Don't Panic!

If you know what the above references, well done.

But then the name of this blog also references it too. But you knew that, right?

Growing up in Suffolk in the late 70s and early 80s, we found our fun where we could, and when I describe how we found our enjoyment, my friends and I will come over like proper geeks. That I got "U" in my Physics O Level shows I was no geek.

I have no idea who brought bridge to our group, but we were addicted to it. So bad was it that my form teacher, Mr Holder, used to confiscate one card each pack to stop us playing. Most of us had played whist with our parents, so that with some bidding at the beginning didn't seem much of a stretch. But we had no real idea what we were doing, and a bid of anything more than two was really brave.

One lunchtime we were playing and our Physics mater, Mr Skeats, caught us, and said, if you're going to play bridge, come to my room every whatever day it was, lunchtime, and I will show you the basics. Which is what he did; allocating points to picture cards to be able to judge hands, bidding protocol, including slamming. And during play, roughing and finessing. The first hand with Mr Skeats' oversight I wad dealt 21 points. I opened with 1 club or something. "What with that humdinger of a hand?" he said. So, an early lesson in slamming, asking for aces followed.

We could play bridge all day, not good when there were exams to revise for. And we invented games so we could play if there were just three of us playing.

A few years later, the family and I were on holiday in the Scottish borders, staying on a farm, and the other guests were an Army major and his family. Do you play bridge he asked, as there was his wife, and eldest son and him, so needed a 4th. I did.

And the whole week, we played bridge until the wee small hours in the kitchen in front of the range. I partnered his wife and from what I remember, we did really well. The Major partnered his son, who he ran ragged and let know when the son made a mistake.

A few years later, and now in the RAF and posted to Germany, there were so many bridge players, sometimes there were four table going at lunchtime. Nothing like a bit of rough bridge to sharpen the barrack room humour.

These days, I know no bridge players, so have not played for nearly 20 years, more's the pity.

It goes without saying we were all music mad of course, and all of us had paper rounds to pay for our vinyl habit. But there was another hobby that we had that cost very little.

Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) could be played with a pencil, some squared paper and all you needed was one of the group to be rich enough to pay for a Dungeon Master's (DM) Guide and a Monster Manual or two. And the dice. Always the dices. Four sided, six sided, ten sided, twelve sided, and so on and on. We could play D&D all day every day, so even less time for homework and revision.

And for the times when there were no pne to play bridge or D&D with, there was the Guide.

I bet you are all froods. I can't imagine being friends with anyone who wasn't froody, at least a little. I myself am a hoppy cool frood, needless to say I know where my towel is too. I bet you do too.

And if that doesn't mean anything to you, are you dead?

The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Universe is the biggest thing to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor, and has two things going for it; it has the words "Don't Panic" written on its cover, and it is much cheaper than other guides.

“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

“Shee, you guys are so unhip it’s a wonder your bums don’t fall off.”

HHGTTG was everywhere when I was a teen, the radio series had been aired in 78, and repeated many, many times so I stumbled upon it in the Radio Times listings. It then became a book, a TV series in 1981 and finally, a film in 2005, the less said about that the better. And there have been many, many radio series over the years. So many, I have got lost with what happened.

So, this week another new series aired on Radio 4, based on a book written after Douglas Adams' death. I was excited, but the knots the story arc seems to have tied itself up in seemed to make it almost unlistenable. And apart from comparing Zaphod to Trump (Let's Make Alpha Centauri Great Again), it fell flat. A lot. At least for me. Still, five more episodes, and they have to be better than a year's worth of Archers, no?