Yorkshire puddings. She is never too busy to make real custard either.
I took the dog with me and we all went for a walk in the afternoon to settle our dinners.
My grandma hasn’t spoken to my mother since the row about the cardigans. Grandma says she ‘won’t set foot in that house again!’ Grandma asked me if I believed in life after death. I said I didn’t and grandma told me that she had joined the Spiritualist church and has heard my grandad talking about his rhubarb. My grandad has been dead for four years!!! She is going on Wednesday night to try to get in touch with him again and she wants me to go with her. She says I have got an aura around me.
The dog choked on a chicken bone but we held it upside down and banged it hard, and the bone fell out. I’ve left the dog at grandma’s to recover from its ordeal.
Looked up ‘Septuagesima’ in my pocket dictionary. It didn’t have it. Will look in the school dictionary, tomorrow.
Lay awake for ages thinking about God, Life and Death and Pandora.
A letter from the BBC!!!!! A white oblong envelope with BBC in red fat letters. My name and address onthe front! Could it be that they wanted my poems? Alas, no. But a letter from a bloke called John Tydeman, here is what he wrote:
Dear Adrian Mole,
Thank you for the poems which you sent to the BBC and which somehow landed up on my desk. I read them with interest and, taking into account your tender years, I must confess that they do show some promise. However they are not of sufficient quality for us to consider including them in any of our current poetry programmes. Have you thought of offering them to your School Magazine or to your local Parish Magazine? (If you have one.)
If, in future, you wish to submit any of your work to the BBC may I suggest you get it typed out and retain, also, a copy for yourself. The BBC does not normally consider submissions in handwritten manuscript form and, despite the neatness of presentation, I did have some difficulty in making out
Since you wish to follow a literary career I suggest you will need to develop a thick skin in order to accept many of the inevitable future rejections you may receive with good grace and the minimum of personal pain.
With my best wishes to you for future literary efforts—and, above all, Good Luck!
P.S.: I enclose a poem by a certain John Mole which appeared in this week’s
My mother and father were really impressed. I kept getting it out and reading it at school. I was hoping one of the teachers would ask to read it but none of them did.
Bert Baxter read it while I was doing his rotten washing up. He said they were ‘all a load of drug addicts in the BBC’! His brother-in-law’s uncle once lived next door to a tea lady at Broadcasting House, so Bert knows all about the BBC.
Pandora got seventeen Valentine’s Day cards. Nigel got seven. Even Barry Kent whom everybody hates got three! I just smiled when everybody asked me how many I got. Anyway I bet I am the only person in the school to get a letter from the BBC.
Barry Kent said he would do me over unless I gave him twenty-five pence every day. I told him that he was wasting his time demanding money with menaces from me. I never have any spare money. My mother puts my pocket money straight into my building-society account and gives me fifteen pence a day for a Mars bar. Barry Kent said I would have to give him my dinner money! I told him that my father pays it by cheque since it went up to sixty pence a day, but Barry Kent hit me in the goolies and walked off saying ‘There’s more where that came from’.
I have put my name down for a paper round.
Woke up with a pain in my goolies. Told my mother. She wanted to look but I didn’t want her to so she said I would have to soldier on. She wouldn’t give me a note excusing me from Games, so I had to stumble around in the mud again. Barry Kent trod on my head in the scrum. Mr Jones saw him and sent him off for an early shower.
I wish I could have a non-painful illness so I could be excused Games. Something like a weak heart would be all right.
Fetched the dog from grandma’s, she has given it a shampoo and set. It smells like the perfume counter in Woolworth’s.
I went to the Spiritualist meeting with my grandma, it was full of dead old people. One madman stood up and said he had a radio inside his head which told him what to do. Nobody took any notice of him, so he sat down again. A woman called Alice Tonks started grunting and rolling her eyes about and talking to somebody called Arthur Mayfield, but my grandad kept quiet. My grandma was a bit sad so when we got home I made her a cup of Horlicks. She gave me fifty pence and I walked home with the dog.
Started reading
It’s all right for Prince Andrew, he is protected by bodyguards. He doesn’t have Barry Kent nicking money off him. Fifty pence gone just like that! I wish I knew karate, I would chop Barry Kent in his windpipe.
It is quiet at home, my parents are not speaking to each other.
Barry Kent told Miss Elf to ‘get stuffed’ in Geography today so she sent him to Mr Scruton to be punished. I hope he gets fifty lashes. I am going to make friends with Craig Thomas. He is one of the biggest third-years. I bought him a Mars bar in break today. I pretended I felt sick and didn’t feel like eating it myself. He said, ‘Ta Moley’. That is the first time he has spoken to me. If I play my cards right I could be in his gang. Then Barry Kent wouldn’t dare touch me again.
My mother is reading another sex book, it is called
Had a dead good dream that Sabre was brutally savaging Barry Kent. Mr Scruton and Miss Elf were watching. Pandora was there, she was wearing her split skirt. She put her arms round me and said, ‘I am of the second sex’. Then I woke up to find I had had my second W.D. I have to put my pyjamas in the washing machine so my mother doesn’t find out.
Had a good look at my face in the bathroom mirror today. I have got five spots as well as the one on my chin. I have got a few hairs on my lip. It looks as if I shall have to start shaving soon.
Went to the garage with my father, he expected to get the car back today but it still isn’t ready. All the bits are on the work-bench. My father’s eyes rilled up with tears. I was ashamed of him. We walked to Sainsbury’s. My father bought tins of salmon, crab and shrimps and a black forest cake and some dead yukky white cheese covered in grape pips. My mother was dead mad at him when we got home because he had forgotten the bread, butter and toilet paper. She says he can’t be trusted to go on his own again. My father cheered up a bit.
My father has gone fishing with the dog. Mr Lucas came for dinner and stayed for tea. He ate three slices of the black forest cake. We played Monopoly. Mr Lucas was banker. My mother kept going into jail. I won because I
