Yesterday thanks to the excellent and free (if you can manage without television) public service known as Radio 4, I learned some new and thrilling snippets about my number one hero, Douglas Adams.
Before I reveal these juicy nuggets, I should clarify the 'hero' status I just rather casually awarded to Mr Adams a moment ago. You will know him as the author of the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, though he also wrote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency which, in my view, is better than Hitchiker's.... , a number of episodes of Doctor Who and loads of other short stories. If you want to really get inside DA's head then blag yourself a copy of The Salmon of Doubt.
Anyway, I am not a sci-fi geek and I am not interested in Doctor Who, although some of my friends wish I were since it would give us something other than music to talk about. I have friends who like sport as well, and they wish I had some interest in sport, but I have very little. Since most of the friends who like Doctor Who don't like much sport, this means that I have many friends with whom I can only talk about music, whether they like it or not. But I digress....
Douglas Adams was, for me, the best possible example of an environmentalist, the kind of environmentalist who could make the ideas of environmentalism hugely funny, entertaining and provocative, reaching a mass audience to the extent they absorb environmentalism almost subliminally. He also loved new technology even at its early-adopter, Heath Robinson stage, and had an incredible insight into the fact that human beings are both evil and destructive and, simultaneously, funny, daft, creative and full of wonder. In fact, I think it is DA's ability to point out the daftness of humanity that gave me the ability to enjoy being a part of humanity, and stop me from being joyless and angry about our destruction of ourselves and our planet.
So, what did I learn yesterday? I learned that he had most of his creative ideas in the bath, and therefore had an almost endless succession of baths in order to fuel his creativity. (I also learned he listened to Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights 30-40 times a day, but that is less important just now.)
You can hardly imagine the joy I felt when learning that I share a love of baths - as creative thinking environments - with my hero! It is the pinnacle of an already sizeable body of argument that having a bath is not the irresponsible sin that many environmentalists would have you believe. Sure, if you run a huge, deep, foamy bath and then leap in and out of it in five minutes, gaining a little hygiene and even less inspiration then it's a bit of a no-no in terms of your water consumption. Sure, if you're an oil magnate who lies in his/her jacuzzi filled with Peruvian mineral water and uses his/her bathtime to cut multi-million dollar deals to exploit new oil fields emerging from under the melting ice-caps, and then build heated golf courses on them afterwards, then you're not really an environmentalist.
But if you:
a) care passionately about the environment;
b) are constantly searching for the [literal] Eureka moment when the answer about how to convert the world to a sustainable place will come to you with incredible clarity;
c) get most of your ideas whilst lying in the bath.....
....then I would say that the bath is a very good place to be. Especially if you can get some grey-water recycling installed and go easy on the bubbles.
I suppose the question is, is it the warmth, the water, the slight sense of weightlessness, the lack of clothes, or staring at the cobwebs on the bathroom ceiling that create the inspiration? Answers on a plastic duck, please.
AW.
