h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Watch this space for the second half...(is being typed up)

Tired but optimistic, John fumbled for the door key. He hadn’t used it for a good 2 months, but had kept it at hand out of habit. Before long, he decided it would be easier to put the bags down first.
John freed his hands of the hefty suitcase and small green squash bag, but saw no point in removing his rucksack. Shortly afterwards he had retrieved the key from his back pocked, and promptly managed to get the key stuck in the lock. A bit of fiddling did the trick, and soon the door was open, well, at least partly anyway.
After a good shove enough of the junk mail was moved to one side, allowing him to fit through the door… It wasn’t wide enough for the backpack however, so John found himself stuck in the doorway. Some more pushing and shoving found John and the rucksack safely in the hallway. The junk mail was quickly pushed aside and the waiting bags pulled through.
Three and a half minutes later, the kettle was on the boil. The state of the teapot however meant that it was a further 27 minutes and half a bottle of fairy liquid before the tea was made. Jon decided to go and give the plants some attention while he waited for the pot to brew,
The cacti had managed to service, but the other plants were somewhat brown and shrivelled. John actually put them on the compost heap before pouring himself out a mug of tea.


Collapsing wearily into a chair and happily sipping his tea, John was able to start putting his thoughts in order. It had been quite a hectic couple of months.
It had all started, as many mornings did, with the arrival of junk mail. He’d won a prize draw – nothing unusual about that, except for one key feature. He actually had won a prize draw.
The local electricity board had decided to improve its customer relations by entering all its members in a free prize draw. Top prize was a two-week holiday in Greece. Second prize was a family holiday in a 3 star hotel in Paris and so on, all the way down to a small china teacup by a budding young designer. John had won the teacup.
Ten days later the post arrived as usual, including a large parcel. The package wasn’t heavy, but was about the size of a small fridge. John had a sneaking suspicion that this was so they could stick more ‘handle with care’, ‘this way up’ and ‘do not bend’ stickers on it.
John opened the box to reveal polystyrene packaging. Against John’s dream of finding wads of money in the box, under the initial layer of polystyrene was more polystyrene. Eventually, after covering the lounge floor with its own protective layer, a small bubble-wrapped object revealed itself to him.
Resisting a childhood urge to pop the entire bubble wrap and ignore the content, John removed all the layers and was rewarded with a sterling silver teaspoon, complete with a note thanking him for his loyalty to the Southern Electric electricity board. Slightly perplexed, John turned his attention to a small package that he thought contained the masonry drill bit he’d ordered three weeks previously.
Shortly afterwards the packaging was removed to reveal a brightly coloured small china teacup with Anna Hartley’s signature underneath.