The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3⁄4

Wednesday February 25th

Bed early tonight because of my paper round. Delivered twenty-five Punches as well as the papers.

Thursday February 26th

The papers got mixed up today. Elm Tree Avenue got the Sun and the Mirror and Corporation Row got the heavy papers.

I don’t know why everybody went so mad. You’d think they would enjoy reading a different paper for a change.

I am an intellectual but at the same time I am not very clever.

am an intellectual but at the same time I am not very clever.

My mother has gone to a woman’s workshop on assertiveness training. Men aren’t allowed. I asked my father what ‘assertiveness training’ is. He said ‘God knows, but whatever it is, it’s bad news for me’.

Mr Cherry gave me two back copies of Big and Bouncy. He told me not tell my mother. As if I would! I have put them under my mattress. Intellectuals like me are allowed to be interested in sex. It is ordinary people like Mr Lucas who should be ashamed of themselves.

Heard my father say ‘goodnight’, to the car. He must be cracking 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.

I wonder if my father knows that she wears a padded bra? She doesn’t hang them on the line to dry, but I have seen them shoved down the side of the airing cupboard. I wonder what other secrets my mother has got?

I have been through an emotional time and I need my sleep. Still I don’t expect them to understand what it is like being in love. They have been married for fourteen-and-a-half years.

I still haven’t heard from Malcolm Muggeridge. Perhaps he is in a bad mood. Intellectuals like him and me often have bad moods. Ordinary people don’t understand us and say we are sulking, but we’re not.