Anyone who’s come to this blog expecting me to be endorsing the views of the Sinn Féin leader (as if!), I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.
No, the heading actually refers to the late Douglas Adams, author of the best-selling book, TV series, radio series and posthumously released film The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as well as a number of other less well-known works, including a brief stint as a script writer on Doctor Who in the late 1970s – when thanks to an ingenious piece of casting (take a bow Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks) the Doctor was a tall thin wide-eye, toothy-grinned maverick with a crazy mop of curly hair and a long scarf – not the floppy haired 16-year old indie boy twat that he is today.
In the light of the current financial crisis affecting Ireland (or more specifically the 26 counties of it lying south and west of the border) and a number of other small eurozone countries the following extract form THHGTTG carries a great deal of currency (pun intended), especially the section I’ve italicised.
“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 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.
[Remember this was the late ‘70s when digital watches were at the cutting edge of technology and modern style in much the same way as the i-pad is today].
This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living 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 which were unhappy. And so the problem remained, and 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 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 day, 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, a girl, sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realised 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, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass and so the idea was lost forever.”
Classic stuff.
The Dreaming Armadillo 