Sue Townsend - Adrian Mole - Diary of a Provincial Man

I distinctly heard Pandora (the best man) whisper, "Talk about a folie à deux".

Monday, January 15

At the last count, there were 213 members of Jo-Jo's immediate family. There's no way I can give even minimal hospitality to 213, as Nigerian custom demands. It may be easier if William went to them. Perhaps during the summer holidays.

Tuesday, January 16, Ashby-de-la-Zouch

Clive Box, the postman, banged on the door at 6.15 this morning, which startled me out of my sleep. For some reason, I keep expecting to be raided at dawn by the police, though I have done absolutely nothing wrong. Clive had no proper letters for me, only a multicoloured envelope that informed me in fat multiple exclamation marks that I had won £1,000,000.

I said irritably, "Couldn't you have just put it through the letterbox?"

"Sorry," Box mumbled, "but I wanted to ask you sommat important."

Behind Box's uniformed back, I could see that the estate was covered in frost. Box looked longingly at the radiator in the hall. I asked him in and shut the front door. He put his sack of letters on the floor and blew on his hands. He looked at the self-portrait of Van Gogh that hangs on the wall.

"Who's that? Your granddad?" he said.

"No!" I said. "That's Van Gogh, whose genius went unrecognised in his lifetime. He only ever sold one of his paintings before he died."

"I'm not surprised," said Clive Box, after looking more closely at Gogh's haunted expression. "He's an ugly bugger."

The hall is tiny. We stood in too close proximity. I led the way into the kitchen and plugged in the kettle. Box sat at the table and said, "You're an educated man, ain't you, Mr Mole?"

I replied that I was a bit of an autodidact.

"I ain't interested in your sex life," he said, "but I've seen them letters from book clubs, so I've chosen you to 'elp me out. Do you speak French?"

"Mais oui," I replied.

He took out a sheet of paper from his uniform pocket and pushed it across the table. "'Ow do you pronounce this?" he asked, stabbing with a stubby finger at a word in block capitals in the middle of a paragraph. I looked at the word. I wasn't familiar with it. "CONSIGNIA." I said it out loud, slowly. "Con-sig-nia."

He then said it many times, like a toddler learning the word hippopotamus. "What does it mean?" he asked, eventually.

I told him that I had no idea. I read the paper in front of me. It said that the Post Office had given itself a "modern and meaningful title". And that the words, «Post» and «Office» no longer described the work that this organisation did.

Box looked at me with bewilderment in his eyes. "So I ain't a postman now?" he said. "Apparently not," I replied. "You're a consignée."

Wednesday, January 17

On the train to London to visit my mother in Holloway, I noticed that that ticket collector wore a badge that said "Roger Morris, Revenue Protection Officer".

My mother was in good spirits. She has made friends with her cellmate, a woman called Yvonne, who is in prison for not having a TV licence. Yvonne's defence — that she never watched BBC1 or BBC2 — was thrown out by the court. My mother pointed her out across the visiting room.

Yvonne saw us looking at her and blew my mother a kiss.

My mother blew one back!

I said to my mother, "You and Yvonne appear to be very fond of each other." She looked me in the eye and said, "Yes, we are very, very, very fond of each other." I took a closer look at Yvonne. She looks like Diana Dors, the black-and-white film star. I stumbled through the prison gates — has my mother taken up lesbianism, as she once took up badminton and feminism? And, if she has, will she tire of it, as she so quickly tired of aforementioned hobbies?

Saturday, January 27, Ashby-de-la-Zouch

It is Glenn's birthday on Friday. Yes, the lad will be 14. Mohammed, whose brother works for Midland Main-line, gave me two Eurostar vouchers to Paris last week saying, "You use 'em, Aidy. I daren't leave the country. I'm frit that immigration won't let me back in."

I said, "Mohammed, you were born in the Leicester Royal Infirmary maternity unit, you have a strong Leicester accent, you cried when Martin O'Neill left Leicester City Football Club. Nobody could possibly question your English nationality."

Oh, yeh," said Mohammed cynically. "And who was the only kid to be stopped at Dover when we come back from that school trip to France?"

I cast my mind back to that heady day when I became a European. I will never forget my first sight of la belle France. As the ferry prepared to dock, Miss Elf gathered her class of 30 around her on the vomit-stained deck and said, "Mes petits enfants, regardez vous la belle France, la crème de la crème, de la Continent". (Or words to that effect, diary. My French is a little rusty, as I rarely have occasion to use it.)

We lost precious time in France because Barry Kent tried to leap from the ferry on to the harbour wall before the docking procedure was quite finished. He wasn't in the water long, but by the time the gendarmes had finished their paperwork, a couple of hours had been lost.

On the coach, Miss Elf announced that, due to Barry Kent's foolhardy leap, there would now be no time for the planned visit to the war graves cemetery (we were doing a class project on first world war poetry). A few of the more sentimental girls wept, I recall, though Pandora was not among them. "Instead," she said, "we will sample French bread and French coffee, and we will visit a market and observe the care with which the French choose their fruit and vegetables."

When I returned home late that night, my mother was waiting for me in the car park of Neil Armstrong comprehensive. As I stepped off the coach, I said to her, "Maman, I have seen and tasted paradise. You must throw away your Maxwell House and your Mothers Pride thin-sliced and embrace the baguette and café au lait." I can't recall her exact words of reply, but they were said with a snarl.

Anyway, diary, what I said to Mohammed was, "It was your own fault you got stopped by immigration at Dover — you were openly smoking a Disque Bleu fag and you were only 12 years old."

Sunday, January 28

My plan is to take Glenn to Paris for his birthday. It is to be a surprise, so my preparations must be made behind his back. Tonight, I washed and ironed his least gangsterish-looking clothes and hid them in my wardrobe. There is nothing I can do about his hair or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer tattoo he's now got on his wrist, but with luck it will be cold and he'll have to roll down his sleeves. I'm looking forward to showing him the Louvre — he's a very lucky boy; I was 26 before I saw that the Mona Lisa wasn't worth the wait in the queue.

Tuesday, January 30

I was checking and re-checking my travel necessities list tonight. Two Eurostar tickets, travellers' cheques, Nurofen, map of Paris, French/English dictionary, passports, umbrella. There was something missing. Then the realisation hit me like an orange thrown by a toddler in a supermarket trolley: GLENN DOES NOT HAVE A PASSPORT!

Wednesday, January 31

Pandora has refused to help fast-track a passport for Glenn. I phoned Keith Vaz MP, but there was nobody available to take my call.

Friday, February 2, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire

I was sitting in the kitchen with a chicken noodle Cuppa-Soup this evening, waiting for The Archers to begin, when to my astonishment I heard my name mentioned on Radio 4. I turned up the volume and listened in growing horror to a «trail» of a television programme featuring a man called Adrian Mole, a former offal chef whose family home is in Ashby-de-la-Zouch.