A L Kennedy's story about The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

I'm going to be slightly embarrassed about this - and I'd have to emphasise that I read all kinds of books when I was kid, devoured them, and all of them did me the world of good a multiplicity of ways, but if I think of one that was exceptionally timely and helpful the first that comes to mind is "The Restaurant At the End of The Universe" by Douglas Adams. It doesn't contain the greatest prose ever - although it is musical, Adams had a great ear - and the humour can be slightly formulaic, but that book did save my mental bacon.

When I was in my early teens I had a minor health problem which involved my first contact with doctors I hadn't met before as cosy family practitioners, examinations I had never dreamed of, massive, long-corridored hospitals and a whole panoply of mildly panicky and threatening consultations - a contact with science that seemed to do nothing to assist my health and everything to leave me with a sense of bizarrely random prodding and adult incompetence.

I happened to be going through a SciFi phase at the time and, as far as was possible, I folded myself away from whatever medical procedure happened to be happening and imagined myself as Zaphod Beeblebrox - a character I never did actually warm to much under any other circumstances. Zaphod was, of course, dragged into the Total Perspective Vortex and forced to confront his almost infinite smallness in the face of reality - something which was usually fatal. The Vortex was silly enough and horrible enough to be just the place for my mind to hide away in and I am grateful to it to this day.

And I have retained my fondness for SciFi, too.