True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole Read Online Free PDF Page A

to find that there were no daffodils flashing in my outer eye as in William Wordsworth the old Lake poet. I asked an ancient country yokel why there were no daffodils about. He said, “It’s July, lad.” I repeated loudly and clearly (because he was obviously a halfwit), “Yes I know that, but why are there no daffodils about?”
    “It’s July,” he roared. At that point I left the poor deranged soul. It’s sad that nothing can be done for such pathetic geriatric cases. I blame the government. Since they put rat poison in the water supply most of the adult population have gone barmy.
    I sat on a rock that Wordsworth once sat on and thrilled to think that where my denim was now was where his moleskin used to be. A yob had scrawled on the rock, “What’s wiv this Wordsworth?” Another, more cultivated hand, had written underneath: “You mindless vandal, how dare you bespoil this precious rock which has been here for millions of years. If you were here I’d flog you to within an inch of your life. Signed, A. Geologist.” Somebody else had written underneath, “Flog me instead. Signed, A. Masochist.” After eating my tuna-fish sandwiches and drinking my low calorie orange drink, I walked around the lake trying to feel inspired, but by tea-time nothing had happened so I put my pen and exercise book back into my carrier-bag and hurried back to the station to catch the train back to the Midlands.
    It was just my luck to have to share a compartment with hyperactive two-year-old twins and their worn-out mother. When the twins weren’t having spectacular tantrums on the floor they were both standing six inches away from me, staring at me with unblinking evil eyes. It used to be my ambition to have a farmhouse full of Hovis-like children. I would imagine looking out of my study window to see them all frolicking amongst the combine harvesters. With Pandora, their mother, saying, “Shush!…Daddy is working,” whereupon the children would blow me kisses with their podgy fingers and run into the stone-flagged kitchen to eat the cakes that Pandora had just taken from the oven. However, since my experience with the mad twins I have decided not to spread my seed. Indeed I may ask my parents if I can have a vasectomy for my eighteenth birthday.
    When I got home I hurried round to Pandora’s house to tell her about this change in my future plans. Pandora said, “ Au contraire, chéri , should we still be having a long-term relationship, I should like to have one child when I am forty-six years of age. The child will be a girl. She will be beautiful and immensely gifted. Her name will be Liberty.” I said, “But do women’s reproductive organs still reproduce at the age of forty-six?” Pandora said, “ Mais naturellement, chéri , and anyway there is always the test tube option.”
    Mr Braithwaite came into the room and said, “Pandora, make your mind up. Are you going to Russia or are you not?” Pandora said, “Not. I can’t leave the cat.” They then had a furious row. I could hardly believe my ears. Pandora was turning down a week in Russia with her father just because her stinking old moggy was about to give birth for the fourth time! During a pause in the argument I said, “I would give my right leg to go to the country of Dostoevsky’s birth.”
    However, Mr Braithwaite didn’t respond with an invitation for me to accompany him. How mean can you get? The Co-op Dairy had given him two tickets to go on a fact-finding tour of milk distribution in Moscow. (Mrs Braithwaite had refused to go because she’d recently joined the SDP.) So a ticket was going spare. Yet the tight git was denying me the glorious opportunity of studying revolution in the raw. When Mr Braithwaite had gone into the garden to savagely mow the lawn Pandora said, “You shall go to Russia.” She worked on her father for a whole week. She refused to eat, she played her stereo at full decibels. She invited her ‘Hell’s Angels’ friends