by Sue Townsend
Tuesday, April 11
This morning, I handed William his usual carrier bag full of toilet rolls and squashed cereal packets and was amazed when he handed it straight back to me, saying, ‘We can’t play at school any more, Dad, so don’t collect ‘em up.’
At home time, I broke the rules and waited outside William’s classroom. On looking through the glass panel in the door I saw that the children were sitting in rows being taught exam techniques by an ‘exam trainer’. (Formerly known as a teaching assistant.) The weather chart and the nature table were nowhere to be seen. The hamster cage was empty.
There were various exhortations around the room. As I watched, the exam trainer wrote ‘Exams are good, play is bad’ on the white board. The children dipped their pens in their inkwells and copied this slogan down. Since when has it been compulsory to write in ink? I fear that once again Mrs Parvez has misinterpreted education-department guidelines.
She won’t be content until the children are wearing clogs.
Wednesday, April 12
I embarked on a new novel, Sty, today. Progress was slow. I only managed to write 104 words, including the title and my name.
Sty, by Adrian Mole.
The pig grunted in its sty. It was deeply sad. Somehow it felt different from the other pigs with which it shared a home.
‘Look at them,’ thought the pig. ‘They are oblivious to the fact that they are merely part of the food chain’ The pig had felt discontented since it had glimpsed Alain de Botton’s TV programme, Philosophy: A Guide to Life, through a gap in the pig farmer’s curtain. The wisdom of Socrates, Epicurus and Montaigne had brought home to the pigs that it was completely uneducated and knew nothing of the world beyond the sty.
Notes on new novel
Should the pig have a name?
Should the pig’s thoughts be in quotes?
Has the story got legs? Or is the main protagonist (the pig) too restricting a character, ie, being (a) unable to communicate with the other pigs and (b) never leaving the sty?
Sunday, April 16
Pamela Pigg has just left this house after flying into a rage and accusing me of stealing her life and turning it into ‘fifth-rate art’. She read my manuscript of Sty which I had foolishly left on the kitchen table under a copy of Men’s Health. As she ran to her car, I shouted, ‘I’m an artist, we must forage where we can for our materials.’
Pamela shouted back, ‘I’m a housing officer. We must cancel the artist’s move to a maisonette as promised’ I went inside and read page 124 of Men’s Health – bed-busting sex, for my art, of course.
Monday, April 17
12 Arthur Askey Way
William begged me for £2.49 today. He wants to buy a booster pack of Pokémon cards. When I refused, he burst into tears and threw himself down on the kitchen floor. Glenn came in and said, ‘You’ve gotta give ‘im the money, Dad, he’s lost respect in the playground.’
Apparently, there are 151 characters in a set and William has only collected 37 of the most common. Glenn said, ‘It’s like, you know, wearing Marks & Spencer’s trainers, Dad?’ Glenn has never forgiven me for making him go to school in my M & S trainers when his own Nikes disappeared. He still wakes in the night sweating and crying out for the NSPCC.
Tuesday, April 18
Tania rang at 10.30 this morning to tell me that my father had fallen off a ladder while trying to construct a pagoda in their garden and had injured his back. He was waiting for an ambulance, she said. I could hear my father groaning in the background and the sound of splashing and birdsong.
I left William and Glenn next door with the Ludlows and hurried off to The Lawns. My father was lying half in, half out of the Koi carp pool and appeared to be in agony. Tania was squatting by his side, instructing him to ‘breathe the pain away, George’. The ambulance took another hour to arrive, having been misdirected by the computer to The Lawns Lunatic Asylum in Rutland. The ambulancemen, Derek and Craig, were remorselessly cheerful. It was their fifth gardening incident in two days. They blamed Alan Titchmarsh for the recent alarming rise in accident and emergency admissions. Tania stayed behind to calm the carp and pack a bag, and I went in the ambulance with my father. To take his mind off his pain, I tried to engage him in conversation about Charlie Dimmock, but he wasn’t interested.
At 2 o’clock in the afternoon he was diagnosed as having two cracked vertebrae, a fractured shoulder and a deep cut in his left thigh caused by the Homebase Spend & Save card in his trouser pocket. At 8.30pm he was finally taken up to Bevan Ward and put into a bed. Without his teeth, and with his grey hair sticking up around his head, he looked every one of his 56 years. He is lying flat on his back and is unable to do the slightest thing to help himself. ‘So, not much change there, then,’ said my mother, his ex-wife, when I rang to give her a progress report.
Query: Where can I buy two Pokomon Easter eggs?
Wednesday, April 19
When I visited my father today I found him in considerable distress. The hospital has lost his teeth. ‘Not that it bloody well matters,’ he gummed, ‘I couldn’t reach my bleedin’ food anyway’ Apparently, his breakfast tray had been placed 6in out of reach of his good arm, 2in nearer than the emergency call button. He is worried about Tania’s reaction when she sees him for the first time without his teeth. Apparently, she is under the impression that his teeth are his own.
Pamela Pigg rang to tell me that she wants to renew our relationship. She has bought the boys two Pokomon Easter eggs. I said yes.
Sunday, April 23, 2000 (Easter Day, St George’s Day)
I didn’t know which trousers to put on today, or what to have for breakfast. Am I suffering from the modern illness Choice Overload Syndrome? I just can’t decide. Somebody has written N-F-R-O-T-H in red pen on my father’s notes. I asked a junior doctor what it stood for. ‘Not for resuscitation, over the hill,’ she said and hurried away. I hope this was a joke. When I wished Pamela a happy St George’s Day this morning, she accused me of ‘celebrating fascism’. We are doomed. Doomed.
Tuesday, April 25
12 Arthur Askey Way, Gaitskell Estate
My father begged me to help him escape from the hospital this afternoon. He said he is losing the will to live due to lack of sleep and the pain from his bedsores. His false teeth have not turned up, despite a top-level internal inquiry. He is living on soup and porridge – when somebody remembers to feed him. He is almost entirely helpless.
Personally, I blame Tanya, his new wife, for his accident. My father is too old to be up a ladder trying to construct a Japanese-style pagoda under her exacting instructions. I have suggested to the rest of the family that we arrange a rota so that one of us is always in attendance at hospital meal times.
I rang Pandora at her Westminster office and asked her to visit the hospital incognito. I said that she should see the third-world conditions for herself. She said she would ‘drop in if she could’, but she was ‘terribly busy’ with Dobbo’s campaign. I laughed a hollow laugh and said: ‘Did she realise it was Anzac Day; the anniversary of a similarly doomed campaign.’
Thursday, April 27
Bevan Ward
A letter from my ex wife, Jo-Jo.
Dear Adrian,
Your mother has written to tell me that William is living in ‘morally dubious circumstances’. She writes that he mixes with criminals ‘on a daily basis’. Can this be true? I have looked at Arthur Askey Way using the world wide web satellite and was disturbed to see a burned-out car in front of your house. I also saw that your front garden was extremely squalid. Is that the mattress we used to sleep on?
Please do not forget, Adrian, that William is part Nigerian and is the grandson of a chief. It is essential that he is brought up extremely carefully. My circumstances are such that I cannot send for him at present, so I beg you to move William away from the Gaitskell Estate before his character and personality are irrevocably damaged.
I have tried to reach you on the telephone, but a
recorded voice tells me ‘it has not been possible to connect your call’. I looked you up on the net and was alarmed to see that you are considered a bad credit risk and that you owe £75.31 to your newsagent, £43.89 to your milkman and to BT £254.08. A further search revealed that you are overdrawn at the bank by £947.16. I scrolled on further and found that you withdrew all monies from your savings account with the Market Harborough Building Society on December 19, 1999. This money was put aside to pay for William’s piano lessons. Is he having them?
I am very concerned about your mental health. A search of your medical records revealed to me that you visited your doctor’s surgery three times last month, complaining that you were being spied upon. Your doctor has written on your notes ‘could be mildly paranoiac’.
Please contact me at jojomole.comataol.com.
So, 1984 is here in the year 2000. It is the end of privacy. I may as well walk naked through the streets shouting out the small details of my life.
I went to see my mother and charged her with gross disloyalty. She was unrepentant. She said, ‘William spends too much time playing round at the Ludlow’s house’ She said, ‘Vince Ludlow is a career criminal, for Christ’s sake!’ I have to admit, Diary, that William’s frame of reference has widened lately. Last night I overheard him saying to Glenn, ‘Mad Frankie Fraser was well harder than Charlie Kray.’
Saturday, April 29
I ask Pamela Pigg about that maisonette she promised me. She said (with relish, I thought), ‘I’ve let it to a family of asylum seekers’ I asked her to arrange a swap. She said, ‘They’re not that desperate.’
Monday, May 1
Arthur Askey Way
I was driving my mother to the hospital today to visit her ex-husband, and my father (the same man). We were sharing a jumbo-sized Mars Bar in a companionable sort of way – taking alternate bites – when I was pulled over by a police car.
I was not drunk or drugged, and I had been keeping to the speed limit. I asked my mother if she had made a rude gesture to them via the rear-view mirror. She denied it. I was, therefore, baffled as to why I’d been stopped. Two policemen got out of the car. Policeman One said: ‘Would you step out of your vehicle please, Sir’ I did as he asked. Policeman Two said: ‘You like a bit of chocolate, do you, Sir?’ in a sneering kind of way.
‘I am a bit of a chocoholic, actually,’ I joked.
‘Like to munch on the cocoa solids in your vehicle, do you, Sir?’ said Number One. I was slightly baffled, but answered, ‘Yes, I usually buy some chocolate when I fill up with petrol.’
My mother had been listening to our conversation with ill-concealed irritation. ‘It’s not against the law to eat in your own car, is it?’ she snapped.
Policeman Number One slowly walked around to the front passenger window. My mother wound it down. ‘It is against the law to drive without due care and attention, Madam,’ he said. ‘And that jumbo Mars Bar was being passed between you and the driver of the car like a parcel at a kiddies’ tea party.’
‘The policemen in The Bill are always driving and stuffing their faces,’ she said.
I saw a nerve twitch just above his temple, and he ordered my mother out of the car while he and his colleague examined the interior. (Looking for what: Twix, Smarties, Aeros?)
We were late getting to the hospital. My father’s catheter had become detached. While we waited for two sheets to be found from somewhere in the hospital, I watched Beryl, the privatised cleaner, push a filthy, ragged mop around the ward floor. I shuddered to think of the viruses swarming on the end of that mop. I hoped that they hadn’t encamped into my father’s bed sores.
Wednesday, May 3
What has happened to the Archers? It was once possible to listen to it in the company of the young and impressionable. Now, I have to switch off if Glenn or William are in the kitchen.
The love scenes between Sid Perks and Jolene are audible pornography. It is like overhearing two warthogs mating. Will somebody please put Cathy Perks in the picture. And will the person in charge of accents at the BBC teach that sexual-harassment bloke, Simon, how to speak Canadian?
Judging by the present storyline, I predict that a socially-concerned villager will soon suggest that Ambridge needs a youth club. Suggested script:
Jill Archer (with warm concern): Have you seen the graffiti on uncle Tom’s gravestone, ‘Sid Perks is tooling Jolene’?
Socially-Concerned Villager (with liberal concern): Yes, and I deplore the damage done to the statue of Walter Gabriel on the village green.
Jill Archer: Yes, it was cruel to stuff an organic turnip up his…
Socially-Concerned Villager (interrupting): It’s the set-aside generation, Jill. They’ve nowhere to go and nothing to do. What they need is a youth club.
Jill Archer: Do you think so? Do you really think so?
Dum De Dum De Dum De Dum Dum De Dum De Dum Dum, etc.
Friday, May 5
Pandora is busy absolving herself from any blame for Mr Dobson’s abysmal result in the mayoral election. ‘I begged him to shave off that bloody beard, lose weight, buy a new suit, dye his hair, get his teeth straightened and whitened. He’s only got himself to blame.’
Saturday, May 6
Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire
My mother rang me this morning and asked if I would give her driving lessons. I laughed for quite a long time. Eventually, she said, ‘Yes or no?’ I said, ‘It would be disastrous, you can’t even tell left from right’ I asked her if she had requested that her new husband teach her. She said, ‘Ivan reckons that there are enough cars on the road already’ I advised her to use public transport. She said that there was no public transport to the creme de la creme of boot-fairs at Saddington in the middle of the Leicestershire countryside.
‘Why won’t Ivan take you to Saddington?’ I asked.
‘Ivan gets nervous seeing so many cash transactions taking place between untrained amateurs,’ she said.
Ivan used to be the chief accountant at a dairy until the cold winds of change knocked the milk bottles off the steps of time and replaced them with the cardboard carton in the supermarket chill cabinet.
My mother was still blathering on: ‘The last time we went to a boot-fair, Ivan completely ruined my pleasure by moaning about the lack of regulations. He said that both the buyers and the sellers were anarchists, and should be made to pay tax and VAT. He has even asked Pandora to bring in an act of parliament: The Boot Fair Regulation Act.
When she mentioned that there were Abba LPs and memorabilia for sale, I offered to take her one Sunday.
Monday, May 8
My father continues to deteriorate in hospital. He has now contracted a virus (the one caused by privatised cleaning) and is in an isolation ward. His new wife, Tania, is in almost permanent attendance. She is taking advantage of his weakened state to read Great Literature at him. She is currently halfway through Moby Dick. When she went out to go to the toilet, I asked my father how he was enjoying Melville’s extraordinary allegorical seafaring tales. ‘I am not enjoying it,’ he whined ‘ I don’t like fishing.’
I noticed that Tania had placed a copy of Silas Marner: The Weaver Of Raveloe on the bedside trolley. It was obviously to be the next literary read-aloud treat. I wondered if I should mention to her that my father has a violent antipathy to books, films and TV dramas about children. (Something had once happened to him in a cinema during the showing of a Shirley Temple film – I don’t know what but a gabardine mac was involved).
Tania would be on firmer ground if she stuck to Raymond Chandler or the earlier Dick Francis.
Friday, May 12
Pamela Pigg called round to say that she’s found me a small town house overlooking a canal basin in Leicester. The present occupant, a Mrs Wormington, is an OAP. She is in hospital, but is nil by mouth, so Pamela reckons I can probably move in in a couple of weeks. I said, ‘Is she nil by mouth so as to free up the country’s housing stock?’
Pamela said, �
�She is occupying a three-bedroom house and she is 97-years-old.’
I said, ‘Pamela, I don’t want Mrs Wormington killed so that I can enjoy watching the narrow boats pass by my living-room window’ I asked which hospital Mrs Wormington was in. She told me that it was the same one as my father, Pankhurst Ward – which was sort of appropriate. Though Mrs Pankhurst chose to be nil by mouth.
Sunday, May 14
Mrs Wormington is nil by mouth because she has had a stroke and can’t swallow properly. She has no family or friends: ‘They’ve all died off, lad,’ she told me. I used a cotton bud dipped in water to moisten her mouth. ‘I don’t like to bother the nurses,’ she croaked.
Are pensioners to be my albatross? I can already feel her liver-spotted hand around my neck.
Wednesday, May 17
Ashby-de-la-Zouch
After a visit to my father, who has been urged by Tanya to sue the hospital for neglect and loss of dentures, I went to Pankhurst Ward to see Mrs Wormington. She is still nil by mouth, though there is now some doubt as to her swallowing ability.
I was there when a young doctor, in jeans and T-shirt (slogan: ‘Trust me, I’m a journalist’) bellowed, ‘We’ve asked Mrs Ng, the ear, nose and throat consultant to have a look at you, Mrs Wormington’ I asked if this meant that Mrs Wormington could drink a cup of tea. ‘Not yet. We don’t want to risk her choking to death,’ she said. ‘I shall die if I don’t have a cup of tea soon,’ rasped Mrs Wormington. The doctor hurried off down the ward. I followed her. ‘When will the consultant next be on the ward?’ I said. ‘Mrs Ng’s next ward round is on Friday afternoon,’ she said.
When the tea trolley came round, I placed myself between it and Mrs Wormington, but she heard the wheels. ‘I’ve drank eight cups of tea a day for 92 years,’ she choked. The poor woman ought by right be admitted to the Priory. She is doing the equivalent of coming off crack.