Probably one of the most moving tributes to Douglas Adams I am likely to see - and which was completely unexpected - occurred yesterday when I mentioned that he had died to a room full of colleagues, all computer geek/nerd prototypes. Most of these people would have only been 10 at the most when he began writing the series.

Some knew already; but everyone knew who he was. And one fairly hard-boiled sweet young thang - who, I suspect, pulls the wings off flies for pleasure - began crying quietly. That completely stunned me. Still, she returned to true form fairly quickly. She recovered from the display of emotion by saying that he wasn't all that young anyway. When I said that he was only a year older than me, you could see from the look in her eye that she was measuring me up for coffin size ...


The idiot also known as Capfka ...