LAST CHANCE TO SEE

The night I got my copy of “Last Chance To See” signed was, ironically, the last chance that I ever got to see Douglas Adams in person. I didn’t plan it that way. I thought that there’d be loads of opportunities, but that’s not what the fates decreed and I suppose that I ought to be at least a little bit grateful that our lives overlapped in even a little way. After all, so many of the great men of history had been and gone and achieved everything they were ever going to years before I was even the beginnings of a twinkle.

It was a strange evening, if truth be told, and it was all a very, very long time ago, sometime during a period I now think of almost as having taken place during another life, in another universe and, well, everything.

Strangely, someone standing behind me in a queue in a bakery recently said something that struck me as being rather profound. This was odd in itself because he was a young chap who was obviously trying (and succeeding, it seemed to me) to impress the young girl he was with in a babble of nonsense that had “first date” scribbled all over it and I immediately loathed him with a vengeance.

However, what he said about things in your life that happened ten years ago no longer mattering did strike a chord with me, as it bored into the very heart of what has now become the current human condition; That the long past is no longer relevant and the whole of history is consigned to the dustbin, and that the “now” and what happens next seem to be all that matter to anyone any more, despite the fact that billions of us live with the consequences of what has happened to us in the past every single day, and  if we don’t learn from history we really are going to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Douglas Adams has been dead and gone for more than ten years now, but still seems more relevant than ever to those of us who have read his many thoughts upon the future of this “pathetic bloody planet”. The only time I ever met him was at that rather strange book signing for “Last Chance To See” which was held at Waterstone’s bookstore on Deansgate in Manchester way back in the days when I had another life, with another girl, on another planet…

I don’t think that she was much of a fan, to be honest. Certainly, when I got involved in a reluctant conversation with a couple of matching “überfans” she took the opportunity to impatiently lift her eyes towards the ceiling and then drifted off in a surly manner towards other, more “highbrow” sections of the shop leaving me locked inside an inescapable conversation, and didn’t return until they started handing out the free glasses of wine.

Consequently I spent the next few hours (it may have been minutes, but you know how it is when you simply cannot get away from people) in the company of a couple of hobbits who claimed that they lived their entire lives by the rules as laid out in “The Worshipful and Ancient Law of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” which seemed a very odd way of going about your life to me, but they seemed happy enough, so I probably disliked them immediately.

They were both the same height and wore matching green waterproof raincoats with hoods and had matching hair. If it hadn’t been for his beard, I might have taken them for twins. There is just a slight possibility that they were actually space aliens, of course, but I tend to dismiss that as being a little bit silly, which might be where I’m going wrong, of course.

Nevertheless, they gushed and enthused, and couldn’t wait for this opportunity to meet their guru in person, and I remained polite enough in my desperation to escape them, and I seem to recall that I did finally get away from them only to run into them in the queue for getting the books signed later on.

The world is a strange and peculiar place, which is why things like that keep happening. There is a universal law that quite clearly states that the one person you are most desperate to avoid is the one who you are most likely to keep on bumping into, especially if you are pushing a supermarket trolley in opposite directions along parallel aisles. Perhaps that’s why the “ex” returned to me when the wine was being dished out; I was the one person she wanted to get away from.

There were obvious signs of wine drinking from Mr Adams himself when he appeared, but not in an unpleasant way, just in the jolly tradition of hospitality of the “Welcome, Mr Adams, would you like a glass of wine to calm the nerves…?” persuasion. The shop had supplied him with a tall chair, which, as he was a tall man anyway, seemed rather redundant, although many of his truest disciples sat down on the floor around him as if they were a school class awaiting the next fairytale to be read to them by their teacher. He seemed so nonplussed by this development that he immediately fell off the chair for comedy effect, which led to one of those “moments” of embarrassment that English audiences are rather ill-equipped to deal with.

Some small child of about fourteen years old immediately made some reference to an incident that occurs in one of the books in the author’s famous “Trilogy in (as it was then) Four Parts” which the author himself failed to recognise, but we all laughed it off in that slightly awkward, looking at our shoes, “Oh God! It’s a fan!” kind of a way.

Then the young lad compounded the social faux pas by trying to look up the reference, and the room was, to all intents and purposes, horrified. After all, we all knew that this wasn’t a “Hitch-Hiker’s” event… This was the great man’s first opportunity to venture into worlds beyond the other worlds he had created, and make a name for himself in writing for the “real world” and yet here he was, not even out of the starting blocks, and already the “Hitch-hiker’s” fans were hijacking the event.

I suppose it was strange, but not entirely unexpected. After all whilst the book itself was very different to those which preceded it in terms of content, the people who were most likely to read an Adams book weren’t necessarily going to be the ones most likely to appreciate such a departure, but the evening went along, and the extracts that were read out were funny and entertaining, and the “Q&A” afterwards managed to generally steer away from science-fiction and stuck mostly to science-fact, although I still recall that the biggest round of applause came when he mentioned that there would indeed be a fifth book in that trilogy one day…

So I queued up with the hobbits and rather cheekily got two of my books signed and, perhaps because I’d had one or two glasses of wine myself, have no recollection at all of the one moment in my life when I met Douglas Adams, apart from the fact that he wrote my name in my book so I know that I must have met him, and I really hope that I didn’t try and be funny like I foolishly once tried to be with Alexei Sayle.

Sometimes, you see, life really is just like plummeting towards the ground and wondering whether it’ll be friends with me…