Thursday January 1st

BANK HOLIDAY IN ENGLAND, IRELAND, SCOTLAND AND WALES

These are my New Year's resolutions:

1. I will help the blind across the road.
2. I will hang my trousers up.
3. I will put the sleeves back on my records.
4. I will not start smoking.
5. I will stop squeezing my spots.
6. I will be kind to the dog.
7. I will help the poor and ignorant.
8. After hearing the disgusting noises from downstairs last night, I have also vowed never to drink alcohol.

My father got the dog drunk on cherry brandy at the party last night. If the RSPCA hear about it he could get done. Eight days have gone by since Christmas Day but my mother still hasn't worn the green lurex apron I bought her for Christmas! She will get bathcubes next year.

Just my luck, I've got a spot on my chin for the first day of the New Year!

Friday October 23rd

I have had a letter from the hospital to say that I have got to have my tonsils out on Tuesday the twenty-seventh. This has come as a complete shock to me! My father says I have been on the waiting list since I was five years old! So I have had to endure an annual bout of tonsillitis for nine years just because the National Health Service is starved of finance!

Why can't midwives remove babies' tonsils at birth? It would save a lot of trouble, pain and money.

Saturday October 24 th
UNITED NATIONS' DAY

Went shopping for new dressing gown, slippers, pyjamas, and toiletries. My father was moaning as usual. He said he didn't see why I couldn't just wear my old night-clothes in hospital. I told him that I would look ridiculous in my Peter Pan dressing gown and Winnie the Pooh pyjamas. Apart from the yukky design they are too small and covered in patches. He said that when he was a lad he slept in a nightshirt made out of two coal sacks stitched together. I phoned my grandma to check this suspicious statement and my father was forced to repeat it down the phone. My grandma said that they were not coal sacks but flour sacks, so I now know that my father is a pathological liar!

My hospital rig came to fifty-four pounds nineteen; this is before fruit, chocolates and Lucozade. Pandora said I looked like Noel Coward in my new bri-nylon dressing gown. I said, 'Thanks, Pandora', although to be honest I don't know who Noel Coward is or was. I hope he's not a mass murderer or anything.

Sunday October 25 th
NINETEENTH AFTER TRINITY. BRITISH SUMMER TIME ENDS

Phoned my mother to tell her about my coming surgical ordeal. No reply. This is typical. She would sooner be out having fun with creep Lucas than comforting her only child!

Grandma rang and said that she knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who had their tonsils out and bled to death on the operating theatre table. She ended up by saying, 'Don't worry Adrian, I'm sure everything will be all right for you.'

Thanks a million, grandma!

Monday October 26th
BANK HOLIDAY IN THE REP. OF IRELAND

11 a.m. I did my packing, then went to see Bert. He is sinking fast so it could be the last time we see each other. Bert also knows somebody who bled to death after a tonsils' extraction. I hope it's the same person.

Said goodbye to Pandora: she wept very touchingly. She brought me one of Blossom's old horseshoes to take into hospital. She said a friend of her father had a cyst removed and didn't come out of the anaesthetic. I'm being admitted to Ivy Swallow Ward at 2 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time.

6 p.m. My father has just left my bedside after four hours of waiting around for permission to leave. I have had every part of my body examined. Liquid substances have been taken from me, I have been weighed and bathed, measured and prodded and poked, but nobody has looked in my throat!

I have put our family medical dictionary on my bedside table so that the doctors see it and are impressed. I can't tell what the rest of the ward is like yet because the nurses have forgotten to remove the screens. A notice has been hung over my bed; it says 'Liquids Only'. I am dead scared.

10 p.m. I am starving! A black nurse has taken all my food and drink away. I am supposed to go to sleep but it is like bedlam in here. Old men keep falling out of bed.

Midnight. There is a new notice over my bed; it says 'Nil by Mouth'. I am dying of thirst! I would give my right arm for a can of Low Cal.

Tuesday October 27th NEW MOON 4 a.m. I am dehydrated!

7 a.m. A Chinese nurse stayed in the bathroom to make sure I didn't drink any water. She kept staring so I had to put a hospital sponge over my thing.

7.30 a.m. I am dressed like a lunatic, ready for the operation. I have had an injection, it is supposed to make you sleepy but I'm wide awake listening to a row about a patient's lost notes.

8 a.m. My mouth is completely dry, I shall go mad from thirst, I haven't had a drink since nine forty-five last night, I feel very floaty, the cracks in the ceiling are very interesting. I have got to find somewhere to hide my diary. I don't want prying Nosy Parkers reading it.

8.30 a.m. My mother is at my bedside! She is going to put my diary in her organizer-handbag. She has promised (on the dog's life) not to read it.

8.45 a.m. My mother is in the hospital grounds smoking a cigarette. She is looking old and haggard. All the debauchery is catching up with her.

9 a.m. The operating trolley keeps coming into the ward and dumping unconscious men into beds. The trolley-pushers are wearing green overalls and Wellingtons. There must be loads of blood on the floor of the theatre!

9.15 a.m. The trolley is coming in my direction!

Midnight. I am devoid of tonsils. I am in a torrent of pain. It took my mother thirteen minutes to find my diary. She doesn't know her way round her organizer-handbag yet. It has got seventeen compartments.

Wednesday October 28th

I am unable to speak. Even groaning causes agony.

Thursday October 29th

I have been moved to a side ward. My suffering is too much for the other patients to bear.
Had a 'get well' card from Bert and Sabre.

Friday October 30th

I was able to sip a little of grandma's broth today. She brought it in her Thermos flask. My father brought me a family pack of crisps; he might just as well have brought me razor blades!

Pandora came at visiting time, I had little to whisper to her. Conversation palls when one is hovering between life and death.

Saturday October 31st
HALLOWE'EN

3 a.m. I have been forced to complain about the noise coming from the nurses' home. I am sick of listening to (and watching) drunken nurses and off-duty policemen cavorting around the grounds dressed as witches and wizards. Nurse Boldry was doing something particularly unpleasant with a pumpkin.

I am joining BUPA as soon as they'll have me.

Sunday November 1st
TWENTIETH AFTER TRINITY

The nurses have been very cold towards me. They say that I am taking up a bed that could be used by an ill person! I have got to eat a bowl of cornflakes before they let me out. So far I have refused; I cannot bear the pain.

Monday November 2nd

Nurse Boldry forced a spoon of cornflakes down my damaged throat, then, before I could digest it, she started stripping my bed. She offered to pay for a taxi, but I told her that I would wait for my father to come and carry me out to the car.

Tuesday November 3rd
ELECTION DAY, USA

I am in my own bed. Pandora is a tower of strength. She and I communicate without words. My voice has been damaged by the operation.

Wednesday November 4th

Today I croaked my first words for a week. I said, 'Dad, phone mum and tell her that I am over the worst'. My father was overcome with relief and emotion. His laughter was close to hysteria.

Thursday November 11th
ARMISTICE DAY

When I got home from school my mother's little suitcase was missing from the hall. She was nowhere in the house, but I found a note on the biscuit tin. It said:

Waters broke at 3.35. I am in the labour ward of the Royal Infirmary. Call a taxi. £5 note at bottom of spaghetti jar.

Don't worry.

Love, Mum

P.S. Dog at Mrs Singh's.

Her writing looked dead untidy.

The taxi ride was a nightmare. I was struggling to get my hand free of the spaghetti jar all the way. The taxi driver kept saying, 'You should have tipped the jar upside down, you stupid bleeder.'

He parked outside the entrance to the hospital, and watched the jar versus my hand struggle in a bored sort of way. He said, ‘I’ll have to charge you waiting time.' A hundred years passed: then he said, 'And I can't change a five-pound note either.'

I was almost in tears by the time I managed to pull my hand free. I had a mental image of my mother calling for me. So I gave the taxi driver the fiver, and ran into the hospital. Found the lift and pressed the button which said 'Labour Ward.'

I emerged into another world. It looked like the space control centre at Houston.

A technician asked, 'Who are you?'

I said, 'I'm Adrian Mole.'

'And you've got permission to visit the labour ward?'

'Yes,' I said. (Why did I say yes? Why?)

'Room 13. She's being a bit stubborn.'

'Yes, she's a stubborn kind of person,' I said, and walked down the corridor. Doors opened and shut and I caught glimpses of women hooked up to gruesome-looking equipment. Moans and groans bounced around the shiny floors. I pushed the door of Room 13 open and saw my mother lying on a high bed reading, Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon.

She looked pleased to see me and then asked why I'd brought the spaghetti jar into the hospital. I was halfway through telling her, when she screwed her face up and started singing 'Hard Day's Night.'

After a bit she stopped singing and looked normal. She even laughed when I got to the bit about the horrible taxi driver. After a bit a kind black nurse came in and said, 'Are you all right, honey?'

My mother said, 'Yes. This is Adrian.'

The nurse said, 'Put a mask and gown on, Adrian, and sit in a corner; it's going to be action stations soon!'

After about half an hour my mother was singing more and talking less. She kept grabbing my hand and crushing it. The nurse came back in and to my relief told me to go out. But my mother wouldn't let go of my hand. The nurse told me to make myself useful and time the contractions. When she'd gone I asked my mother what contractions were.

'Pains,' she said, between clenched teeth. I asked her why she hadn't had her back frozen to stop the pain. My mother said, 'I can't stand people fiddling around with my back.'

The pains started coming every minute, and my mother went barmy, and a lot of people ran in and started telling her to push. I sat in a far corner at the head end of my mother and tried not to look at the other end where doctors and nurses were clanging about with metal things. My mother was puffing and panting, just like she does at Christmas when she's blowing balloons up. Soon everyone was shouting, 'Push, Mrs Mole, push!' My mother pushed until her eyes nearly popped out. 'Harder,' they shouted. My mother went a bit barmy again, and the doctor said, 'I can see the baby's head!'

I tried to escape then but my mother said, 'Where's Adrian? I want Adrian.'

I didn't like to leave her alone with strangers, so I said I'd stay. I stared at the beauty spot on my mother's check for the next three minutes, and I didn't look up, until I heard the black nurse say, 'Pant for the head.'

At 5.19 p.m. my mother had a barmy moment; then the doctor and nurses gave a sort of loud sigh, and I looked up and saw a skinny purple thing hanging upside down. It was covered in white stuff.

'It's a lovely little girl, Mrs Mole,' the doctor said, and he looked dead pleased, as if he were the father himself.

My mother said, 'Is she all right?'

The doctor said, 'Toes and fingers all correct.'

The baby started crying in a crotchety, bad-tempered way, and she was put on my mother's flatter belly. My mother looked at her as if she was a precious piece of jewellery or something. I congratulated my mother and she said, 'Say hello to your sister.'

The doctor stared at me in my mask and gown and said, 'Aren't you Mr Mole, the baby's father?'

I said, 'No, I'm Master Mole the baby's brother.'

'Then you've broken every rule in this hospital,' he said. 'I must ask you to leave. You could be rife with childish infectious diseases.'

So, while they stood around waiting for something called the placenta to emerge, I went into the corridor. I found a waiting-room full of worried-looking men, smoking and talking about cars.

(To be continued after sleep.)

At 6.15 I rang Pandora and told her the news. She did big squeals down the phone. Next I rang Grandma, who did big sobs.

Then I phoned Bert and Queenie, who threatened to come and see my mother. But I managed to put them off. Then I ran out of five pence pieces, so I called in to see my mum and sister. Then went home. I walked around the empty house, trying to imagine sharing it with a little girl.

I put all my smashable possessions on the top shelf of my unit. Then went to bed. It was only 7.30 but for some reason I was dead tired. The phone woke me up at 8.15. It was my father gibbering about having a girl. He wanted to know every detail about her. I said she took after him. Half bald and angry-looking.

Thursday May 1st 1997

To keep myself awake as William chewed each individual Coco Pop individually twenty times (the kid is a genius – how many almost-three-year-olds can count to twenty?), I read Pandora’s election pamphlet, which was fastened to the fridge with a Postman Pat magnet. It was a tawdry document. She’d been far too profligate with her exclamation marks.

Dear Voter (it started)

• Are you sick of hearing the same tired excuses from the nearly morally corrupt Tory Candidate for Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Sir Arnold Tufton? Yes! So am I!
  
• Do you think that his record on civil liberties (petitioning Ashby-de-la-Zouch council to deter vandals by installing close-circuit TV in the cubicles of public lavatories) is disgraceful? Yes! I do!
  
• Do you agree with Sir Arnold Tufton that TV license dodgers should be jailed for a minimum of fifteeen years? No! Nor do I!
  
• Do you demand an explanation as to why Sir Arnold Tufton was photographed in Marbella in the company of the notorious criminal Len Fox? Would you like to know what was inside the Jiffy-bag that passed from Len Fox to Sir Arnold Tufton in the Bar Espanol? Yes! So would I!
  
• If I voted for me on May 1 st, I pledge that I, Dr Pandora Braithwaite, Oxford Don, Linguist of Leicestershire Stock, will work conscientiously, honestly and fearlessly to represent the wishes of the people of Ashby-de-la-Zouch. In this cradle of democracy! The mother of parliaments! Send me to the House of Commons!
  
• IT CLEARLY MAKES SENSE!

At nine o’clock I took a cup of Nescafe up to my father. He lay where we had left him, his face to the wall, his hands clasped together as if in anguished prayer. He said he could hear Tony Blair’s voice whispering from the corner of the room. For a split second I thought madness had set in and that he would leave the house in a straitjacket, but then I realised that the clock radio had turned itself on and Radio Four was transmitting Tony Blair’s soundbites. I crossed the room, turned it off and my father seemed to relax a little. But I couldn’t persuade him to leave his bed and come with me and my mother to vote.

I went to his side of the wardrobe and riffled through his pathetic collection of trousers, a hymn to man-made fibres and Elvis-in-Las-Vegas styling, and discarded them all. However, in a drawer in his side of the chest of drawers I found a pair of 501s that he’d never worn, a Christmas present from my mother in 1989 apparently. As I tried them on and looked in the wardrobe mirror, a shaft of sunlight touched the top of my head, and I saw with horror that my hair had thinned so much that light was able to penetrate to the very follicles. I went into the bathroom and examined my scalp in the devastating light of the magnifying mirror on the window-ledge. The evidence was unmistakable: I was losing my hair.

Even as I watched, a hair detached itself, floated form my head, and landed in the bottom of the washbasin. With great difficulty I picked it up, and put it into my shirt pocket with the Ralph Lauren logo. Don’t ask me why I did this.

I took William and the New Dog for a walk around the block. The street was a riot of cherry blossom. Is it compulsory to have a cherry tree in your front garden in Ashby-de-la-Zouch? Did the council pass a by-law? There were drifts of fallen blossom on the pavements. William ran through it, grabbed handfuls and covered the New Dog. It looked like a grizzle-faced bride.

I’ve tried hard but I can’t get used to the New Dog: it’s got a miserable kind of face – the Old Dog was always smiling. Also, the New Dog displays no curiosity: it never tugs on its lead or gets excited. However, when I white van trailed blue balloons, blasting ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ from a crackling public-address system, went by, the New Dog turned its shaggy head and bared its teeth. So I warmed to it, very slightly.

I asked him where we were going to meet up and have that drink, but he said he hadn’t got his electronic organizer with him, so we said goodbye. I dragged William off the swings and we went home.

My mother and I left William in the care of his depressed grandad and his foul-mouthed aunt and walked the quarter of a mile to vote.

There was a gaggle of voters outside the Scout hut polling station. Some enterprising senior Scouts had set up a stall and were selling chilli-flavoured Doritos and little pots of salsa. There was a choice of Coke or Diet Coke to drink. ‘Whatever happened to tea and home-made scones?’ asked my mother of a Scout-master-type person, who appeared to be in charge.

‘We’ve had to move with the times,’ he said politely. ‘This is what the public want.’

‘Baden-Powell would turn in his grave,’ she said. The man blushed and turned away, and began fiddling with the salsa dip as though embarrassed. ‘What did I say?’ she asked of me, as we went into the smelly hut.

‘Baden-Powell has been discredited by World in Action. He got a bit too fond of the boys,’ I said.

‘There are no heroes left anymore,’ she said. ‘Apart from Tony Blair…’

A woman in urgent need of orthodontic treatment smiled and handed us our ballot papers. It gave me a thrill to see Pandora’s name – I had forgotten that she had two middle names: Louise Elizabeth. I wondered if she ever used her initials. I went into the voting booth and took up the pencil on the string and paused, savouring the moment. I, Adrian Mole, was about to exercise my democratic right and vote for a government of my choice. My reverie was broken when a scrutinizer inquired, ‘Are you alright in there, sir?’ I drew a thick, pencilled cross next to Pandora Louise Elizabeth Braithwaite’s name, and withdrew form the cubicle.

As I stood before the ballot box, folding my voting paper into a small square, I tried to fully realize the awesome significance of the moment.