May 26 May 22nd Club

The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul
Douglas Adams

Chap1

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport'.

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly.Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk. (Murmansk is the only known exception in this otherwise infallible rule) and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

They have tried to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveller from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky,and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional and conceal the position of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

Caught in the middle of a sea of hazy light and a sea of hazy noise, Kate Schechter stood and doubted.

All the way out of London to Heathrow she had suffered from doubt. She was not a suprstitious person or even a religious person, she was simply a person who was not at all sure she should be flying to Norway. She was finding it increasingly easy to believe that God,if there was a God, and if it was remotely possible that any Godlike being who could order the disposition of particles at the creation of the universe would also be interested in directing traffic on the M4, did not want her to fly to Norway either. All the trouble with the tickets, finding a next door neighbour to look after the cat, then finding the cat so that it could be looked after by the next door neighbour, the sudden leak in the roof, the missing wallet, the weather, the unexpected death of the next door neighbour, the pregnancy of the cat – it all had the semblance of an orchestrated campaign of obstruction which had begun to assume Godlike proportions.

Even the taxi driver- when eventually she had found a taxi driver- had said,'Norway? What do you want to go there for?' And when she had instantly said 'the Aurora Borealis' or 'Fiords!' but had looked doubtful for a moment and bitten her lip, he had said, 'I know. I bet its some bloke dragging you out there. Tell you what. Tell him to stuff it. Go to Teneriffe.'

:-)


When troubles come they come not in single spies but in battallions

Shakespeare?