As you may or may not know, Tonrose's range includes some super quality towels which we are very proud of. You can imagine our delight, therefore, when we heard that today was a celebrated day dedicated to the fluffy things themselves!
Disappointingly, the day isn't connected directly to our towels, but came about through a science fiction book (well, they have always said that sci-fi geeks like to do things a little differently...). So what is it all about?
If you don’t know much about Douglas Adams, the most important thing to know is that he wrote humorous and fun science fiction books. This May marks the 11-year anniversary of Adams’ death. Two weeks after his death, his fans decided to commemorate him by making May 25th, Towel Day.
Adams believed that towels should be worn everywhere. In his most famous book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Adams wrote about the importance of towels. Have a look to see what he wrote:
"A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with."
—Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
