Shiny shiny,

shiny new book, purchased today:













I'd sort of forgotten how much I loved the original Hitchhikers books. I read them when I were a lad (apart from the later ones, which I read as a young man). I probably borrowed them from the local library, a place I practically lived in for a number of years during boyhood and then a later period post-polytechnic when I was on the dole. Gawd knows how many books I borrowed from there. I had a habit of devouring series or particular writers, starting with Doctor Who novelisations when I was very young, then moving onto yer James Herberts and Stephen Kings and Richard Laymons, by way of the Fletch novels or the Beiderbeck books. And then, for quite a long time, I forgot I'd read so many books. Successive interests – music, comics, politics, wanking – largely kept me away from reading much in the way of novels, and my passion for them – and history with them – vanished.

But now the books are back, and with them my particular past, and now there's a new Hitchhikers novel, almost as a celebration of my return to the fold, although in truth merely a coincidence. How very Douglas Adams.