Happy Towel Day, you hoopy froods!

The day has snuck up on me again. Every year, I faithfully record it on my calendar and then I neglect to look at it and am surprised by photos online depicting hoopy froods all around the world proudly displaying their towels, often casually draped over a shoulder. Well, at least I happen to have done a towel wash this morning. Thirteen of them are drying on the clothes horse in the kitchen.

What am I blethering on about is what you are probably asking  yourselves.

Towel Day occurs every year on 25 May, which happens to be the birthday of the genius writer that was Douglas Adams. Every year, fans all around the world commemorate him by not forgetting to take their towels with them, because as every fool knows, a towel is just about the most useful thing in the universe. I quote from the book, my comfort book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel is just about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can carry. Partly because it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat; wrap it around your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of theRavenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course you can dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have "lost." What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."

Personally, I don't carry a towel with me all the time...but I do always carry a scarf with me and that pretty much fulfils the same functions.