True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole by Sue Townsend.
Title: True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole.
Author: Sue Townsend.
Genre: Fiction, bildungsroman, teen, YA, epistolary novel, humour.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: August 31st, 1989.
Summary: Adrian Mole is an adult. At least that's what it says on his passport. But living at home, clinging to his threadbare cuddly rabbit 'Pinky', working as a paper pusher for the DoE and pining for the love of his life, Pandora, has proved to him that adulthood isn't quite what he expected. Still, without the slings and arrows of modern life, what else would an intellectual poet have to write about?
My rating: 7/10.
♥ THE HOI POLLOI RECEPTION
By A. Mole
The food stood on the table
The drink stood on the bar
The crisps lay in the glass dish
‘Twixt the gherkins in the jar.
The poets were expected
The artists had sent word
The pianists and flautists
Were bringing lemon curd.
The novelists were travelling
From dim and distant lands
The journalists were trekking
O’er deep and shifting sands.
The hoi polloi stood standing
Outside the party room
Which glowed with invitation
Like a twenty-year-old womb.
Yet they dared not cross the portal
To taste the waiting feast
For fear of what would happen
If they dared to cross the beast.
The hoi polloi grew weary
And sat upon the floor
And told each other stories
Until the clock struck four.
They drew each other pictures
One person sang a song
But was careful at the end
To say, “Of course they won’t be long.”
The artists and the poets
And the people who write books
The musicians and the journalists
And the Nouvelle Cuisine cooks
Sent word they couldn’t make it
They couldn’t leave the town.
They were meeting VIP’s for drinks
And couldn’t make it down.
The gherkins went untasted
The crisps were never crunched
The Chablis kept its cork in
The Twiglets went unmunched
But still the people waited
For a hundred million days
And just to help to pass the time
They wrote and acted plays.
They carved a pretty pattern
On the panel of the door.
They painted lovely pictures on the
Coldly concrete floor
They sang in pretty harmony
About the epic wait.
Then hush!... Was that a car we heard
Was that a creaking gate?
It’s the sculptors on the gravel
It’s the poets wild-eyed
Quick open wide the door to
Let the journalists inside.
Oh welcome to our party!
We thought you’d never come
So sad we ate the food though
We haven’t left a crumb!
For in the time of waiting
The hoi polloi grew brave
They went into the room
And took the things they craved.
And the poets and the sculptors
And the artists and the cooks
And the women good at music
And the men who wrote the books
And the journalists and actors
And the people trained to sing
Stood waiting ever after for the party to begin.
♥ The afternoon was free so I went for a walk in Gorky Park and looked for bodies. Loads of Russians were walking around like English people do. Some were licking ice-creams, some were talking and laughing and some were sunbathing in their underwear with rouble notes on their noses to prevent sunburn. Indeed such was the heat that I was forced to go back to the hotel and take off my balaclava, mother’s fur hat, mittens, big overcoat, four sweaters, shirt and two T-shirts.
♥ I occasionally glance through my early diaries and mourn for my lost innocence, for at the age of thirteen and three quarters, I thought it was sufficient to just have a life. I honestly didn’t know then that you can’t just have a life. You have to have a lifestyle.
♥ The warm scent of home baking does not greet me as I enter the kitchen. So I create my own smell by baking scones. Here is my recipe but remember before you rush for pencil and paper that the recipe is copyright and owned by me, Adrian Mole. So, should you wish to bake scones to this recipe then you will need to send money to me.
A. MOLE’S SCONES
Ingredients
4 oz flour or metric equivalent
2 oz butter or metric equivalent
2 oz sugar or metric equivalent
1 egg (eggs are still only eggs)
Method
Beat up all the ingredients. Make a tin greasy, throw it all in. Turn over to number 5. Wait until scones are higher than they were. Should be 12 minutes, but keep opening oven door every 30 seconds.
♥ My mother cannot modulate her voice. Her laugh could pickle cabbage. Her appearance is striking and now, in her forty-third year, merging on eccentric. She has no colour sense. She wears espadrilles. Summer and winter. She disobeys the No Smoking signs and enters doors labelled, Private Staff Only.