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Ford Prefect was not born, like some people, knowing what he wanted to do for a living. (He wasn’t born Ford Prefect, either, but that’s another story).
He rather fell into Guide-writing as a student on Betelgeuse, when he realised his two main talents were 1. drinking and 2. making up stories under pressure (of the my kvvlxx ate my homework, I was going to pay your money back but my sister contracted Quaglian snail-pox and I had to pay medical bills, look behind you! variety).
This led to him submitting an increasingly illegible review to the student paper of the nine varieties of cocktail on their menu, along with a passionate but almost unreadable plea for the addition of a tenth.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy hired him more for his resilient liver than the quality of his journalistic prose, but of course they didn’t mention that at his interview.
Travelling the galaxy sampling a variety of alcoholic and in some cases potentially lethal beverages sounded like an exciting, easy and glamorous career. But in actual fact it ended up waking up in a gutter covered in your own vomit with absolutely no memory of the night before a worryingly high proportion of the time.
In fact it took Ford three months on Arcturia attempting to drink and review a cocktail named Benzene Bonanza before concluding that short term memory loss was one of its intended effects.
One foray into Artolian brandy-beer resulted in Ford submitting a sixteen-page dossier on the best (only) way to survive the swamps of Artolia and the crocodile-like creatures which inhabited them. It was one trip which did at least fall under the banner of ‘exciting’.
The Guide editors worked their magic and the eventual entry looked like this:
Artolian Brandy-Beer
Pleasant creamy texture with notes of Hyperscotch.
On no account fall into the Artolian swamps whilst visiting.
Which even Ford had to admit was probably the most sensible advice. He kept his own notes on swamp survival just in case he ever got the urge to return for more brandy-beer. It did have a particularly moreishly creamy texture after all.
After an unfortunate incident on the planet Jasperox involving three bikini models, a spotted snurg, a yard of pink gin and a highly illegal drinking game, he was summarily demoted, and shortly afterwards sent to a rather unremarkable planet, where his job as a Guide writer came to an end, and his life as Ford Prefect began.
Of course Ford was unaware that he had effectively been (mostly-accidentally) abandoned on Earth, and set about sampling as many of the local beverages as possible. Had he, in fact, known that he had been effectively (mostly-accidentally) abandoned, his immediate response would probably have been to set about sampling as many of the local beverages as possible. The only difference being that he might have been a little more maudlin whilst doing so.
In an unremarkable pub in an unremarkable town in an unremarkable country on this unremarkable planet in an unremarkable corner of the galaxy, two remarkable things happened to Ford:
1. He consumed the best tasting alcoholic beverage in the galaxy. The best tasting alcoholic beverage in the galaxy was the home-brewed ale of one Mary Stibbins of Camberley. It didn’t have quite the zing of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, but a pleasantly honey-and-amber flavour that gave you a warm feeling that everything was going to be alright with the world. (Of course everything was not going to be alright with this particular world, which was one hell of a bitter aftertaste.)
2. As a direct consequence of consuming this particular beverage, Ford fell in love.
It happened like this:
A man walked into a bar.
Everything about this man was utterly unremarkable, he was quiet, ordinary looking, had the same habit as other humans of complaining about the weather while not looking you in the eye. But of all the bars in all the galaxy, they happened to be co-existing in the same one at the same time. And, under the honeyed influence of Mary Stibbins’ home-brewed ale, Ford decided that that was a most fortuitous coincidence.
Arthur Dent was not a remarkably handsome man, nor even a remarkably clever one. He was nicer to Ford than many of the other humans he had encountered on his travels thus far, being largely indifferent to Ford’s obvious peculiarities and never once asking him whether he had a sister named Fiesta. One of the traits of Betelgeusians is that once they fall in love, they generally stay there, and so once he’d decided Arthur Dent was the one for him, that was pretty much that for Ford.
Over time they became regular drinking companions, Ford utilising both of his talents to spin apparently entirely plausible tales about being an out of work actor. The key to this particular lie, as with all the best ones, was that it was partly true – Ford was indeed out of work. And the couple that drinks together stays together. Or so Ford always maintained. Statistically speaking this is probably incorrect, but in the case of Ford and Arthur alcohol proved to be a common bond. That and planetary destruction, but we’ll get to that bit later.
Ford never really got around to telling Arthur that he loved him before the destruction of Earth. They didn’t really do much apart from drink, and complain about things. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call a conventional courtship (unless of course you happened to be on Algolia, which they were not).
There was that one morning they’d woken up wearing each other’s underwear, but neither one of them had managed to remember or prove anything, even though there had been no Benzene Bonanzas involved. Ford decided to follow what seemed to be the Earth custom of never mentioning it again and blushing furiously whenever that particular bar in Reading was mentioned.
He’d also lent Arthur his towel, more than once, and Arthur had lent Ford his pocket handkerchief. In some cultures that meant they were practically engaged.
And so when the Vogons decided to blow up the planet, there was only one person on Earth Ford could reasonably imagine taking with him.
But that’s another story. And you’ve already read that one.