This time of year, I always try to take some time to remember I great man who deeply influenced my life and the way I look at the world. This is that man:

Douglas Adams died in May of 2001. At first glance one may expect him to be a plumber or an electrician, but to his fans he was both an intellectual and a humorist of the highest caliber. Best known for his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” five-book trilogy, he has also written several other books, TV series, video games, radio dramas, and half of a movie (Disney kept him waiting for the green light so long that he finally died in protest.) His Hitchhiker’s Guide story is so popular that it exists in all of the above forms. Here is the intro to the first book to give you an idea of why:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't  the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on  her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

Thanks Douglas, for all the times you made me laugh at life, the universe, and everything! The world is a sadder place without you, and you are greatly missed.