This was not, on paper, a sensible allocation of time. I was doing A-levels in chemistry, biology, and computer science, which is not exactly the academic menu of a girl drifting attractively through life in a blue skirt. Those are serious subjects for serious people headed toward serious futures. The timetable itself felt like a declaration that one intended to understand the world properly.

Then a friend lent me Douglas Adams and the whole mood got compromised.

Michelle and I had become friends through one of those small school accidents that later turns out not to be an accident at all. We had unusual subject combinations, our schedules lined up, and that was enough. Friendship often begins with proximity and then gets promoted by recognition. She handed me a book. My brain never quite recovered.

People talk about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as if its main cultural contribution was making “42” famous. Fine. But that is like saying the sea’s main contribution is dampness. The real brilliance of the book is that it smuggles philosophy past your internal hall monitor. It makes you laugh first, which is very useful, because once people start announcing that they are about to discuss meaning, they usually become intolerable.

Douglas Adams was not intolerable. He was dry, surgical, ridiculous in exactly the right places. He understood a profound thing: human beings are absurd, but they become most absurd when they are trying hardest to appear important.

This was a useful lesson to receive while marinating in the atmosphere of exams.

School, like corporate life later, runs heavily on the fumes of seriousness. Serious subjects. Serious performance. Serious consequences. Serious adults using serious language. Some of that is real, of course. Much of it isn’t. Much of it is theatre with paperwork. A-levels taught me facts, and I am grateful for the facts. Chemistry is real. DNA is real. Code is real. But official systems are often much less real than they seem. They are part ritual, part anxiety, part consensus, and part costume.

This was not the sort of thing the textbooks mentioned.

Textbooks told me what things were. Adams suggested I pay attention to what people were doing. That is a different education.

He taught me that language can drift very far from reality and still be rewarded. That bureaucracy can become self-perpetuating. That large systems often continue not because they are wise, but because they are already in motion. That humans will accept astonishing levels of nonsense if it arrives laminated.

And most importantly, he taught me that absurdity is diagnostic.

It tells you where the gap is.

Between appearance and substance.
Between authority and wisdom.
Between the official explanation and the actual thing.

This was one of the first books that made me feel awake in a new way. Not smarter exactly. Less conned.

That distinction matters.

There are books that give you knowledge, and then there are books that remove a veil. They do not necessarily hand you answers. Sometimes they just make it impossible to re-enter the old hypnosis completely. Once you have seen that much of the world is held together by performance, jargon, and mutual agreement, it becomes harder to tremble before it.

The map has stage lighting, but it is still not the territory. That insight has only grown more useful with age.

Work, especially, is full of beautifully dressed delusion. Entire industries run on producing reports, frameworks, plans, and declarations whose main achievement is to preserve themselves. People speak of alignment when they mean fear, transformation when they mean reorg, strategy when they mean wishful formatting. A surprising amount of modern life is just 42 in a blazer.

And now here comes AI, eager to help.

Which is funny, in a dark little way. Because we have built machines that can generate answers at astonishing speed, while human beings remain extremely capable of not understanding the question, the context, the stakes, or the reality under the language. It turns out scale does not cure confusion. Sometimes it industrializes it.

So yes, I owe a strange debt to a book I read when I should have been revising.

It sharpened my appetite for style.

It validated my love of dry humour.

It taught me that satire is not decorative; it is a way of seeing.

It helped me understand that the world’s performance of seriousness is often less solid than it appears. And it gave me, early, a suspicion that has served me well ever since: if everyone in the room is acting solemn, that may be the first sign that something ridiculous is going on.

I am that age now, which is irritatingly on theme.

My daughter read the book at ten and loved it, which gave me a very specific kind of joy. Not the joy of replication. Something better. The joy of watching a mind meet irreverence early. The joy of knowing she, too, might grow up slightly resistant to pomp.

And perhaps that is the best thing reading can do.

Not make you impressive.
Not make you well-informed at dinner.
Not turn you into one more person speaking confidently in abstractions.

Just make you a little harder to fool.