Adrian Mole: Diary of a Provincial Man

Love at the crèche

Saturday, June 30

I am still in love with the supervisor of Safeway's in-store crèche, Mary-Lou Hattersley. She has the widest vocabulary of any woman I have ever known — and that includes Pandora, who lectured in semantics at Oxford for a while.

Mary-Lou, or ML as she likes to be called, claims that both she and Roy Hattersley, her very distant relation, have inherited the same genes from Isiah Hattersley, "an autodidact night soil man". He was a follower of "disestablishmentarianism", she told me as she pinned William's name-badge on his new Shrek T-shirt.

Instead of doing a weekly shop, I now find myself visiting the store daily. William is complaining that he is fed up with the crèche, but I have bribed him with the promise of a trip to McDonald's. Yes, I have sunk that low! But I am a prisoner of love. I have to see her dirty blonde hair. Those fiery, intelligent eyes. She wore a skirt yesterday, so I was able to assess her legs. They are not bad, though when we are better acquainted I will advise her to avoid shorts and miniskirts.

Monday, July 2

Glenn asked if he can have the day off school to watch Henman get beaten. For some reason he hates him; he can't explain why.

On no account must I tell ML how I feel about her. I have made that mistake before. In my experience, women don't like protestations of love from strangers. They fail to return calls, ignore messages, and sometimes get their brothers to throw you off the doorstep.

My mother rang from Majorca to tell me that my father spent the night in the police station in Palma. He had a fight in the taxi queue at the airport. Apparently, he was maddened by thirst and the heat, and when a French family pushed in front of him he cracked and screamed, "Oi, Frogface! Hop off!" The Frenchman said something about foot and mouth, and my father went berserk and kicked the man's luggage into the gutter.

It was news to me that my mother and my father have gone on holiday with each other. Have their spouses given their permissions?