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usual. The usual
blue bold headings drop into place, mostly junk,
some expected, and my gaze absently follows them
down the page. The name Douglas Adams catches my
eye and I smile. That one, at least, will be good
for a laugh. Then I do the classic double-take,
back up the screen.
What did that
heading actually say? Douglas Adams died of a
heart attack a few hours ago. Then that other
cliche, the words swelling before my eyes.
It must be part
of the joke. It must be some other Douglas Adams.
This is too ridiculous to be true. I must still be
asleep. I open the message, from a well-known
German software designer. It is no joke, I am
fully awake. And it is the right - or rather the
wrong - Douglas Adams. A sudden heart attack, in
the gym in Santa Barbara. "Man, man, man, man
oh man," the message concludes. Man indeed,
what a man. A giant of a man, surely nearer seven
foot than six, broad-shouldered, and he did not
stoop like some very tall men who feel
uncomfortable with their height. But nor did he
swagger with the macho assertiveness that can be
intimidating in a big man. He neither apologised
for his height, nor flaunted it. It was part of
the joke against himself.
One of the great
wits of our age, his sophisticated humour was
founded in a deep, amalgamated knowledge of
literature and science, two of my great loves. And
he introduced me to my wife - at his 40th birthday
party.
He was exactly
her age, they had worked together on Dr Who.
Should I tell her now, or let her sleep a bit
longer before shattering her day? He initiated our
togeth erness and was a recurrently important part
of it. I must tell her now.
Douglas and I met
because I sent him an unsolicited fan letter - I
think it is the only time I have ever written one.
I had adored The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Then I read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency.
As soon as I
finished it I turned back to page one and read it
straight through again - the only I time I have
ever done that, and I wrote to tell him so. He
replied that he was a fan of my books, and he
invited me to his house in London. I have seldom
met a more congenial spirit. Obviously I knew he
would be funny. What I didn't know was how deeply
read he was in science. I should have guessed, for
you can't understand many of the jokes in
Hitchhiker if you don't know a lot of advanced
science. And in modern electronic technology he
was a real expert. We talked science a lot, in
private, and even in public at literary festivals
and on the wireless or television. And he became
my guru on all technical problems. Rather than
struggle with some ill-written and
incomprehensible manual in Pacific Rim English, I
would fire off an email to Douglas. He would
reply, often within minutes, whether in London or
Santa Barbara, or some hotel room anywhere in the
world. Unlike most staff of professional helplines,
Douglas understood exactly my problem, knew
exactly why it was troubling me, and always had
the solution ready, lucidly and amusingly
explained. Our frequent email exchanges brimmed
with literary and scientific jokes and
affectionately sardonic little asides. His
technophilia shone through, but so did his rich
sense of the absurd. The whole world was one big
Monty Python sketch, and the follies of humanity
are as comic in the world's silicon valleys as
anywhere else.
He laughed at
himself with equal good humour. At, for example,
his epic bouts of writer's block ("I love
deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as
they go by") when, according to legend, his
publisher and book agent would lock him in a hotel
room, with no telephone and nothing to do but
write, releasing him only for supervised walks. If
his enthusiasm ran away with him and he advanced a
biological theory too eccentric for my
professional scepticism to let pass, his mien at
my dismissal of it would always be more humorously
self-mocking than genuinely crestfallen. And he
would have another go.
He laughed at his
own jokes, which good comedians are supposed not
to, but he did it with such charm that the jokes
became even funnier. He was gently able to poke
fun without wounding, and it would be aimed not at
individuals but at their absurd ideas. To
illustrate the vain conceit that the universe must
be somehow preordained for us, because we are so
well suited to live in it, he mimed a wonderfully
funny imitation of a puddle of water, fitting
itself snugly into a depression in the ground, the
depression uncannily being exactly the same shape
as the puddle. Or there's this parable, which he
told with huge enjoyment, whose moral leaps out
with no further explanation. A man didn't
understand how televisions work, and was convinced
that there must be lots of little men inside the
box, manipulating images at high speed. An
engineer explained about high-frequency
modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum,
transmitters and receivers, amplifiers and cathode
ray tubes, scan lines moving across and down a
phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the
engineer with careful attention, nodding his head
at every step of the argument. At the end he
pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now
understand how televisions work. "But I
expect there are just a few little men in there,
aren't there?"
Science has lost
a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the
mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a
gallant defender (he once climbed Kilimanjaro in a
rhino suit to raise money to fight the cretinous
trade in rhino horn), Apple Computer has lost its
most eloquent apologist. And I have lost an
irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of
the kindest and funniest men I ever met. The day
Douglas died, I officially received a happy piece
of news, which would have delighted him. I wasn't
allowed to tell anyone during the weeks I have
secretly known about it, and now that I am allowed
to it is too late.
The sun is
shining, life must go on, seize the day and all
those cliches.
We shall plant a
tree this very day: a Douglas Fir, tall, upright,
evergreen. It is the wrong time of year, but we'll
give it our best shot.
Off to the
arboretum. |
