My Nose, by Douglas Adams

My mother has a long nose and my father had a wide one, and I got both of them, combined. It's large. The only person I ever knew with a nose substantially larger than mine was a master at my prep school who also had tiny little eyes, hardly any chin and was ludicrously thin. He resembled a cross between a flamingo and an old-fashioned farming implement and walked rather unsteadily in crosswinds. He also hid a great deal.

I wanted to hide, too. As a boy, I was teased unmercifully about my nose for years until one day I happened to catch sight of my profile in a pair of angled mirrors and had to admit that it was actually pretty funny. From that moment, people stopped teasing me about my nose and instead started to tease me unmercifully about the fact that I said words like "actually," which is something that has never let up to this day.

One of the more curious features of my nose is that it doesn't admit any air. This is hard to understand or even believe. The problem goes back a very long way to when I was a small boy living in my grandmother's house. My grandmother was the local representative of the RSPCA, which meant the house was always full of badly damaged dogs and cats, and even the occasional badger, stoat, or pigeon. Some of them were damaged physically, some psychologically, but the effect they had on me was to seriously damage my attention span. Because the air was thick with animal hair and dust, my nose was continually inflamed and runny, and every fifteen seconds I would sneeze. Any thought I could explore, develop, and bring to some logical conclusion within fifteen seconds would therefore be forcibly expelled from my head, along with a great deal of mucus.

There are those who say that I tend to think and write in one-liners, and if there is any truth to this criticism, then it was almost certainly while I lived with my grandmother that the habit developed. I escaped from my grandmother's house by going to boarding school, where for the first time in my life I was able to breathe. This new-found blissful freedom continued for a good two weeks until I had to learn to play rugby. In about the first five minutes of the first match I ever played, I managed to break my nose on my own knee, which although it was clearly an extraordinary achievement, had the same effect on me that those geological upheavals had on whole civilizations in Rider Haggard novels... it effectively sealed me off from the outside world forever.

Various ENT specialists have, at different times, embarked on major speleological expeditions into my nasal passages, but most of them have come back baffled. The ones who didn't come back baffled didn't come back at all, and are therefore now part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The only thing that ever tempted me to try taking cocaine was the dire warning that the stuff eats away at your septum. If I thought cocaine could actually find a way through my septum, I would happily shove it up there by the bucketful and let it eat away as much as it liked. I have been put off, however, by the observation that friends who do shove it up their noses by the bucketful have even shorter attention spans than me.

So by now I am pretty well resigned to the fact that my nose is decorative rather than functional. Like the Hubble Telescope, it represents a massive feat of engineering, but is not actually any good for anything, except perhaps a few cheap laughs.

Esquire, Summer 1991

-From The Salmon Of Doubt

Read by Simon Jones

Earbuds / headphones are required! Well... at least suggested.

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