A poem written by a 17-year-old Douglas Adams has been discovered in a cupboard at his old school.

Archivist Stacey Harmer was digging through piles of documents at Brentwood school last week when she came across a series of books featuring poems written as part of the initiation to the upper-sixth's literary society, Candlesticks. Noting that the poems, written between 1950 and 1983, spanned the period during which Adams attended the school, she managed to track down the late author's effort. Written in January 1970, when Adams would have been 17, the poem is entitled "A Dissertation on the task of writing a poem on a candle and an account of some of the difficulties thereto pertaining", and stretches to two pages.