“This amusing, sad, and heartfelt look at [Adams’s] lifeis a true gift.”— New York Post It all started when Douglas Adams demolished planet Earth in order to make way for an intergalactic expressway—and then invited everyone to thumb a ride on a comical cosmic road trip in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . Adams made the universe a much funnier place to inhabit and forever changed the way we think about towels, extraterrestrial poetry, and especially the number 42. And then, too soon, he was gone. In Wish You Were Here , Nick Webb, a longtime friend of the author, reveals the many sides, quirks, and contradictions of Douglas Adams. A summation as celebration, it is a look back at a life well worth the vicarious reliving, as studded with anecdote, droll comic incident, and heartfelt insight as its subject’s own unforgettable tales of cosmic wanderlust.  Praise for Wish You Were Here “Webb’s tale brims with affection and humour; every page is a delight.” — The Daily Mail “It’s perhaps the ultimate credit to Webb that he can be just as funny as Adams in his writing. With many of the same veins of humour that Adams had running throughout this biography, it’s as if the great hitchhiker has never really left.” —The Leeds Guide  “This amusing, sad, and heartfelt look at [Adams’s] lifeis a true gift.” — New York Post “Webb’s tale brims with affection and humour; every page is a delight.” — The Daily Mail “It’s perhaps the ultimate credit to Webb that he can be just as funny as Adams in his writing. With many of the same veins of humour that Adams had running throughout this biography, it’s as if the great hitchhiker has never really left.” —The Leeds Guide  NICK WEBB was a publisher for nearly thirty years before, perversely, turning to writing. He commissioned The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy while he was an editor at Pan Books, and remained good friends with Douglas Adams until the end of the author's life. He lives in Hackney. ONE   Not from Guildford After All   “The main problem which the medical profession in the most advanced sectors of the galaxy had to tackle after cures had been found for all the major diseases, and instant repair systems had been invented for all physical injuries and disablements except some of the more advanced forms of death, was that of employment.   “Planets full of bronzed healthy clean-limbed individuals merrily prancing through their lives meant that the only doctors still in business were the psychiatrists, simply because no one had discovered a cure for the universe as a whole—or rather the one that did exist had been abolished by the medical doctors.”   THE NARRATOR, FIT THE ELEVENTH, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy   It was half a century and a world away. In Britain, the 1950s were not famously colourful. If the nineties were a decade when everything had inverted commas around it, the fifties were like sitting through The Mousetrap over and over again in some church hall with rock-hard seats. You would say “as joyous as the fifties” about as often as you’d remark that something was as droll as a Bergman season.   Internationally, Eva Peron, “the mother of Argentina,” died in 1952. Great swathes of Africa were still under European colonial rule. The Korean War ended in 1953 having cost almost three million lives. President Eisenhower was in the White House (twice), while Americans got richer and their cars, already the size of cathedrals, became larger and finnier with every passing year.   British society was one of those bottles of fizz that feel as hard as teak until the top is unscrewed and the pressure released. Dr. Jonathan Miller, the director, writer and polymath, thinks that in many ways the fifties were a social extension of the thirties with habits of deference that did not change until a decade later. A certain strangulated gentility ruled, especially in the suburbs whose sprawl had been contained by “green belt” legislation just in time to prevent the whole of southern Britain below a line from the Wash to Cardigan Bay from becoming a housing estate.   Car ownership was only for the well-off. Television was grainy and black and white (405 lines to the screen and not today’s 625), and it was by no means universal. The sets themselves were huge brown boxes containing valves that took a minute to warm up and stored energy long enough for a strange white dot to fade slowly from the screen when the power was turned off.   Despite their room-crushing dimensions, TVs had hanky-sized screens in front of which free-standing magnifiers could be placed. There were two channels, and on the BBC continuity gaps were filled with footage of a potter’s hands shaping a clay vase. Spiffing chaps in dinner jackets or county women in evening dress would announce the next programme with voices of crystal-etching upper-class Oxbridge English.   The fifties were a time of damp gabardine macintoshes, ugly haircuts, hideously uncomfortab