42Bytes

Only nineteen days away from the year’s greatest day, Towel Day is set to be big this year as it’s the 30th Anniversary of Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the book that began it all. Galactic Hitchiker’s around the world will carry their towel’s for a day in honour of the great Douglas Adams.

For those who don’t know what Towel Day is, it’s a day where people carry a towel around to honour the memory and great pieces of literature of Douglas Adams (1952-2001) who died tragically of a heart attack. He was a great man, who loved his Macs and cared for the environment. And we have this day to honour that memory of laughing out loud while reading his books or quoting in sync with the person next to you describing The Guide itself.

You may ask why we carry a towel, and that is answered only by the most famous book he ever wrote, Hitchiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth;wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you - daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

And there you have it; wear your towel on May 25th everywhere you go and show your support for the literature genius that is Douglas Adams. Leave a comment and tell me your plans for Towel Day!