Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend

have gone brown. I had a phone call from Mum. She told me that you and Ryan was fighting in the shop. I hope you done him over good, Dad. Don’t worry about me missing the holiday we was going to have. I will be going to Cyprus with the army soon. Ha ha ha.
    Best wishes,
    Your son, Glenn
    I made the coffee and took it out to the balcony and heard my father say, ‘You see that humped-back bridge in the distance, Pauline? It was under that bridge that I lost my cherry with Jean Arbuthnot. I was seventeen and it felt like I’d won the pools that night.’
    ‘Did you wear a condom?’ she asked.
    ‘A condom?’ he said. ‘Nobody wore a condom in the 1950s.’
    ‘It’s a wonder she didn’t get pregnant then,’ said my mother censoriously.
    ‘We did it standing up, Pauline,’ he explained, as if talking to a moron. ‘You can’t get pregnant if you do it standing up, not the first time.’
    When they’d finished smoking they looked around for an ashtray, then, not finding one, flicked the ends into the canal.
    My mother helped me to assemble and wire up the entertainment centre while my father read the
News of the World
, occasionally complaining about the sexual immorality of today’s youth.
    When he got up to go to the toilet I gave him the usual warning about his outline being visible, but he said, ‘I’ve got nothing that your mother and you haven’t seen before.’
    However, I still chose to turn my head away, but couldn’t fail to hear the thunderous sound of his urination. He urinates, defecates, coughs, sneezes and belches louder than any man I have ever known. How my mother sticks it, I don’t know.
    When the entertainment centre was operational and the speakers were in place, I sorted out my
Phantom of the Opera
CD. The volume setting had inadvertently been turned to full and Sarah Brightman’s opening shrieks nearly knocked us off our feet. I hurried to turn it down, but even with the volume on low the floor reverberated and the bricks of the glass lavatory shook. Professor Green in the apartment below banged on my floor. Somebody else in the apartment above banged on my ceiling. I became uncomfortably aware of my neighbours.
    My mother told me that she had rung Rosie yesterday.
    ‘How did she sound?’ I said.
    My mother’s face broke into a big smile and she said, ‘Oh, fantastic. She’s doing incredibly well. She’s almost finished her dissertation and she’s going out with a lovely boy called Simon. She needed £200 to buy a new printer for her computer so that she can print her dissertation out.’
    How little our parents know about us. Do my children lie to me?
    *
    Just before they left, my father told me that he had placed a bet with Ladbrokes that Hans Blix, the United Nations chief weapons inspector, wouldn’t find any Weapons of Mass Destruction after his return to Iraq tomorrow.
    My mother scoffed, ‘A fool and his money are soon parted.’ Then she said, ‘Tony Blair obviously knows something we don’t know. He sees secret documents, George. He reads all the intelligence reports. He’s in touch with MI5, MI6, the CIA, the FBI, Mossad and Rupert Murdoch.’
    My father said, ‘We lied to Adrian about the tooth fairy, Pauline. He was eleven before he found out that it was me who put a quid under his pillow rather than bleeding Tinkerbell.’
    My mother said, ‘And your point is?’
    My father shouted, ‘My point is, people we trust lie to us. Just think of Jeffrey Archer.’
    My father was a great Archer fan and felt betrayed when it was revealed that Archer had lied at his first trial.
    When I arrived outside Chez Flowers in Beeby on the Wold, Marigold came running out to meet me.
    She said nervously, ‘Just a few pointers. Don’t mention that you live in a loft or that your father used to sell electric storage heaters, that your parents smoke, that you have a son in the army or that you were once an offal chef in Soho. And please, please don’t mention Mexico.’
    I said