Adrian Mole: Diary of a Provincial Man

Piqued at the post

Tuesday, January 16, Ashby-de-la-Zouch

Clive Box, the postman, banged on the door at 6.15 this morning, which startled me out of my sleep. For some reason, I keep expecting to be raided at dawn by the police, though I have done absolutely nothing wrong. Clive had no proper letters for me, only a multicoloured envelope that informed me in fat multiple exclamation marks that I had won £1,000,000.

I said irritably, "Couldn't you have just put it through the letterbox?"

"Sorry," Box mumbled, "but I wanted to ask you sommat important."

Behind Box's uniformed back, I could see that the estate was covered in frost. Box looked longingly at the radiator in the hall. I asked him in and shut the front door. He put his sack of letters on the floor and blew on his hands. He looked at the self-portrait of Van Gogh that hangs on the wall.

"Who's that? Your granddad?" he said.

"No!" I said. "That's Van Gogh, whose genius went unrecognised in his lifetime. He only ever sold one of his paintings before he died."

"I'm not surprised," said Clive Box, after looking more closely at Gogh's haunted expression. "He's an ugly bugger."

The hall is tiny. We stood in too close proximity. I led the way into the kitchen and plugged in the kettle. Box sat at the table and said, "You're an educated man, ain't you, Mr Mole?"

I replied that I was a bit of an autodidact.

"I ain't interested in your sex life," he said, "but I've seen them letters from book clubs, so I've chosen you to 'elp me out. Do you speak French?"

"Mais oui," I replied.

He took out a sheet of paper from his uniform pocket and pushed it across the table. "'Ow do you pronounce this?" he asked, stabbing with a stubby finger at a word in block capitals in the middle of a paragraph. I looked at the word. I wasn't familiar with it. "CONSIGNIA." I said it out loud, slowly. "Con-sig-nia."

He then said it many times, like a toddler learning the word hippopotamus. "What does it mean?" he asked, eventually.

I told him that I had no idea. I read the paper in front of me. It said that the Post Office had given itself a "modern and meaningful title". And that the words, «Post» and «Office» no longer described the work that this organisation did.

Box looked at me with bewilderment in his eyes. "So I ain't a postman now?" he said. "Apparently not," I replied. "You're a consignée."

Wednesday, January 17

On the train to London to visit my mother in Holloway, I noticed that that ticket collector wore a badge that said "Roger Morris, Revenue Protection Officer".

My mother was in good spirits. She has made friends with her cellmate, a woman called Yvonne, who is in prison for not having a TV licence. Yvonne's defence — that she never watched BBC1 or BBC2 — was thrown out by the court. My mother pointed her out across the visiting room.

Yvonne saw us looking at her and blew my mother a kiss.

My mother blew one back!

I said to my mother, "You and Yvonne appear to be very fond of each other." She looked me in the eye and said, "Yes, we are very, very, very fond of each other." I took a closer look at Yvonne. She looks like Diana Dors, the black-and-white film star. I stumbled through the prison gates — has my mother taken up lesbianism, as she once took up badminton and feminism? And, if she has, will she tire of it, as she so quickly tired of aforementioned hobbies?