Written on a Sunday afternoon...

Reflection on Sunday afternoons, as described by the late Douglas Adams

Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged is a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would be the first to admit, but it keeps him busy. Keeps him on the move. For Wowbagger is one of the Universe’s very small number of immortal beings.

Most of those who are born to immortality instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger is not one of their number. Indeed, he has come to hate them, and refers to them as ‘the load of serene bastards’.

He had his immortality inadvertently thrust upon him after an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, although many people have ended up looking very silly, or very dead or, more often than not, both, trying.

To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody. But even the attractions of immortality can pass, in the end it was Sunday afternoons he just couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, or that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the ‘Long Dark Teatime of the Soul’.

So things began to pall for him. The smug smiles he used to wear at other people’s funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular.

And it was at this point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this:

He would insult the Universe.

That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in Alphabetical Order.

When people protested to him, as they sometimes did, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely look and say, “A man can dream, can’t he?”