Free The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams

glasses of champagne while another stood guard by the sliding glass doors that led into the air-conditioned interior.
    His job was to push them open for us. He explained that this had become necessary because unfortunately the doors didn’t open automatically when you approached them, and some of their Japanese visitors would often just stand in front of them for whole minutes getting increasingly bewildered and panic-stricken until someone slid them open by hand.
    The journey took about an hour, streaking effortlessly over the dark and gleaming sea under a brilliant sun. Smaller lush green islands slid past us in the distance. I watched the long wake of water folding back into the sea behind us, sipped at my champagne, and thought of an old bridge that I know in Sturminster Newton in Dorset. It still has a cast-iron notice bolted to it that warns anybody thinking of damaging or defacing the bridge in any way that the penalty is transportation. To Australia. Now, Sturminster Newton is a lovely town, but it astonishes me that the bridge is still standing. Jane, who is much better at reading guide books than I am (I always read them on the way back to see what I missed, it’s often quite a shock), discovered something wonderful in the book she was reading. Did I know, she asked, that Brisbane was originally founded as a penal colony for convicts who committed new offences after they had arrived in Australia?
    I spent a good half hour enjoying this single piece of information. It was wonderful. There we British sat, poor grey sodden creatures, huddling under our grey northern sky that seeped like a rancid dish cloth, busy sending those we wished to punish most severely to sit in bright sunlight on the coast of the Tasman Sea at the southern tip of the Great Barrier Reef and maybe do some surfing too. No wonder the Australians have a particular kind of smile that they reserve exclusively for use on the British.
    From offshore, Hayman Island looks deserted, just a large verdant hill fringed with pale beaches set in a dark blue sea. Only from very close to can you spot the long, low hotel nestling among the palms. There is hardly anywhere you can get a good look at it from, since it is virtually smothered with what look like giant feral pot plants. It snakes and winds its way through the greenery: pillars, fountains, shaded plazas, sun decks, discreet little shops selling heart-stoppingly expensive little things with designer labels you’d have to carefully unpick, and indiscreetly large swimming pools. It was pretty fabulous. We adored it immediately. It was exactly the sort of place that twenty years ago I would have despised anybody for going to. One of the great things about growing older and getting things like freebie holidays is that you can finally get to do all those things that you used to despise other people for doing: sitting around on a sundeck wearing sunglasses that cost about a year’s student grant, ordering up grotesque indulgences on room service, being pampered and waited on hand and foot by—and get this, this is a very important and significant part of what happens to you on Hayman Island—staff who don’t just say “No worries” when you thank them for topping up your champagne glass, they actually say “No worries at all.” They truly and sincerely want you, specifically you, not just any old fat git lying around in a sun hat, but you personally, to feel that there is nothing in this best of all possible worlds that you have come to for you to concern yourself about in any way at all. Really. Really. We don’t even despise you. Really. No worries at all. If only it were true. I had my Sub Bug to worry about, of course. This huge great thing that I had lugged ten times farther than Moses had dragged the children of Israel, just in order to see how it compared with a manta ray as a means of getting about underwater. It had been quietly removed from the boat in its huge silver-coloured box and