Life, The Universe And Everything...

....not a Holy Week homily - that yet to be carefully scripted for delivery at the Vigil of course - but a reflection on a dear friend now so early dead. (In Heaven too I am sure, though he would have scorned the very existence of the place whilst on Earth.)

DNA - no not that either as life's meaning, but the man's name.

Douglas Noel Adams. You'll know him, though not perhaps the Noel bit. He of 'THHGTTG' - and if I have to spell that one out you'll not be knowing of him and the point of the tale would be lost, so I shan't.

Anyway, cutting to the chase as ever one does, there was - now some thirty years ago God spare us from remembering how long ago - the matter of the meaning of 'LTU&E', that being the Ultimate Question put to Deep Thought, a computer of gargantuan scope that took some several millions of years to come up with the question's answer: '42'

Good answer, if a bit tricky to fathom - as many of the best answers are. So still comes the secondary question - what on Earth was DNA up to? Forty-frigging-two! Some crazed, teasing, madcap genius playing with our sensitivities these thirty years? In many ways yes.

The source of many a learned paper on the matter, with explanations quite as weird and wonderful as the answer itself. Many based on warped misuse of the near-science of numerology: codes within codes revealing a certain truth all dependent on symbolism and affinity. (Quite fun in its way - dear Saint Augustine loved it - but generally that way obsessive compulsive madness lies.)

All wrong in any case of course. Lend or bend - according to taste - an ear, I shall expound all.

DNA and I roomed together at School. When I say 'roomed' I mean rather that we were but two among four hundred or more boyish souls condemned by cruel fate - and harsher parenting - to dwell in the deep discomfort of a boarding school.

Among the many aches and pains of such a life was the very industrial scale of the thing. Nothing was ever really personal, all was en masse from bathing facilities to dormitories to dining halls.

Eating would indeed be at a long double-sided table seating twenty or so pupils, each grabbing what they could from the vast troughs of food 'ere a greedy neighbour had scoffed the last remaining pie.

In such circs. a boy's fantasy would be dining on a totally more domestic scale. As indeed boy turned to youth, hormone infested and deeply charged with - largely - unrequited sexual longings, the perfect ideal would be the a dinner date with a lascivious female as prelude to whatever the virginal youth - as such he was - could most fervently imagine.

From thus came forth the great - and greatly misunderstood - answer to life the universe and everything. Deep Thought - taking on the mantle of its author - did not give a numerical answer, as generally taken, but a verbal. Being, however, a computer not entirely versed in the full idiom of English the words were not uttered entirely as they ought.

Deep Thought thus, in answer to the great mystery of life, spoke of "For tea two" - that wonderful intimate moment of a pair of persons alone with their scones and their Darjeeling - instead of the intended or more correct "Tea for two".

That was the earthly paradise the boarding school boy had yearned for, and the one he wished pronounced. An intimate meal - nothing more, but most certain nothing less.

There is in fact, within the text, a 'second phase' (as these rugger types would say) meaning not to be overlooked.

For the people who heard Deep Thought utter the Great Answer assumed that a computer must give a numerical answer, because computers were but vast 'number crunchers' after all. '42' might be odd and a bit off, but at least it was a logical starting point, they reckoned (applying further the numerical idiom).

And thus from this dual misunderstanding, based on mutual attempt to see the world from the point of view of the other, came complete confusion.

Or chaos.

Which is where DNA really did intend to leave his Universe.

But I do hope - indeed I know - that the man has finally found his proper ordering of the finite world within his now infinite sphere.

Might not be the making of an Easter homily. But then again it might.