Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt - Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

I therefore now drink Stolichnaya vodka martinis if I go to New York, because they’re very smart and sophisticated and New Yorky, but, most important, they render me incapable of doing anything stupid, or indeed anything at all, though I occasionally converse very knowledgeably about quantum chromo-dynamics and pig farming when under their influence.

I like Bloody Marys, but only ever have them in airports. I have no explanation for this. It never occurs to me to have a Bloody Mary in the normal course of events, but put me in an airport lounge and I make for the Stoli and the tomato juice like a rat from a sinking ship, and arrive a few hours later at my destination throbbing with jet lag.

At home I tend to drink whatever is lying around in the fridge, which is usually very little. My fridge has a peculiar feature: you put a bottle of good champagne in it, and when you come to look for it you find a bottle of noxious cheap white wine in its place. I still have not worked out how this happens, but I usually console myself with a glass of the world’s most boring drink, the only one I can drink with no ill effects whatsoever: a gin and tonic.

The Independent on Sunday, DECEMBER 1990

Radio Scripts Intro And then more faxes come in demanding more introductions, this time for omnibus editions of books, each of which I have already written individual introductions to. After a while I find I have written so many introductions that someone collects them all together and puts them in a book and asks me to write an introduction to it. So I miss another dinner party and also a scuba-diving trip to the Azores and I discover that the reason my wife isn’t talking to me is that she is now in fact married to someone else. (I am making this bit up as well, as far as I know.)

In the days when I used to be able to go to parties, in other words, in the days when I had only written a couple of books and the business of writing introductions to them had yet to become a full-time activity, it used to save a lot of time when I discovered that two of my friends didn’t know each other, just to say to them, “This is Peter, this is Paula, why don’t you introduce yourselves?” This usually worked fantastically well, and before you knew it Peter and Paula would be a happy couple going off on joint skiing holidays in the French Alps with your wife and her second husband. So. Dear reader. This is the anniversary reissue of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio scripts. Why don’t you introduce yourselves? I have enjoyed this little chat.

Introduction to The Original Hitchhiker Scripts, 10thAnniversary Edition (Harmony Books, MAY 1995)

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How should a prospective writer go about becoming an author?

First of all, realise that it’s very hard, and that writing is a grueling and lonely business and, unless you are extremely lucky, badly paid as well. You had better really, really, really want to do it. Next, you have to write something. Unless you are committed to novel writing exclusively, I suggest that you start out writing for radio. It’s still a relatively easy medium to get into because it pays so badly. But it is a great medium for writers because it relies so much on the imagination.

Unfinished Business of the Century Just a few more days to go. I think it’s important not to leave a century, let alone a millennium, without cleaning up behind you, and there is clearly unfinished business to attend to. I suggest that the Net community try to identify this unfinished business and see if, between us, we can’t get it squared away so that we can all enjoy the New Year celebrations with the sense of a century well done.

Yes, I know you all think that the millennium doesn’t change till a year later, and very tedious you are about it, too. In fact, you are so keen to have something you can wag your fingers at the rest of the world about, that you are completely missing the point. IT HAS NO SIGNIFICANCE WHATSOEVER! It is merely an excuse to go “Whoa! Look at that! There they go!” as all the digits change. What other significance can it possibly have? Ten (along with its multiples) is an arbitrary number. January 1 is an arbitrary date. And if you happen to think that the birth of Jesus Christ is a significant moment, then all we can say with any certainty is that 1 A.D. isn’t when it happened. Or 0 A.D., if the previous year had been called that (which, as we all know because the pedants keep banging on about it, it wasn’t).

Then, as the historians (a much more interesting bunch than the pedants) tell us, the calendar has been played around with so many times in the intervening years anyway that the whole thing is doubly meaningless. Consider this: we’ve only relatively recently got our time- and date-keeping precisely defined and standardised, with the aid of atomic clocks and suchlike. And on January 1, 2000 (if the doomsayers are to believed) all of our computer systems will go haywire and plunge us back in the stone age (or not, as the case may be). So it seems to me that midnight on December 31 is the only solid and reliable point we have in the entire sorry mess, and so perhaps we should be celebrating that just a little bit. And instead of saying that we have got the end of the millennium (or bi-millennium) wrong, we should say that our ancestors got the beginning of it wrong, and that we’ve only just sorted the mess out before starting a new mess of our own. What the hell does it matter anyway? It’s just an excuse for a party.

But first, to unfinished business.

One particularly niggling piece of Unfinished Business, it occurred to me the other day in the middle of a singing session with my five-year-old daughter, is the lyrics to “Do-Re-Mi,” from The Sound of Music. It doesn’t exactly rank as a global crisis, but nevertheless it brings me up short anytime I hear it, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to sort it out.

But it is.

Consider.

Each line of the lyric takes the name of a note from the sol-fa scale, and gives its meaning: “Do (doe), a deer, a female deer; Re (ray), a drop of golden sun,” etc. All well and good so far. “Mi (me), a name I call myself; Fa (far), a long, long way to run.” Fine. I’m not saying this is Keats, exactly, but it’s a perfectly good conceit and it’s working consistently. And here we go into the home stretch. “So (sew), a needle pulling thread.” Yes, good. “La, a note to follow so ...” What? Excuse me? “La, a note to follow so ...” What kind of lame excuse for a line is that?

Well, it’s obvious what kind of line it is. It’s a placeholder. A placeholder is what a writer puts in when he can’t think of the right line or idea just at the moment, but he’d better put in something and come back and fix it later. So, I imagine that Oscar Hammerstein just bunged in “a note to follow so” and thought he’d have another look at it in the morning.

Only, when he came to have another look at it in the morning, he couldn’t come up with anything better.

Or the next morning. Come on, he must have thought, this is simple. Isn’t it? “La ... a something, something ... what?” One can imagine rehearsals looming. Recording dates. Maybe he’d be able to fix it on the day. Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer. But no. No one manages to fix it.

And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on. How difficult can it be? How about this for a suggestion? “La, a ... , a . .

.”—well, I can’t think of one at the moment, but I think that if the whole world pulls together on this, we can crack it. And I think we shouldn’t let the century end with such a major popular song in such an embarrassing state of disarray.

something ... what?” One can imagine rehearsals looming. Recording dates. Maybe he’d be able to fix it on the day. Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer. But no. No one manages to fix it.