Nick Ahad: Hitchhiker’s Guide proves laughter really is the best medicine

My head feels fuzzy, I can feel a cold coming on (I never was a sickly child, but some necessary medication has been making me susceptible to viruses this past 12 months) and I’m not sure I can face nestling under the duvet with Hitchens.

I decide that he needs to be read with a clearer head and wonder what should be my company for the evening.

Standing in front of my bookshelf, I’m tempted by my well-thumbed copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Like Lemsip, soup and lots of tissues, a book like Douglas Adams’s is the sort of comfort you need at a time like this. However, on my way to the Adams book, my eye passes over a couple of Stephen Fry novels which have languished unread for several years.

I pick up Making History, the third of Fry’s novels, published in 1996, which has stood on my shelf for a good decade at least.

What a choice. Brilliantly funny and inventive as much of the work of Fry’s friend Douglas Adams, it was the perfect comfort reading when feeling a little under the weather.

Finishing the novel a day later, still in bed, I have a quick look at Twitter to see what Stephen Fry is up to – it is marvellous to feel you have a direct link to someone whose work you admire – and see that Fry is telling his Twitter followers that this week (Wednesday, in fact) features Towel Day.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Adams dispensed the advice that a towel is “about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have”.

Fans of the book celebrate the life of one of the most brilliant minds to have ever lived among us on May 25 every year with Towel Day.

The anniversary has snowballed into a worldwide phenomenon: in London there was a Vogon Poetry Slam, there were towel-wearing flash mobs in Krakow and Bregenz, Austria. In Bali there was a meeting at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, concerts and get-togethers and readings around the world.

It really is quite something, isn’t it, that a book, written by a man who had an idea while (legend has it) lying in a field while hitchhiking around Europe, can mobilise people around the world?

From a sick bloke in his bedroom in Bradford, to a bunch of revellers in Bali, Adams created something that continues to grow in popularity.

Ironically, I feel quite lucky that I still feel rotten.

Because now I’m off home to bed, where a dose of Lemsip, soup, and the Hitchhiker’s Guide awaits. The best medicine I can possibly imagine.