So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams

Author:Douglas Adams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Science-Fiction
ISBN: 9780307497901
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-07-14T10:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

he purpose of having the sun go low in the evenings, in the summer, especially in parks,” said the voice earnestly, “is to make girls’ breasts bob up and down more clearly to the eye. I am convinced that this is the case.”

Arthur and Fenchurch giggled about this to each other as they passed. She hugged him more tightly for a moment.

“And I am certain,” said the frizzy ginger-haired youth with the long thin nose who was expostulating from his deck chair by the side of the Serpentine, “that if one worked the argument through, one would find that it flowed with perfect naturalness and logic from everything,” he insisted to his thin dark-haired companion who was slumped in the next-door deck chair feeling dejected about his spots, “that Darwin was going on about. This is certain. This is indisputable. And,” he added, “I love it.”

He turned sharply and squinted through his spectacles at Fenchurch. Arthur steered her away.

“Next guess,” she said, when she had stopped giggling, “come on.”

“All right,” he said, “your elbow. Your left elbow. There’s something wrong with your left elbow.”

“Wrong again,” she said, “completely wrong. You’re on completely the wrong track.”

The summer sun was sinking through the trees in the park, looking as if—let’s not mince words. Hyde Park is stunning. Everything about it is stunning except for the rubbish on Monday mornings. Even the ducks are stunning. Anyone who can go through Hyde Park on a summer’s evening and not feel moved by it is probably going through in an ambulance with the sheet pulled up over his face.

It is a park in which people do more extraordinary things than they do elsewhere. Arthur and Fenchurch found a man in shorts practicing the bagpipes to himself under a tree. The piper paused to chase off an American couple who had tried, timidly, to put some coins on the box his bagpipes came in.

“No!” he shouted at them; “go away! I’m only practicing.”

He started resolutely to reinflate his bag, but even the noise this made could not disfigure their mood.

Arthur put his arms around her and moved them slowly downward.

“I don’t think it can be your bottom,” he said after a while. “There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that at all.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “there’s absolutely nothing wrong with my bottom.”

They kissed for so long that eventually the piper went and practiced on the other side of the tree.

“I’ll tell you a story,” said Arthur.

“Good.”

They found a patch of grass which was relatively free of couples actually lying on top of each other and sat and watched the stunning ducks and the low sunlight rippling on the water which ran beneath the stunning ducks.

“A story,” said Fenchurch, cuddling his arm to her.

“Which will tell something of the sort of things that happen to me. It’s absolutely true.”

“True story.”

“You know sometimes people tell you stories that are supposed to be something that happened to their wife’s cousin’s best friend, but actually probably got made up somewhere along the line.

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