“No, don’t move….. you’d better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.”
“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”
“You ask a glass of water.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
As soon as CH reminded me of this quote I knew that today would involve water play, and what fun we had! Well, I had a good time anyway – I’m not sure how much fun it was for CH, standing on the lawn holding a piece of black foam board, but no-one ever said that the life of a studio assistant was wall-to-wall jollification. He didn’t need to be quite so snippy about my teeming and ladling* skills though, frankly.
I did meet the late, great Douglas Adams once: in 1984 he was doing a book signing tour to promote So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, and I happened to be working at one of the venues. I have to say, he wasn’t displaying his legendary charm that day – but who knows how many bookshops he’d already visited, and how many hundreds of times he’d scribbled personal messages and signed his name, by the time he reached Croydon? I do still have my signed copy of the book.
* This expression is in such common use in our family that it only just occurred to me that other people might not know it – and when I looked it up I was surprised to discover that it’s a peculiarly Sheffieldish phrase, with its roots in the steel industry: teeming is the pouring of molten metal into a mould, and the thing it’s poured from is called a ladle.
