The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole - Sue Townsend

As I may have mentioned, there are builders working on my parents' house. They are skimming the spare room at the moment, and so a whole library's worth of books are now stacked precariously up and down the landing. I never thought I'd see the day when my mother's house looked so chaotic and bohemian.

Anyway... I was wondering what I was going to read next as part of my read-one-book-a-week-that-isn't- for-work regime and happened to notice this on top of one of the piles. I could have had my pick of John Steinbeck, Wilkie Collins or Henry James, but no. It was the 1984 edition of The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole that jumped out at me.

I read it in the '90s, when I was barely a teenager myself and I'm pretty sure it was the first 'grown up' book I ever read - that is to say it was the first one I picked up of my own volition that didn't have a picture of a pony on the front. I remember being vaguely scandalised whenever there was a mention of nipples or sperm (that sheltered upbringing in the Cotswolds obviously worked) and therefore torn between reading it shamefully under the covers at night with a torch and publicly flaunting the fact that I had been deemed mature enough to read it, by doing so in a place where people would be able to see.

I suppose it's ironic, really, that I picked this book as a bit of light relief after The Believers, thinking it to be its complete antithesis. It is sold as the adolescent ramblings of Adrian:a slightly pretentious, precocious and sex-obsessed 15-year-old, but really it's all just a smoke screen, and he is simply the conduit through which Sue Townsend can impart her not only witty but clever observations about politics, belief, and the dysfunctional family. The two books are, actually, startlingly similar.

A review on Amazon says that the points 'Adrian' makes are just as relevant today as they have ever been, but I don't agree with that entirely. Yes, some of the themes are timeless and universal, but I reckon if a teenager read it today, they would struggle to get a handle on it. Perhaps it's the constant references to (then) current events - the boys I babysit for didn't know who Princess Diana was, let alone the significance of her giving birth to a boy in 1982 - but I doubt it could ever mean that much to anyone born after about 1989. If girls, in 2008, really are giving blow jobs at 12, then why on earth would they want to read about the sexual frustrations of a spotty 15-year-old?!

Having re-read it, ten years older and if not exactly wiser then at least a little less naive, I'm certain that a lot of the innuendo and euphemisms would have gone right over my thirteen year-old head. And I couldn't be more pleased that they did.