I feel despondent and unhappy after this afternoon.

This afternoon I've read ‘The Salmon Of Doubt’, which I've been meaning to borrow from the Gallery for some time but instead picked up at Eastercon in the general book-buying frenzy. It's hilarious and wonderful, and it leaves me sadder than ever that Douglas Adams is no longer with us. In small part because the actual half-finished Dirk Gently story will never be finished, but in very large part because of the various other writings and musings contained in the book.

I grew up reading Douglas Adams; I can't remember just how long his books have been a part of my world, but it's a long time. So my main impression of him has always been as a person who created funny and entertaining books, and as such my sorrow at his death was partly on general humanitarian grounds and partly because no more such books would delight the world. But the collected wafflings in TSOD, written by someone who so clearly inhabits the same real world as I do and gets irritated by all the same things, paint the very different picture of Douglas Adams as a human being, and a thoroughly lovely and wonderful one. You get a real sense of what he must have been like as a person, not just as an author you experience only through his highly polished output. And although I was pretty upset when I heard of his death, I feel upset all over again now I have some idea of what it meant to the people who knew him.

Also this afternoon I spent some time on hold to the two electricity companies who are currently striving to accomplish the supposedly simple task of transferring my account between them. That made me angry, as spending over half an hour on hold to unhelpful phone drones is wont to do, but it also made me even more sad because it's just the sort of thing Adams would have found something wry and funny to say about, and indeed probably did.

I'm sure this isn't the emotional reaction I ought to have from reading a book which kept me smiling throughout and laughing out loud frequently.