Backlisted - The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

The wonderful Nina Stibbe, award-winning novelist and diarist, joins us for a discussion of Sue Townsend's classic comic creation. When it was first published in 1982, the confidential journal of Leicester's foremost teenage poet and intellectual was an overnight success, eventually going on to become the best-selling British novel of the 1980s. Four decades on, we can see it for what it truly is: a masterclass in the art of writing comic prose and a work of political satire that stealthily made its way into several million British homes. Nina, Andy, John and Nicky celebrate Sue Townsend's life and career, laugh at her jokes, and make the case for her to rank alongside Charles Dickens, Stella Gibbons, George Grossmith and E.M. Delafield in the pantheon of British writers. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes and exclusive writing, become a Patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. The book featured in today's show needs very little introduction. It's the 1982 bestseller, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 and three quarters by Sue Townsend. I'm John Mitchinson, writer and publisher. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of the Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we welcome a return guest from the past. It's like in Doctor Who when they bring back an old companion from many years earlier. And she last joined us to discuss Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter, which, in a behind the scenes glimpse, she didn't actually like very much. Live at the Poor

Elliott Festival back in September 2018, it's the writer and noted diarist, Nina Stibbe. Hello Nina. Hello, thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back with a book this time that you have warmer feelings for, I hope. Yes, I do, definitely. Okay, good. Lester Bourne Nina is the author of seven books. Love Nina, winner of the Non-Fiction Book of the Year

Award at the National Book Awards 2014, shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year, was adapted for BBC Television. Her novels, Man at the Helm 2014, and Paradise Lodge 2016, were both adapted for serialization on BBC Radio 4, and shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Prize for Comic Fiction.

Her third novel, Reasons to be Cheerful 2019, won both the Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Comedy Women in Print Award. A collection of stories and articles, An Almost Perfect Christmas 2017 was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 over Christmas 2020. Her most recent novel, One Day I Shall Astonish the World 2022, was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Prize for comic fiction. How many bottles of Bollinger champagne have you now accumulated as a result of your writing endeavors?

Well, it's funny you should ask that because when I won it, it was a rollover year. Do you remember the terrible controversy where they didn't award it? They didn't give the prize. Yes, that's right. It was a kind of publicity stunt. They said there wasn't anything with the right kind of lols. And so when I won it, whatever year it was, it was a rollover.

So I got lots and lots of champagne. Do you get any money as well? You get a pig, don't you? You get a pig, but I got two pigs. A rollover of pigs? Amazing. You were awarded your pigs at the Hay Festival. Somebody said to me, don't be nervous of the pig. You must get in and cuddle the pig for the Sunday Times.

So I did because I like pigs. me, don't be nervous of the pig, you must get in and cuddle the pig for the Sunday times. So I did because I like pigs. And so there are loads of photographs that pop up of me all over the place of me literally hugging this cluster old spot. But it's a lovely pig. How marvellous. Nina's latest book, Went to London Took the Dog, the diary of a 60-year-old runaway, was published in 2023 and has been described by our very own John Mitchinson as the funniest book he has read since the common years by Julie Cooper. Wow, really? Quite true, quite true. I think it's brilliant. I love the way you thread all those real people into it. Obviously it's a diary, but you know how good you are at writing diaries and that will become obvious because we're going to, you know, that's what we're here to discuss.

The first volume of Adrian Mole was published in 1982 by Methium. It's the diary of a year in the life of a teenage boy from a relatively poor working-class family in Leicester who's decided he's an intellectual. Set in 1981 and 1982, the book takes place against a background of real events. The rise of Mrs Thatcher, the wedding of Charles and Diana, the F takes place against a background of real events, the rise of Mrs Thatcher, the wedding of Charles and Diana, the Falklands War and the local showing of Monty Python's life of Brian. Against this Adrian charts his physical and emotional development as he works his way through the great works of world literature, fretting about his spots and the size of his thing. Throughout he records his obsession with Pandora, a girl from a wealthier but impeccably left-wing family.

His troubled relationship with schoolmate Nigel, his fondness for Burt Baxter, an irascible pensioner, and the turbulent marriage of his parents, whose drinking, smoking and extramarital affairs cause him great concern. Adrian Mole began his life as Nigel Mole, a character in a couple of stories Su Tansen wrote for a now defunct arts journal

called simply Magazine, while she was writer in residence at the Phoenix Theatre in Leicester in the late 1970s. Encouraged by friends to send these stories to the BBC, she was eventually commissioned by the head of radio drama John Tideman, and everyone listening to this has read the secret diary of Adrian Mole and knows that John Tideman, and everyone listening to this has read the secret diary of Adrian Mole and knows that John Tideman is a recurring character in that book and subsequent ones, to turn them into a radio play. The Diary of Nigel Mole, aged 13 and three quarters, was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on New Year's Day 1982 and led to the book being commissioned in short order by Methuen. After a slow start it became a runaway bestseller, smashing the two million copy mark within two

years and spawning seven sequels that have been translated into more than 30 languages and sold over 20 million copies. It has been adapted into three television series. Townsend herself turned it into a very successful stage play in 1984 and was working on a full musical theatre version at the time of her death in 2014, which was released to great acclaim at Leicester's Curve Theatre in 2015. The book has become a part of British literary life and always polls highly when people are asked to vote for their favourite books of all time. In 2019, the Secret Diary of Adrian Mould, aged 13 and three quarters, appeared on the BBC Arts 100 most inspiring novels as one of 10 books in the coming of age category, alongside such backlisted favourites as So Long See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, slightly less amusing book, The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien and Oryx and Crake by Margaret

Atwood. Now I want to already observe that you'll have heard the voice of our producer Nikki Birch today because she's decided she's elbowed her way onto the air because she so enjoyed reading or rereading, we'll find out later, this book. Honestly, Nikki, you've been doing this now for almost as long as we have. I've never seen you look so happy under any circumstances, let alone on a show, not in person, not, you know, could you just want to say how much, tell people why you wanted to say something today? I have just, I spent the week listening. I listened to an audio book version of Adrian

Moll and I have just not stopped giggling and I'm still giggling and the idea of you talking and even quoting from Adrian Mole is making me laugh. I'm anticipating the laughs that I'm going to get just and the joy of listening to you talk about it. Yeah, this is great. Well, it's always nice to have a good clack standing in the wings ready to laugh. So thank you very much. Now on my script here it says, so how good is it really and how has it lasted? Is there more going on than just nostalgia? In the bin with that, in the bin with it. Nikki has answered that question. Of course there's no further questions, Your Honour. We'll discuss all this and much more after this message from our sponsors. And we're back. But before we start on the main course, it's a good moment to mention that we'll be picking up elements of today's discussion in our next week's Locklisted, our show for patrons.

You can subscribe for that at patreon.com forward slash backlisted and five years of superior book, film and music chat plus ad free early versions of the main show will be all yours. But come with us now as the virtual screen goes wobbly. And we return to Leicester in 1982 for the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 and three quarters by Sue Townsend. And let's ask the question we always ask on Batlisting. First of all, Nina Stibbe, where were you, who were you, what were you doing when you first read The Secret Diary of Adrian Moll?

Okay, I was 20. I know exactly when I read it because I mentioned it in my own letters that are published so I can look at that. So I read it in 1983, I just turned 20 and I didn't want to read it. I was a reader and I was reading things like Salinger and Catch 22 and things like that. And I thought it was not really for me, but everybody around me was reading it. And I mean everybody, my parents, my grandparents, my siblings, my friends. And I left school at age 15 and the only way of getting away from home was to

be a nanny or an au pair. So I'd taken this job, I'd ended up in North London. And by chance, I was living in this street of very accomplished cultural figures, people like Alan Bennett and Claire Tomlin, who was then the, I think she was the literary editor of the Sunday Times, and Alice Thomas Ellis and Jonathan Miller and David Gentleman. And my boss, the woman I was the nanny to, was Mary Kay Wilmers.

She was the then deputy editor of the London Review of Books, then became the editor. So I was little me from Leicester having not an O level or an A level to my name, living with all these people. And they all dropped in the whole time. I mean, literally would come in, Alan Bennett would come in for dinner almost every night and they were all talking about it.

I slightly resisted it because it looked a bit popular for me in a quite an Adrian kind of way. Anyway, I then I did read it. And honestly, now when I'm asked and I'm asked a lot what my favorite books are, almost whatever the criteria, it's Adrian Mole. Not just because it was a great book, but it was, and it was so funny and so brilliant, but it completely changed my life. It didn't just change me as a writer because I was already doing bits of writing, it changed me as a person. It genuinely did. And I can track that through the book that was published of the letters I was writing then.

And this is sounding really self-obsessed, but it's the truth. I was from Leicester. I had worried all through my childhood about my mother's promiscuity and her drunkenness in quite a jolly way, like Adrian did. I wasn't sort of weeping and I wasn't depressed, but I was thinking, how am I going to thrive academically if she's having it off with that guy down the road? And that was in my head. I honestly, I thought we're going to, I honestly had this, this thing in my head, which was, if anybody finds out how much my mother drinks,

we will become wards of court. I'd learned that phrase. And Adrian worries about exactly the same thing. He constantly going on about it. I thought I was very clever and I wrote bits of poetry. So to find him, even though he was only, you know, 13, 14, and I was very clever and I wrote bits of poetry. So to find him, even though he was only 13, 14, and I was 20, it was funny, entertaining, and all those things that everybody else felt.

But for me, it was incredibly reassuring. Would you say that reading Adrian Mole helped you find your voice as a writer? Yes. Writing funny stuff and deciding to be a funny writer? Completely. So first of all, I changed what I was looking at and how I was seeing the world. Secondly, it was as if I'd been given permission to write about being an ordinary person from Leicester and that those concerns could be funny and could be interesting. And you were allowed to write about that stuff because he wasn't from Yorkshire and achingly poor.

He was from Leicester and they were sort of okay. There was nothing glamorous either way. The other thing is that my book, which is entirely made up of the letters I wrote at that time, was published in 2013. And that was the first book of mine to be published. I then rewrote, because that book did well, basically written as Adrian by complete accident. I then rewrote all the novels I'd subsequently started. So, Man at the Helm, my second novel, I then wrote in my own voice because, so indirectly Sue Townsend just did everything for me.

She completely gave me my voice and gave me permission to write about just, I mean, I haven't set any books in, you know, Monaco or London or Paris. They're all set in Leicester. Yeah, yeah. Hey, people will be pleased to learn that your new novel, Nina Stibbe and the Weapons of Mass Destruction will be published next year. Can I just say one other thing about first reading it? Yes, please do. So I read it and I'm now part of the gang of everybody, including Alan Bennett and Mary K.

Wilmers, who love this book. And we are all chatting about it and saying how brilliant it is. And this is so Adrian, I can't believe it. When I look back, my life could be very different. You could be reading a review that I wrote at that time because when I said to Mary Kay Wilmers and Alan Bennett, yeah, I loved it. I loved Adrian Mole. Mary Kay Wilmers turned to me and said, hey, do you want to write a review of Adrian Mole for the London review of books? Right. Now imagine if I had my life would be, it would have been very different. But what I thought was I became Adrian. I like, I think people do a bit when they first read it. I thought to myself, you cheeky cow, you know, I would, I pick up the dry cleaning.

I make the turkey burgers. I'm picking the kids up and now I'm doing that bit of your job as well. And I said to her, I said sort of, no thanks love. That's your job. And I, I, I, I declined it in the Adrian style. It was when I look back, it's just, oh. Oh, thank you so much. Um, a lost review.

Oh, well, this is it. Maybe this is it. We're getting, we're getting to hear the minister review. So let's quickly, quickly go around the rest of us then. And everyone's got a mole origin story, perhaps not as triumphant as Nina's, but still though, John. I read it in 19, like you, in 1983. I'd spent 1981 living a slightly Adrian Mole existence, although I was sort of 18, living in Sunderland mostly with my grandparents and doing a bit of traveling.

And a lot of the mole references, I'm writing a diary of such utter pretentiousness. In fact, I almost wish I'd found it. But I remember one entry started, today, today, Anwar Sadat was assassinated. I wasn't. You know, that kind of level of teenage horror. Magnificent. I can't think of any book that is more irresistible, really, when you read it. If you've lived a kind of lower middle class,

sort of working class life in this country, it's brilliant comic writing. Yeah, so I read it and devoured it. At the same time I was reading Douglas Adams and I held them both in equal esteem. Will, yes indeed. We'll come on to him too, I think in relation to this. Very interesting. Nikki, I know you've just read it. Had you read it before? Yes, I had read it before, but not since I first read it or actually had it read to me. It was published in 82 and The Growing Pains was published in 84, I think, or something like that.

Yeah, that's right. The sequel. So I suspect we read both of them at the same time because I was born in 75. So I think when I was about 11 or 12 and was on holiday with my family, my mum and my dad and my brother, my mum read them out to us in all, we were all sleeping in one room. And I can remember really clearly, can't remember the holiday, but I remember lying in bed, all of us lying in bed and laughing and laughing and laughing while my mum read the books to us. And it was just such a lovely joyous kind of family moment where we, where we found it, we found it.

We all really loved Adrian Mole. And then we watched the TV series and, you know, locked in, but not relatable necessarily, just funny, you know, just funny. Just funny. Now that's a very, very, very good point. So for what it's worth, I have slightly different relationship to Adrian Mole, these books than the three of you.

I'll try and do this quickly and just say the thing is when this book was published, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 and three quarters, I was myself 13 and three quarters. You were. Funny. And my initials, Andy Miller, are the same as Adrian Mole's. Miller are the same as Adrian Maltz. And because I was an already anxious and self-conscious boy, I found it actually terribly difficult to read Adrian Maltz. Oh, Andy! And I always have, and I always have to. Right? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, listen, it's this interesting and probably unique feeling. Yes.

I would read it and think, as an aficionado of comic writing, even then, I would read it and think, this is brilliant. The beats in this are hilarious, the way characters come in and out, the use of callbacks, even as a teenager, you're sort of looking at these things and thinking, oh, that's brilliant. Right. We last heard that phrase 30 pages earlier and she's landed right here in the

right spot. Right. So all that stuff I could get with the problem was. I kept doing and saying things, feeling they were original and necessarily emotional. And then seeing them played for laughs on the page in front of me. Having my own, Nina, having my own adolescent pain burlesked for everyone's amusement was quite tough. I have to say, I spent this week listening to it, thinking this is Andy Miller. Okay, bless you. Bless you, bless you, bless you. We will come onto this as well, right?

But I just want to also say that I've been writing a long piece for our Patreon about while we've been preparing for this show, I've been writing a long piece about Kate Bush, whose music I love and whose music I loved when I was 13 and three quarters. And I have titled that essay, The Growing Pains of Kate Bush

by Andy Miller, 57 and a quarter. Because it seems to me, she and I are locked in a mole-like adolescent relationship forever, apparently forever. Anyway, Nina. She's like your Pandora, Andrew. I think she, in a sense, she is. She is in a real, very real sense. Nina, when I reread this a couple of weeks ago, I had that wonderful and horrible feeling of thinking,

wait, I haven't changed at all. This still makes me feel slightly like someone's laughing at me, looking over my shoulder and laughing at me, which of course is not what I think Sue's terribly compassionate. It's just, it's so good. And so accurate an observation of all this stuff, that it's a slightly queasy experience for me. But anyway, why don't we hear a little bit from Sue herself,

Why don't we hear a little bit from Sue herself, her husband Colin Broadway, her editor at Methuen, Geoffrey Strachan, and the aforementioned John Tideman as they discuss those very early steps of Nigel Mole. Oh no, we never thought it was going to be a hit, we thought it would be a good book. She was shy and amazed at the success of the first Adrian Moe book in particular. I thought it would be a one-off. Our first print run was very modest, it's a few thousand copies I think, and she was very worried about that. I was astonished when it started to sell.

Sue never really believed that anybody would want to publish it or anybody would want to read it, and when she found that they were going to print 10,000 copies she thought well they'd sell Catler-Brandon and then it'd be pulp the rest. I remember your having said oh dear the first print is 7,000 books and they're never going to sell them well of course they sold like hotcakes and it went into first edition second edition I mean you couldn't buy the books they couldn't print them fast enough. So the reason I want to listen to that is because of the P word. Yes, the phenomenon.

Phenomenal success. You described it to us half an hour ago as a phenomenon. I wonder if you could remind people of the nature of that phenomenon and quite how massive these books were in the early 90s. Yeah, well, I mean, I was sort of forced to read it because I'd never known a book that everybody was reading. You know, everybody, my whole family, all my friends, and it was just coming at me.

And what was interesting, I remember I was thinking about it the other day and I was thinking it sort of behaved more like a TV show in that people talked about it, didn't they? John will remember this, you were probably too young, but people were talking about it and you'd see people reading it, so you'd see it on the tube and the bus and stuff. And you'd hear people laughing. And that's kind of the highest bar, isn't it? The laugh out loud. I think the books we most want to share are books that make us laugh out loud. They're the ones that people most want to talk about because it's like you're telling somebody a joke and you're being funny yourself. It seemed to me it lived somewhere in the same place

as Fungus the Bogeyman, which is there was a kind of naughtiness about it when it was first published. A kind of, oh, she's talking about adolescent things in a direct, relatively non-coy way. Just as Fungus the bogeyman talks about all sorts of horrible stuff in a non-coy way and plays it for laughs but plays it for truth at the same time or mingles the two together. I think a key thing that I remember being different about it because obviously

Hitchhiker was around in my life at the same time is just the sheer range of the readership. It wasn't a cult book that was just me and my mates loving. And it was like, as Nina said, it was everybody from being discussed on television, grandmothers giving it to their grandkids for Christmas. I mean, there have been cult hits since that maybe, I don't know, Dan Brown, you remember that one, Andy? I am familiar with him. 50 Shades of Grey, where everybody goes mad for a while and everybody feels like, like Nina says,

you kind of have to read it because you have to have an opinion about it. And you feel bad having an opinion about it if you haven't actually read it, which wasn't quite how I came to it, but I remember it was the year that I went to Oxford and it was astonishing even there it was still in you know late 83, it was still being talked about enthusiastically by English undergraduates wanting to test their comic skills. My favourite story about the mole mania and the phenomenon of the success of it is that

listeners of a certain age will recall the 1980s television adaptation, which spawned a hit single. Oh yes. A hit single. Ian Jury. Profoundly in Love with Pandora by Ian Jury. Now the brilliant thing about that is you will recall there's a scene, I've got it here Sunday, May the 24th, I have decided to paint my room black. Yes, Nikki, I did something very similar. Of course. It is a colour I like. I can't live a moment longer

with naughty wallpaper anyway, Adrian tries to paint over. They keep coming through like a ghost. Then he has to use felt tip to go over them again. Ian Durie, who was no stranger to controversy, ran into terrible trouble when his record company wouldn't release the track he originally wanted on the B side of profoundly in love with Pandora, which was called simply, Fuck Off Noddy. To this day, it's very difficult to hear. You can find it on YouTube, but it's like, it's a kind of, it's like he almost submitted two songs,

a charming one and a less charming one. Nina, would you like to read us a passage from The Secret Diary of Adri Moel? Well, I'm going to read a few entries that come from the summer holidays, because of course that's the brilliant thing. He has this long period where he's not at school and it all changes. And so this is where his mother has left his father and he's living with this guy, Mr. Lucas. There's a bit of a tug of love going on because he has to choose who to go on holiday with.

Saturday, August 1st, postcard from my mother. She wants me to go on holiday with her and creep Lucas. They are going to Scotland. I hope they enjoy themselves. Tuesday, August 11th, got another postcard from my mother. Dear Aidy, you've no idea how much I want to see you. The mothering bond is as strong as ever. I know.

as ever. I know you feel threatened by my involvement with Bimbo, but really, Aidy, there is no need. Bimbo fulfills my sexual needs. No more, no less. So, Aidy, grow up and come to Scotland. Lots of love, Pauline, in brackets, mother. P.S., we leave on 15th, catch 822 train to Sheffield. Saturday, August 15th. My mother and creep Lucas met me at Sheffield. My mother looked dead thin and has started dressing in clothes that are too young for her. Lucas creep was wearing

jeans. His belly was hanging over his belt. I pretended to be asleep until we got to Scotland. Lucas mauled my mother about even whilst he was driving. We are at a place called Loch Lubnag. I'm in bed in a log cabin. My mother and Lucas have gone to the village to try to buy cigarettes. At least that's their story. Saturday, August 22nd. Went to see Rob Roy's grave. Saw it, came back.

Sunday, August 23rd. My mother has made friends with a couple called Mr. and Mrs. Ball. They have gone off to Stirling Castle. Mrs. Ball has got a daughter who is a writer. I asked how her daughter qualified to be one. Mrs. Ball said that her daughter was dropped on her head as a child and has been a

bit queer ever since. It is Mrs. Ball's birthday. They all came back to our log cabin to celebrate. I complained about the noise at 1am, 2am, 3am and 4am. At 5am they decided to climb the mountain. I pointed out to them that they were blind drunk, too old, unqualified, unfit and lacking in any survival techniques and had no first aid kit and weren't wearing stout boots and had no compass or map or sustaining hot drinks.

My protest fell on deaf ears. They all climbed the mountain, came down and were cooking eggs and bacon by 11.30. As I write, Mr. and Mrs. Ball are canoeing on the lock. They must be on drugs. Wednesday, August 26th, we drove through Glasgow at 11 a.m. in the morning. Yet I counted 27 drunks in one mile. All the shops, except the DIY shops, had grills on the windows.

Off licenses had rolls of barbed wire and broken glass on the roofs. We had a walk around for a bit and then my mother nagged Lucas creep into taking her into the Glasgow Art Gallery. I intended to sit in the car and read Glenn Coe, but because of all the drunks staggering around, I reluctantly followed them inside. How glad I am that I did. I might have gone through life without having an important cultural experience. Today, I saw Salvador Dali's painting of the crucifixion, the real one, not a reproduction. They've hung it at the end of the corridor so that it changes as you get nearer to it. When you are finally standing up close to it,

you feel like a midget. It is absolutely fantastic, huge with dead good colors and Jesus looks like a real bloke. I bought six postcards of it from the museum, but of course it's not the same as the real thing. One day I will take Pandora to see it, perhaps on our honeymoon. Bravo! Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. So good.

Before we get into any autobiographical details, I may wish to supplement that story with Nina. Do you want to just tell us some of the nice things or crafty things that Sue Townsend is doing as a writer to make us laugh? Well, in there, we know what she's doing. First of all, I think her clever, her first clever idea is to have a diary, to make it a diary. Because with a diary, you're not bogged down with exposition. She's just going to introduce characters and it's up to us to work out who they are. She doesn't need to tell us why something's happened. And I love that about diaries. And isn't that true of diaries when you think of Pooter and Bridget Jones

and a diary of a provincial woman. They're brilliant because you get all meat. There's no veg. Yeah. In other words, you can cut straight into the voice telling you the thing, can't you? You don't have to explain. You don't have to explain. And because the conceit is that Adrian's writing this diary for himself, he's not writing it for us, so he can just sort of ramble on and give us bits of detail. I mean, did you notice,

there's a lovely bit in the entries I've just read, which is her obsession with writing and writers, that Mrs Ball's daughter is a writer, not because she's qualified, but because she was dropped on her head. Dropped on her head. And went a bit queer after that. So there's that, but I just, for me, the thing she does best and what makes this diary the absolute joy is the detail. Oh yes, he's very proud to have got 20 out of 20 for his geography test. So he's told us that,

he sort of talks about it a bit. And then he says, there's nothing I don't know about the Norwegian leather industry. He's just so proud of himself. So it's those little details. Adrian's taken, he's got this friend Bert and he lives in an old people's home and he takes some woodbines around to Bert. And obviously it's, you know, it's important that him and Pandora are very kind to Bert and that Bert's met this lovely lady friend, Queenie, and they've got engaged. So that's the entry. Bert and Queenie have got engaged.

But what Sue tells us is they've got their names on the same ashtray. So someone's obviously got a marker pen, this is Burt and Queenie's ashtray. And it's those little delightful things. And when it's the royal wedding and he misses the vows, he doesn't miss the vows because he's gone out to make a cup of tea. He's gone upstairs to get some toilet paper for his nan who's crying and forgotten to have forgotten her handkerchief. And also, you know, the bit we've talked about with Noddy, it's the bells on Noddy's hat that keep coming through. It's the bells on Noddy's hat that keep coming through. Which is just, it's for me, it's those details that I think,

I mean, I'm being very self-obsessed as always. That's what made me be a details person. I mean, it's those little extras that I think made it really, really funny. I remember you complimenting me, Nina, which is very kind of you, on my use of a particular IKEA brand name of a glass in one of my books. And you said to me me, ah yes, I like it when somebody goes to the trouble of actually specifying Skvepa in that instance. For me, that's what's funny. Can I observe that the bit you just read, Nina, there's a couple of things in there that remind me of other writers of great comic prose. She does a thing that David Nobbs used to do, which is find a seemingly innocuous phrase and have characters use it over and over

and over again. So Adrian has just my luck, which you couldn't get anything out of that. Right. You wouldn't think, but because Nob's and I think Sue Townsend realise we all do that, we all say something like more or less more than other people do. It becomes very truthful and very funny to see just my luck come out. Yes. And I borrowed this from Sue without realizing it. I, in my autobiographical novel called Man at the Helm, the young me has seen that my mother wrote in a letter to the school, she said, I'm sorry, Nina has to miss PE. I know that I use the name Lizzie because it wasn't entirely autobiographical. So Lizzie has to miss PE or something because the dog's runaway. So again, the runaway dog that I've obviously borrowed. And it's imperative that we get her back. And then

I repeat this word imperative over and over again. Everything's imperative. And, you know, I learned that, we all learned that from Sue. That's such a clever thing. Well, also you mentioned the phrase, I will, so this reminds me of a different writer. You meant her gift for a phrase, which is often a rhythmic one, right?

Norwegian leather industry is incredibly pleasing as a construction, isn't it? Just hearing the words out loud or reading them on the page. Norwegian leather industry is very good. There's a bit in the one you read out here, when he's doing the list of... So this is one of the things about Adrienne. She gets a lot of good comedy out of the fact

that Adrienne is the things about Adrian. She gets a lot of good comedy out of the fact that Adrian is the adult. Right? So it's through Adrian's eyes we see the childish antics of everyone who's supposed to be in a position of authority around him. Yeah, particularly the parents, particularly teachers and whatever. And when you were listing those things where he's pointing out to them, they ought not to go mountain climbing because they were too old, unqualified. And there's two brilliant phrases here. Weren't wearing stout boots. So that stout boots is a kind of nice blunt thing, followed by and had no compass map or sustaining hot drinks. Yes!

Sustaining hot drinks. Sustaining hot drinks, Nina. A word I will, I'll edge is borrowed from none other than AA Mill and Winnie the Pooh. Sustaining is a word in Winnie the Pooh, which is, which is, which he gets much fun out of. Do you find that when you're writing, you can hear the rhythm of what you need,

but you can't quite get the words? Yeah, I often do. And I've just, I'm in the middle of a novel at the moment. And I was rereading a book that I know you love, which is the Fortnite in September. I know you love it. I love it too. And I just reread it. And the word too. And I just re-read it.

And the word tawdry jumped out at me. And it's not a word I think about or use, but it's perfect for a couple of things. And so it's this thing that borrowing words. And we know that Sue was a huge reader as a child and a young person. I mean, there's a list of her. I don't know if any of you've got this 30th anniversary edition that I've got. I don't have that.

It's a very lovely edition because there's an interview with her in the back. Which authors have most influenced you as a writer? And she replies in rough chronological order, Richmel Crompton, Charlotte Bronte, Alfred E Newman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Dickens, George Elliott, Oscar Wilde, Chekov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Ward, George Orwell, Stella Gibbons, Iris Murdoch, Flo Bear, John Updike, Richard North. She's a big reader. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Wow.

Yeah. I don't even know why I'm saying wow. I knew that anyway. Sounds like Adrian. He was a big reader too. But Adrian was a big reader. But also, also on those two things, one is that, I don't know, that painting was in my grandparents' house.

That, you know, a reproduction of that painting. That painting was definitely- Of Salvador Dali's you know, and a reproduction of that painting, that painting was definitely- Of Salvador Dali's crucifixion. Yeah. Yes. But also I remember being dragged around the highlands by my, you know, on a holiday with my parents and my dad was reading the John Preble book, Blanko. They're just, they're just really perfect cultural moment.

I will now tell people that one of the sources of pain for me. I was in Glasgow last week and I went to the Kelvin Grove Art Gallery. Is it called Kelvin Grove Art Gallery? Yes, it is. Yeah, it is. Which is amazing. It's beautiful.

And I can report, A, that the painting has moved from where it lived in Adrian and my day. Adrian's and my day. It's not down the corridor. But they do still sell postcards in the shop. And when I was a teenager and my mum took me to look at that, I was bowled over by the painting in exactly the same terms. I hadn't read Adrian Moll then. Dead good colours. Exactly the same terms. I hadn't read Adrian Mull then. Dead good colours. Exactly the same terms Adrian describes. And I too purchased half a dozen postcards from the gift shop and sent them to everyone I knew and then got home and read Adrian Mull and it felt like I had been publicly shamed. You've just been seen.

For my pretentiousness. But please, what did I send you all last week? You did send me all a postcard. Yes. AM. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to make a land grab. It's just, it's just, I felt I was walking in the footsteps of my teenage self, like I always do really. So when we come back, we're going to hear two chat show appearances from Sue Townsend, approximately 35, even 40 years apart. But first, let's have a word from our sponsors. What's better than a well marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well marbled

ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the And we're back. Welcome back, everybody. So we're just about to hear a clip now from an appearance that Sue Townsend made on the 10th of February 1983 on Russell Hardy's chat show. And then we're going to fast forward by 35 years to 2008 where she's talking to Jim Nochte on Radio 4. But the question hasn't changed. Tell us if we don't know who Adrian is, who he is, where have you found him? Well I found him in Leicester, that's where I live, and he's very ordinary, but he's extraordinary at the same time. And he has a lot of problems doesn't he?

Well yes, I mean he's a typical teen Adrian, doesn't he? Well, yes. I mean, it's a typical teenager, in that they seem to spend their whole, you know, that whole period having problems, getting over one and then finding another one. Now, he has very, very peculiar family. Do you think so? Mm. You've led a sheltered life. LAUGHTER

Can I ask you when and how you first heard in your head the voice of Adrian Mole? I can tell you precisely it was one of those Sunday afternoons that Hancock described as being so boring you start to fill in the o's of the news of the world. I was sitting with my three children in a council house. We had no money. And my eldest son said to me, "'Mom, why don't we go to safari parks "'like other families do?' Which is one of the few lines from life that I used it in the first mole book.

And it reminded me of how we gradually begin to examine our parents very carefully with that very cold eye of adolescence. As if they're a spot on your own face. As if they are a blemish on you because you hate their clothes, their choice of food, their furniture, everything about their lives and you can't quite believe you were born of these parents. It's a common fantasy in adolescence and Mole shares that as well. The thing that they mentioned there, we've talked a bit about the parents and you know his understanding of his parents changing and I listened to that and thought it's really

perfect example of the un-parenting that went on in the 80s. But there's also loads of really other great characters in there, you know the girlfriend or if the hand already becomes the girlfriend, the menacing, the bully. What was the bully's name? Yeah, Barry Kent. Barry Kent. Yeah. And Nina, what roles does Barry and what do these other sort of, and Burt Baxter play in this, you know, the sort of surrounding characters? Well, I think the, probably the most important other character is Pandora Braithwaite, his treacle-haired girlfriend. She's very important all the way through and she's such a sort of foil

to him, like she goes off to Tunisia on holiday. So she's very, very important and he sort of trails around after her but occasionally gets the upper hand and he sort of trails around after her, but occasionally gets the upper hand and actually towards the end of this diary, he meets somebody else. Do you remember Barbara Boyer? Barbara Boyer who has a platonic affair with her. And there's Bert Baxter who's the elderly man who starts out at age 89. And what's interesting in my lovely edition, which has the interview with Sue, she talks about Bert Baxter a bit. And she says one of her few regrets about things that she did in the first book was

she made him too old because he couldn't go on and on and on and she finally killed him off at 105. Oh, that's really, no, okay. That's absolutely interesting. It's incredible. You discover as you write what the potential of the comedy is

and then you think, oh no. Yes, yes. What can I, yeah, so she's, she's, she obviously started writing him and we heard how modest she was. She had no idea that she was going to need to keep these characters going. My favorite characters by far are George and Pauline Mole, Adrian's parents.

I think they're utterly fantastic. Pauline has discovered Germaine Greer. Started wearing dungarees and overalls. Dungarees, yeah, and hennering her hair. Adrian's interesting because he's very cross with her for anything that she does that distracts her from shopping and cooking. He's quite reactionary and very judgmental about his mother. And he worries that he's gonna get scurvy and he worries about his acne.

And he thinks because they don't have enough vitamins, she's not doing her job. But I love, I mean, I'm not gonna worry too much about spoilers. It's such an old book and I'm sure everyone's read it. But I, when I was a kid, my parents had divorced very, when I was very, very young. And I always wanted them to get back together. They, not that they ever would, but I remember that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard-

Burton. Burton. Did get back together. Get back together, yeah. It gave me hope. And actually when I was reading this as a 20 year old, I was thinking, please let them get back together, let her dump Lucas. Oh, yeah.

Okay. Cause there's, isn't that, do you remember there's a great bit where, about the dry cleaning ticket and then she's, she says, you know, she's getting upset and, and his dad, George, rings Lucas. And what does it, I've got it here. It says, my father rang Sheffield and ordered Lucas to cease communications or risk getting a bit of Sheffield steel in between his porky shoulder blades. But this is what I love.

My father looked dead good on the telephone. He had a cigarette stuck between his lips. My mother was leaning on the corner of the fridge. She had a cigarette in her hand. They looked a bit like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall postcard on my wall. I wish I was a real gangster son. At least you'd see a bit of life. But also it's that lovely vignette of his parents getting together and sticking it to Lucy. So I love that. They're not just in the background, as parents often are, and certainly were in children and young adults books, that the parents just had to disappear.

She really gets a lot out of them. Don't you think the reason why all of this stuff works so well is, and actually why it holds up now, is that the detail, the 80s detail, that it's so set in its time and all of the parents, the references- Kevin Keegan keyring. Exactly. I had Kevin Keegan slippers and the parents going through, you know, unemployment or a kind of, you know, discovering feminism, all this stuff is so of its time. And actually that was the thing that I chuckled so much about when I was listening to it this week, thinking, this is all so funny. The 80s details are fantastic.

Can I just share with you, please, a brief paragraph from the listener magazine, the now defunct listener magazine, sadly, which was written in about 1985, where the writer notes this. And if I just read this to you, I'd be very interested to see what you make of this. He says, Adrian Mole offers its audience a way of coping with anxieties, which are very close to home, and most of which are particular concern to home, and most of which are

particular concern to women, they being the ones who are usually left to pick up the pieces. With soaring divorce rates, high unemployment and rapid changes in family life, the England of the early 1980s was ripe for Adrian Mole. Central to its phenomenal success, Nina, that's phenomenal with a capital P, is the reversal of roles whereby Adrian is essentially the adult of the family while the supposed grown-ups behave most of the time like naughty children. This reversal has great symbolic potency. Most of Dickens's novels are based around some form of it and perhaps it is especially powerful at this particular time. We are still to a great extent living in the fallout from the upheavals of the 1960s but we are in radically changed social and economic circumstances.

Our instincts may still be hedonistic, permissive, regressive, but there are harsh imperatives and responsibilities to be faced and life is hard. How are the children of the 60s to grow up and to become adults? For many people, I suspect Adrian Mole is underneath the laughter, giving some sort of answer to that question. When the social history of the 1980s comes to be written, the Mole books, astonishing though it may seem now, will probably be considered as key texts. Fantastic. Yes. So good. He was right.

Who was this? as key texts. Fantastic. Yes. So good. He was right. Written by Nigel Andrew. So Nigel Andrew had a good day at the office 40 years ago. That was excellent. I would also say what I noticed when I reread it was just how dark it is. It's way darker than I remember. And much more emotionally, you know, in pace is really quite bleak and difficult. And I don't, it's funny, you remember

the funny bits, you know, you remember that, you remember the dog and you remember Burt Baxter, but actually the poverty and the, and the anxiety, the electricity is going to be cut off. He watches his father lose his job. And he says something like, it's pathetic to see how unemployment has reduced my father to childish dependence on others. And amongst all the laughter in that section of the book, it's heartbreaking. It's horrible. Yeah. One of my theories about the phenomenon of mole, I'd be interested in you to know

what you would think of this, is like many popular phenomena, be they in literature or music or film, they always come as something of a surprise to the author. I'm thinking of Douglas Adams. I'm thinking of our guest Chris Chibnall a few episodes ago, who said on the show that the success of Broadchurch was a huge surprise to him, not least because he thought he was writing something that was like Twin Peaks, but the audience received in a different way. And I wonder how you feel

about the idea that I think Sue Townsend was writing, thought she was writing, a much more satirical political and left-wing book given her background. I completely agree. And the whole thing about the, we've been celebrating the jokes about adolescence and Adrian, that was the surprise to her. I don't think that's what she meant to do. I think you're right, Andy. I think she set out to write a really hard line satire.

It was, it was, it was the, you know, set against the early years of Thatcher. Can you imagine what, I mean, we're none of us old enough to remember quite what that must have felt like. She described herself as being left of Lenin and Livingston. And she was a genuine socialist. Um, and. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt Nina and her background prior to this is really textbook 80s adjunct prop theatre. Adjunct props, I guess, here it comes. Here it comes. Nikki, she had a piece at the Croydon Warehouse Theatre. The Croydon bell has rung.

I hadn't really thought about any of this while reading the book on the number of times I've read it or any of the subsequent books or the telly. It's preparing for this event, this podcast that made me really look into this side of it and thinking, now this is clever. This book, in my opinion now, my new opinion is it should be ranked alongside Martin Amis' money. It's hard, brilliant political satire. I mean, Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up.

You don't see Sue Townsend on those lists. You don't see that. Some of the language comes straight out of the Tory party manifesto, 1979. You know, the short, sharp shock that Barry Kent's got to have, the anger about juvenile delinquency, the racism. There's a brilliant bit. Mr. Cherry from the news agent, rather opportunistically, brings out some old magazines that he wants to burn. And this magazine is called Now Magazine, Now! So I looked up Now Magazine. Do you know what Now Magazine is? It's a magazine that was launched in 1979 ish by what's his name? Goldsmith. I can't remember his

name. James Goldsmith. What was he? He was in the Tory party. I can't remember what his actual job was. He was a billionaire wasn't he? He was a grandee. He was a big donor and anyway, so he launched this magazine and it's something to do with the timing of the newspapers going on strike. The right wing press went on strike, it had to do with whopping and all that. So he launched this magazine and it's basically a Tory party manifesto ongoing, but it didn't catch on and it went out of business. And so the joke is that Mr. Cherry, the news agent wants to burn all these, but guess what? They don't burn. They're still there the next morning. And it's those things that people,

we don't remember them. We remember, you know, Barry Kent. We remember the big and bouncy magazine. We do. Her agenda, when you're looking for it, is not very hidden. But as you say, you know, the highest bar is laugh out loud. So that's what we want and that's what we remember. This reading and reading about her politics a bit more and has made all of that jump out at me more. For instance, think of the women in this book, how strong they are, how they run the show from Pandora, Pauline, absolutely. His nan sorts out Barry Kent. Yeah, that's one of my favorites.

Yeah, that's one of my favorites. It's so great. And the men aren't idiots, but they aren't in charge. They clearly are not the boss. The fact that Adrian himself, he spouts Thatcherist views a lot. He's very judgmental. He's incredibly patriotic. When there's the royal wedding, he talks about, nobody does pageantry like the British. He loves it and he's a little bit xenophobic. But as the book goes on, he finds his social conscience and he's very tolerant and he becomes quite angry about the slashing funding to certain things, whether

it be on the NHS where suddenly at age 14, he gets a letter saying he's going to have his tonsils out. And he says that's because he had an appointment about swollen tonsils when he was five. And it's taken that long and it came as a bit of a shock. And also this thing about school meals that you used to get a decent meal and now you get pizza and chips. So he starts complaining about the very things that Thatcherism are doing. Whereas at the beginning he's crossed with his mum for being a feminist. Let's just hear one more clip now.

Like all the best writers, Sue Townsend hated writing. Here's a little clip of her talking about it and you'll hear from various people, including her husband again, her editor, and so forth about how difficult she found writing. The thing is he's had to adjust to my mad hours. My mad hours are midnight onwards. You know, it takes me that long to get the courage to start to write because, you know, I've always found it a very difficult process. I have to kind of get myself worked up and about midnight I'm ready. Her editor has worked with her through the night and has typed for her as well. Louise,

I'm sure she'd tell you the same story. It just happened all the time. It was absolutely terrible. She'd only write if she and everyone else was brooking it. I mean that was the awful truth of it and it was very hard on everyone. Very hard on her but it was very hard on us. So we just we touched very briefly on that there on the subject of her various illnesses. She was never in great health and she had various conditions diabetes and progressive blindness as you get older. But I think Nina perhaps one way in which she was fortunate is it strikes me that because she was a playwright first, and a writer of dramatic dialogue, that perhaps dictating mole was not as arduous

as it might've been for other people, as you say, because the tone is conversational. I've written diaries, and I've written fictional diaries, and it is a really nice way of doing it. It almost, it's so much easier that you, it feels like a cheat when you're doing it. You think, Oh no, can I get away with this? Yep.

Yeah. Jump cuts, isn't it? Jump, you don't have to, as you say, no exposition. You don't have to get people in and out of the room. And for the reader, it's manageable chunks and you can read it on the toilet type thing. But also you do have to do a little bit of thinking and that's quite satisfying as well. You don't really realise you're doing it. You don't think, hang on, who's this?

You just think, okay, you're not cross about it because it's a diary. But I found that really moving. And I obviously, that wasn't news to me that she had to dictate quite a lot of the work and she wrote in a great big writing. And I find it very reassuring, like so many things about her, that she did find it difficult and didn't love it.

I mean, you just don't want to hear of writers loving it. You want to hear that they hate it. Oh god yeah. She's one of the patron saints I think when you perhaps start to aspire to being a writer knowing that they're so clever these people because they make the pain of it sound funny. Yes oh she's so funny about it. She's very funny on it. You listen to Douglas Adams talking about the absolute nightmare he had creating anything. At the same time, it's terribly seductive because you think, wow, that's what it's actually like sitting there throwing jokes away rather than thinking of new ones. I went to see the Sue Townsend archive at Leicester University a year or so ago.

I didn't just turn up out of the blue, they invited me because I was doing a talk there and the librarians and the archivists said, you know, would you like to come in? So off I went. And they made a display of her sort of mood boards. I'm going to call it mood boards. I don't think she would have called it that, but it's her manuscripts are interesting. A lot of them are handwritten and that's nice. But what was lovely was that they've kept all this paraphernalia that she collected. And it was stuff from the Mole family life. So it's takeaway restaurant menus, Chinese menus, and it's details of houses from estate agents. And there's a really lovely load of notes where she had to change the name from Nigel

Moll to Adrian Moll. So you see her doing that. You see lots of her choosing the name. I mean, she never really liked Adrian. It was only the least worst best, least worst. And on the back of her writing are shopping lists. She's got detailed notes or a bit of a play, a bit of dialogue on the back. There's noughts and crosses with one of her children and she's blotted her lipstick on it because she's got to go into a meeting. Everything merged with her and it's just lovely. Anyone can visit the archive, by the way, and you can see Joe Orton's amazing archive as well there at the same time, so it's worth a visit. Wow.

Okay, so I've got here an absolutely wonderful overview of the mole phenomenon of Sue's writing by Penelope Fitzgerald. And I was gonna read some of that out here, but we've run out of time. However, if you are a subscriber to our Patreon at Lock Listener level or above, we always do a follow-up show as part of Lock Listed when we've recorded one of these episodes of Backlisted. And I will be sharing that Penelope Fitzgerald piece. Now there's a tease. Come on guys, sign up.

That's how niche we are. Open your wallets now and you'll hear me reading from Penelope Fitzgerald's thoughts on Adrian Mull. Although I will tease you with just one tiny extract from it because I think it's so brilliant. And Nina, this was written for, Penelope Fitzgerald wrote this for the LRB in 1989. So I like to think that because you turned Mary Kay down, she had to go and ask bloody Penelope Fitzgerald. I know, I nearly said she nicked my job, but I thought, no, I can't say that.

But I did think that. Anyway, she says this. How brilliant. The epigraph to the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole is from D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. Paul walked with something screwed up tight inside him, yet he chatted away with his mother. He would never have confessed to her how he suffered over these things and she only partly guessed." And then Penelope Fitzgerald writes, Sue Townsend is the mother who wholly guessed. So good. Isn't that good? That's so good. The mother who wholly guessed.

There's the title of a biography for you. Anyway, yes, John, do you want to take us out? Yeah, I'm afraid that's where we must leave Adrian, Doreen, George and Pandora. Thanks, huge thanks to Nina for joining us and giving us the perfect excuse to revisiting our former selves and to our producer, Nicky Burch, for joining us and giving us the perfect excuse for revisiting our former selves and to our producer Nicky Burch for keeping us real. If you would like show notes with clips links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the ump team that we've already recorded please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any

of our other shows visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop. At backlisted Backlisted as your bookshop. At backlisted.fm you can also sign up for a free new look fortnightly newsletter where we preview each show, share our owner, our guests, book recommendations and news about events and giveaways and don't forget Patreon, Andy mentioned before, patreon.com forward slash backlisted. If you subscribe at the lock listener lever you get two extra exclusive podcasts every month and the next one will feature Andy, Nicky and I talking about this show and recommending other books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.

Also people who subscribe at the Lock Listener level get their names read out like this. Paul Gill, thank you. David Bloom, thank you. Dean Emery, thank you. Gabriel Brodecki. Thank you. Tyson Stolte. Thank you. Hannah Raskin. Thank you. Veronica Makovsky. Thank you. And David Marshall. Thank you. Now we have to wrap up, but before we go, Nina, is there any last observation you would like to make

about Adrian Mole or Sue Townsend that we didn't quite have time for in the show. Is there anything you want to say that you want to leave on the record right now? Yes. I would like to leave on the record that when my brother, who was at university when this book first came out, was reading it and had it in his pocket at his summer job at Pucker Pies. He pulled out the book at his tea break and he was attacked by the other workers at Pucker Pies who called him a pretentious twat and put him into a freezer for a bit. By the end of the week, and put him into a freezer for a bit. By the end of the week, they were all fans of the book. That is the phenomenon of Adrian Mole. Oh, beautiful Nina. Thank you so much.

That's perfect. Lovely use of the word phenomenon again. Also, pukka pies. I learned it from Sue, that whole thing. Pukka pies, phenomenon. It's alliteration. Pukucker pies. I learned it from Sue, that whole thing. Pucker pies phenomenon. It's alliteration. All right. Listen, thank you so much everybody. And Nina, thank you so much. This has been a gas, you know, come back in, in seven years.

Let's do Philip Larkin again. Thanks very much. Thank you for having me. See you next time. Thanks very much. Thank you for having me. We'll see you next time. Thanks everybody. Bye. See you in a fortnight. Okay.

Friday, October 2nd, 6pm. I am very unhappy and have once again turned to great literature for solace. It's no surprise to me that intellectuals commit suicide, go mad or die from drink. We feel things more than other people. We know the world is rotten and that chins are ruined by spots. I am reading Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom by Andrei D. Sakharov. It is an inestimably important document according to the cover. 11.30 PM. Progress coexistence and intellectual freedom is inestimably boring according to me, Adrian Mole. I disagree with Sakharov's analysis of the causes of the revivalism of Stalinism. We are doing Russia at school, so I speak from knowledge.

Saturday October 3rd. Pandora is cooling off. She didn't turn up at Burt's today. I had to do his cleaning on my own. Went to Sainsbury's as usual in the afternoon. They are selling Christmas cakes. I feel that my life is slipping away. I am rereading Wuthering Heights. It is brilliant. If I could get Pandora up somewhere high, I'm sure we could regain our old passion. Thank you.