Adrian Mole, The Cappuccino Years by Sue Townsend.
Title: Adrian Mole, The Cappuccino Years.
Author: Sue Townsend.
Genre: Fiction, humour, romance, epistolary novel, diary.
Country: U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: October 14, 1999.
Summary: Adrian Mole is 30, single and a father. His cooking at a top London restaurant has been equally mocked ('the sausage on my plate could have been a turd' - AA Gill) and celebrated (will he be the nation's first celebrity offal chef?). And the love of his life, Pandora Braithwaite, is the newly elected MP for Ashby-de-la-Zouch - one of 'Blair's Babes'. He is frustrated, disappointed and undersexed. But a letter from Adrian's past is about to change everything.
My rating: 8.5/10.
♥ I had been twenty-six years old before realizing that there were, in fact, six senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste and dress.
♥ I lay awake on the sofa and wondered if I should intervene before my mother brought yet another tragedy to our family. Trust her to spoil my enjoyment of Labour’s victory. What should have been a glorious new dawn of optimism and celebration of the transcendence of all that is best in humankind had been tainted by the potential threat to the Moles’ and the Braithwaites’ family units. And all because two late-middle-aged people have restless genitals.
♥ I find his prejudices most offensive. He is like all aristocratic people. They are all inbred, deranged sexual deviants who should be put up against the drystone walls of their country estates and, if not actually shot, then at least… made to feel very uncomfortable indeed.
♥ Harriet Harman, the Social Security, has been on radio and television trying to explain about the government’s ‘Welfare to Work’ scheme. Several times she called it a ‘crusade’. It has to be said that Mrs Harman has the look of the zealot about her, as well as a constant air of irritation. She should let her fringe grow out, stop wearing smocks and buy an uplift bra. Also, she should stop complaining about sexism in politics. It’s most annoying.
♥ “What Diana didn’t understand was that you can’t invite photographers to put you on the cover of Vogue one day, then scream press intrusion the next when you’re on the front of the Sun. You can’t be a little bit famous.”
♥ I like to think I am a civilized man, but I wanted to run round to Aaron Michelwaite’s house, drag him into the street and beat him up for what he’d done to my little sister. He’s bigger than me, but I reckoned that an unexpected and well-timed blow to the back of his head with my hardback edition of War and Peace would knock him off his feet.
♥ It was me who held her for the first time, after she’d had the slime removed, and me who taught her to click Lego bricks together. She used to follow me around like a small shadow, until she turned twelve, then something horrible happened to her and she transmogrified into a demon.
♥ I wish sometimes I wasn’t a parent, even when I am alone I carry him and William with me, across my shoulders and inside my heart.
♥ As we cleared the Sunday-lunch table, I told him and William about Jesus turning water into wine. “Did he have a drinkin’ problem, Dad?” he asked, when I finished.
♥ I have often wondered how I would stand up against fire, flood and tempest. Would I run in panic and try to save my own life? Until tonight I suspected that I would do exactly that. But when I woke to the exploding gas and the choking smoke and the sharp flames on the stairs, I found that my own life was unimportant to me. Nothing else mattered apart from removing my sons from danger.
I expect that by tomorrow I will have embellished the story and given myself a heroic status I do not deserve, but all the same, on this night at this hour, I am pleased to record that I acquitted myself well.