Springtime (pre-equinox)

Loud t-storm; air so warm, we have windows open. Earlier, when Samuel’s school bus arrived, he paced the aisle, unwilling to disembark in what was then a light rain. I had to climb aboard to coax him out. And earlier still, I’d gone with Karin, Abel, and Daniel to meet the boys’ new doctor (the previous one, a Seventh-day Adventist, has moved to Guam for a three-year religious sojourn). Upon our return to Toad Hall, the alarm was blaring. It took us an age to turn it off. Daniel ran down the block, did a round of hopscotch, and ran back.

I’m tempted to try reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, but the schedule is just too packed.

“He – for there could be no doubt about his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”

(The opening lines.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m reading Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, set just before Britain’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Adrian is a die-hard Blair supporter. He believes there will be no war because that’s what Blair tells Britain. Adrian’s 17-year-old son Glenn has joined up and trains in Aldershot, running in full battle-dress on builder’s sand. Adrian has just used a Barclaycard blank check (29% interest) to obtain down payment funds (I forget how many thousands of pounds) for his trendy canalside loft, which he is furnishing on store credit (almost £10,000 at 20% interest). Moreover, his parents have sold their house to a developer and bought a pig-sty to convert, by “DIY” methods, into their new dwelling (“The Piggeries”). Meanwhile they live in a tent.

It’s a cheap trick, relaying what’s in other people’s books, but this stuff is too good to keep quiet about.

Adrian Mole: The cappuccino years

At 10:00pm not-quite-four-year-old Daniel runs through the house like a madman, or a young cat. So he does most nights.

So Samuel used to do. But now he must rise for Kindergarten, and has conditioned himself to retire before eight o’clock.

Abel, at thirteen months, sleeps last. He has taken a turn toward ultraviolence.

Adrian Mole is in his fifth book. He is thirty years old. He has two sons. One of them, he recognizes as his son. The reader recognizes them both. Adrian isn’t the most self-aware diarist.

It’s the 1990s. Blair is the new Prime Minister. Adrian works as an offal chef at Hoi Polloi, a Tory restaurant. In his spare time he scripts an unsold radio serial, The Windsors, about the Royal Family. Princess Diana’s death scuttles Adrian’s plot. Adrian’s own life seems plotless, notwithstanding his acquisition of sons.

His parents also are chronic failures – after a livelier fashion (even what with Adrian’s father’s depression). The most impressive figure in this book is Adrian’s mother, who unexpectedly succeeds as a ghostwriter, spinkling pages with unsolicited references to Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch).

“Philistines” always succeed where Adrian fails.

Adrian considers writing to be his vocation. Thus he wastes time agonizing over semicolons.

Pity. He is eloquent.

I sometimes wish I lived in pre-feminist times when if a man washed a teaspoon he was regarded as “a big Jessie.” It must have been great when women did all the work, and men just lolled about reading the paper.

I asked my father about those days when we were preparing the Brussels sprouts, the carrots and the potatoes, etc., etc. His eyes took on a faraway misty look. “It was a golden age,” he said, almost choking with emotion. “I’m only sorry that you never lived to see it as an adult man. I’d come home from work, my dinner would be on the table, my shirts ironed, my socks in balls. I didn’t know how to turn the stove on, let alone cook on the bleeding thing.” His eyes then narrowed, his voice became a hiss as he said, “That bloody Germaine Greer ruined my life. Your mother was never the same after reading that bleeding book.”

Bear in mind that Adrian is on the liberal end of the political spectrum.

I reflected on his feelings as I chopped vegetables for our “hobo’s stew.”