So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

by Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams was tall. He was brilliant: I’ve met a handful of geniuses, and I’d count him as one of them. He was a frustrated performer, a remarkable explainer and communicator, an enthusiast. He was an astonishing comic writer: he could craft sentences that changed the way a reader viewed the world, and sum up complex and difficult issues in aptly chosen metaphors.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish has, beneath the elegant veneer, the simplest, easiest, most traditional of plots: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, makes love to her in the clouds and sets off with her to find God’s Final Message To His Creation. And does.

The Census report, like most such surveys, had cost an awful lot of money and didn’t tell anybody anything they didn’t already know – except that every single person in the Galaxy had 2.4 legs and owned a hyena.

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying ‘And another thing . . .’ twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.

The figure, the car and its door handle were all on a planet called the Earth, a world whose entire entry in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comprised the two words ‘Mostly harmless’. The man who wrote this entry was called Ford Prefect, and he was at this precise moment on a far from harmless world, sitting in a far from harmless bar, recklessly causing trouble.

One of those nasty hushes had descended on the place, a sort of missile crisis sort of hush.

One of the bones in Ford’s shoulder began to grate against another one of the bones in his shoulder in a way which suggested that the hand had learnt the principles of pain from a highly skilled chiropractor.

He opened the bottle and wiped the top of it with the towel, which had the opposite effect to the one intended, in that the Ol’ Janx Spirit instantly killed off millions of the germs which had been slowly building up quite a complex and enlightened civilization on the smellier patches of his towel.

Ford flipped the switch which he saw was now marked ‘Mode Execute Ready’ instead of the now old-fashioned ‘Access Standby’ which had so long ago replaced the appallingly stone-age ‘Off’.

And yet here – he activated the Guide again – was his own entry on how you would set about having a good time in Bournemouth, Dorset, England, which he had always prided himself on as being one of the most baroque pieces of invention he had ever delivered. He read it again and shook his head in sheer wonder.

Arthur watched it go, as stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years, suddenly discovers that he had merely been wearing too large a hat.

Arthur reached out for the bedside light, not expecting it to come on. To his surprise it did. This appealed to Arthur’s sense of logic. Since the Electricity Board cut him off without fail every time he paid his bill, it seemed only reasonable that they should leave him connected when he didn’t. Sending them money obviously only drew attention to yourself.

He felt a spasm of excitement because he knew instinctively who it was, or at least knew who it was he wanted it to be, and once you know what it is you want to be true, instinct is a very useful device for enabling you to know that it is.

He almost danced to the fridge, found the three least hairy things in it, put them on a plate and watched them intently for two minutes. Since they made no attempt to move within that time he called them breakfast and ate them.

‘Oh, hello, Arthur Dent here. Look, sorry I haven’t been in for six months but I’ve gone mad.’ ‘Oh, not to worry. Thought it was probably something like that. Happens here all the time. How soon can we expect you?’ ‘When do hedgehogs stop hibernating?’ ‘Sometime in spring, I think.’ ‘I’ll be in shortly after that.’ ‘Rightyho.’

Exuberance and Hall and Woodhouse best bitter was a mixture to be wary of, but one of the first effects it has is to stop you being wary of things,

The beer festival is in town, but it's a school night, so this seemed quite apt

He paused and manoeuvred his thoughts. It was like watching oil tankers doing three-point turns in the English Channel.

Grown men, he told himself, in flat contradiction to centuries of accumulated evidence about the way grown men behave, do not behave like this.

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins they are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.

The barman dunked Arthur’s change in a pool of beer on the bar, for which Arthur thanked him.

The summer sun was sinking through the trees in the park, looking as if— Let’s not mince words. Hyde Park is stunning. Everything about it is stunning except for the rubbish on Monday mornings. Even the ducks are stunning. Anyone who can go through Hyde Park on a summer’s evening and not feel moved by it is probably going through in an ambulance with the sheet pulled over their face.

‘You know sometimes people tell you stories that are supposed to be something that happened to their wife’s cousin’s best friend, but actually probably got made up somewhere along the line. ‘Well, it’s like one of those stories, except that it actually happened, and I know it actually happened, because the person it actually happened to was me.’

Arthur drew The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from its cover. It was like a small, thin, flexible lap-computer. He tapped some buttons till the screen flared with text.

Mark Knopfler has an extraordinary ability to make a Schecter Custom Stratocaster hoot and sing like angels on a Saturday night, exhausted from being good all week and needing a stiff beer – which is not strictly relevant at this point since the record hadn’t yet got to that bit, but there will be too much else going on when it does, and furthermore the chronicler does not intend to sit here with a track list and a stopwatch, so it seems best to mention it now while things are still moving slowly.

‘Life,’ he said, ‘is like a grapefruit.’ ‘Er, how so?’ ‘Well, it’s sort of orangey-yellow and dimpled on the outside, wet and squidgy in the middle. It’s got pips inside too. Oh, and some people have half a one for breakfast.’

‘It’s quite easy,’ urged Arthur, ‘if you don’t know how. That’s the important bit. Be not at all sure how you’re doing it.’ Just to demonstrate how easy it was he floated away down the alley, fell upwards quite dramatically and bobbed back down to her like a banknote on a breath of wind. ‘Ask me how I did that.’ ‘How . . . did you do that?’ ‘No idea. Not a clue.’

Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.

Fenchurch tried some little swoops, daringly, and found that if she judged herself just right against a body of wind she could pull off some really quite dazzling ones with a little pirouette at the end, followed by a little drop which made her dress billow around her, and this is where readers who are keen to know what Marvin and Ford Prefect have been up to all this while should look ahead to later chapters, because Arthur now could wait no longer and helped her take it off.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among its current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-five thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that ‘it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. ‘In other words – and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxy-wide success is founded – their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.’

‘How reliable is he?’ asked Fenchurch in a sinking voice. ‘How reliable?’ said Arthur. He gave a hollow laugh. ‘How shallow is the ocean?’ he said. ‘How cold is the sun?’

There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.