Just because you're paranoid

Last night I watched on TV the big-budget Hollywood film of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which Douglas Adams wasted so much of his life struggling to get made. In fairness, he would have wasted it anyway, as he had the unfortunate handicap for a writer of absolutely hating writing. I hope he would have approved of the movie; it filled part of an evening quite painlessly, though I preferred the book, which I think I liked marginally more than the original radio series. I cannot make any comparison with TV adaptation as I never watched that. For my money, his best book is Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

I did not know Douglas Adams. We attended the same Cambridge college, where he was a year above me. He shared rooms for a year with someone I knew quite well, and of course I saw him around. He was strikingly tall and even more strikingly funny. But the fact is that we never spoke to each other. I think it is important to spell this out in order to dispel once and for all the rumour that he might have taken me as the model for Hitchhiker’s incredibly depressed robot, Marvin the paranoid android. I’m much more miserable than that.

There’s not much of note to report today, other than that the dog was sick on my bed. But it could have been worse; at least I wasn’t in my bed at the time.