Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction (13 page)

Barry Kent was in the
Sunday Times
. It was a feature called ‘How I Spend My Money’. He told the interviewer, Topaz Scroggins, that he gives his huge income mostly to charity, but he apparently begged Topaz not to reveal this
in the paper. Topaz wrote, ‘I hope he will not feel betrayed, but I felt that the readers of this newspaper should know that Barry Kent, despite his gritty, uncompromising image, is a true humanitarian who wears his genius lightly.’

I got a House of Commons Christmas card from Pandora, an obscene picture of a snowman with the carrot in the wrong place from Aunty Susan and a letter from Glenn.

Dear Dad

I think the war might be kicking off. We done some desert training today. Me and Sergeant Brighouse went to the builder’s merchants and ordered ten tons of sand for the same-day delivery. Sergeant Brighouse told me that if he had ordered the sand through army supplies it would have took three months to come. Anyway, the sand came in the afternoon. We emptied the bags on the assault course and Sergeant Brighouse made me and the lads stand behind the heap, then he started the generator up and sand blew in our eyes. He was shouting, ‘You’re in the fucking desert now, you O-level reject bastards.’

Then he made us take our boots off and fill them with sand. Then we had to put them back on and run round the assault course until we was knackered. Then he shouted, ‘Right, that’s your fucking desert training done.’

Me and my best mate, Robbie Stainforth, have met two girls on the Internet. They are from Bristol and we are driving to
see them on Sunday. Their photos are OK. I hope they are not fifty-year-olds with no teeth. I think you would like Robbie, Dad. He reads a lot of books and knows a lot about everything. When he seen me reading the
Sun
he set fire to it for a laugh.

All the best, Dad

Your son, Glenn

PS We might not get any leave this Christmas, but we can have parcels.

Enclosed was a photograph of Glenn and Robbie Stain-forth. They were in their khaki uniforms, holding a little trophy of a man with a fat belly throwing a dart. Robbie had a shy smile. I had forgotten that soldiers can wear glasses. On the back of the photograph Glenn had written, ‘Me and Robbie was the finalists in the regimental pairs darts match, and we won. I was bought eleven pints by the lads. Dad, I have never felt so bad.’

I watched Rowan Williams being sworn in as Archbishop of Canterbury. He reminds me a little of Michael Flowers. I longed to take my nail scissors to his beard, and I suspect his wife cuts his hair. And I know Jesus wore sandals, but this is the twenty-first century. He is reputed to have a great brain and a powerful intellect. He certainly likes the sound of his own voice. He makes Donald Sinden sound like David Beckham. However, I wish him well. Being in charge of the Church of England must be as hard as Iain Duncan Smith trying to persuade Tories to vote Conservative.

*

Reply to Glenn’s letter.

Dear Glenn

I don’t know why Sergeant Brighouse made you do desert training, because you certainly won’t be going to Iraq. If Saddam refuses to give up his Weapons of Mass Destruction there is bound to be a long-drawn-out period of negotiation. The diplomats will sort everything out. And anyway, you are too young. You are still only seventeen and are not old enough to fight. So rest assured, son, the nearest thing to danger you will experience this year will be meeting up with a girl you found on the Internet.

Have a good time, but remember to drive carefully on the M4. Keep well back from lorries. They are constantly jackknifing or shedding their loads, and white minibuses are notoriously accident-prone. Steer clear of them. A thousand people die on Britain’s roads every year, and countless thousands are injured or permanently disabled.

Please don’t drink eleven pints again. You are putting a terrible strain on your system, not to mention your bladder.

Make sure you have a condom with you. Bear in mind that over half of Britain’s women have a sexually transmittable disease: 30 per cent have chlamydia, for instance, 20 per cent have genital warts and an unknown quantity have syphilis, which causes your nose to rot away and eventually fall off.

But have a good time in Bristol, son, and congratulations to you and Robbie on your darts triumph.

Love Dad

Don’t ask me why, but I had expected the chimney sweep to be a bow-legged little man covered in soot, wearing a flat cap and carrying circular brushes over one shoulder. However, the ‘sweep’ was wearing a suit, collar and tie, was perfectly groomed and had immaculately clean fingernails. He attached a bag over the opening of the fireplace and turned on a vacuum machine. It was all over in ten minutes.

I said, ‘I don’t suppose you officiate at many weddings nowadays, do you?’

He said that his grandfather used to hang about outside the church, dressed in traditional chimney sweep clothes, but had stopped doing it after an unfortunate incident with a bag of soot and a crinoline-styled white wedding dress.

I suggested to him that he should think about describing himself as a chimney sucker rather than a chimney sweep. But he seemed unwilling to take this on board.

The fireplace is very pretty. There are old-fashioned, tulip-patterned red tiles surrounding the grate.

I went to the BP garage at the bottom of the High Street and lugged back two mesh bags of logs. I went out again for matches and firelighters. When I got back I found Mr Carlton-Hayes tearing up strips of the
Guardian
and twisting them into spills for the fire. Don’t ask me why, diary, but it was quite an emotional moment when Mr Carlton-Hayes touched the first firelighter with a
Guardian
spill. The little fire roared away and the logs
began to spit and crack in the grate. Mr Carlton-Hayes had to stamp on some of the flying embers. Mindful of the recent announcement by the striking fire fighters’ leader, Andy Gilchrist, that he intends to topple New Labour, I left the shop yet again and ran across the road to Debenhams and bought a fireguard.

Later we cleared a space around the fire by moving some bookshelves. We then amalgamated British Politics with American History, which made space for two armchairs.

The fire was an instant success. A teenage boy who came in looking for an aircraft book for his dad’s Christmas present said it was the most realistic fire he had ever seen. When I told him the log fire was not a gas facsimile, he said the fire was cool.

Mr Carlton-Hayes joined us and said that it was a shame ‘one couldn’t buy coal these days’.

The youth said, ‘Coal, what’s that?’

Mr Carlton-Hayes patiently explained to the boy that once upon a time men descended into the bowels of the earth via a cage on a pit head pulley. Once there, they crawled on their hands and knees through dark tunnels until they reached what was called the coal face, whereupon they hacked at the coal with pickaxes. Coal was the fossilized remains of trees. Large lumps of coal were thrown on to a conveyor belt and taken to the surface of the mine, where it was broken into small pieces, put into hundredweight sacks and delivered by lorry to every household in the land, where it was burnt in fireplaces and kitchen ranges, supplying heat for comfort and for cooking.

The boy listened with something akin to wonder, reminding me of the famous oil painting of the old sailor mending his nets and telling two young boys about his maritime adventures.

The youth said, ‘So have I got this right? You used to, like, chuck these lumps of black shiny stuff on to the fire and set them alight?’

I told the youth that in my boyhood coal had been superseded by electric storage heaters, which consisted of a pile of electrically heated bricks inside a metal box.

The boy’s eyes widened further.

‘My father used to sell them,’ I added. ‘Before he was made redundant, like the miners.’

Mr Carlton-Hayes said, ‘The miners were not made redundant, Adrian, their jobs were stolen from them by Mrs Thatcher.’

The youth said, ‘We haven’t done Thatcher yet. We’re still on the First World War.’

I managed to flog him
The Observer’s Book of Aircraft
for his dad.

New Moon

3 a.m.

Unable to sleep tonight due to money worries. Will my car have to go?

Received an invitation for a New Year’s Eve party from Tania Braithwaite. It is fancy dress. I can’t afford to hire an elaborate costume: I may go as Osama bin Laden. All I will need are a few sheets, an old bathrobe, a pair of sandals and a false beard.

According to the
Daily Mail
, Cherie Blair is dabbling in the occult and cannot decide whether to have tea or coffee in the morning without consulting a medium in Dorking called Sylvia. Mrs Blair surrounds herself with gurus and mystics. It seems you cannot move in No. 10 before tripping over crystals and astrological charts.

Marigold said, ‘It’s good to know that someone of the New Age is married to the most powerful person in Britain.’

We are getting through four bags of logs a day at a cost of £3 a bag.

I was slightly nervous all day while I was at work. I had given my parents a spare key to my apartment and ntl were calling at 11.30 to connect me to over 200 television
channels, at a cost of £66 a month. I will find the money somehow. A man of my intellect cannot afford to ignore global culture.

I got home from work to find my mother on the balcony, feeding the swans with croissants she had taken from my freezer. When I objected that (a) I do not want to encourage the long-necked bullies to congregate below my balcony, and (b) the frozen croissants were for my personal consumption – I eat two every morning before going to work – she said swans are strange creatures with special powers, you have to be nice to them or they’ll turn against you and make your life a misery.

I could see that the ntl engineer had turned up as promised. My father was watching Formula One racing live from Adelaide. I asked him to turn the volume down. He dithered over the five remote controls that are needed to operate the home entertainment centre, but only succeeded in turning the volume up to a torturous level that made my heart beat faster and my ears vibrate. It sounded as though Michael Schumacher was in my living room, revving his engine.

I tried to turn the television off at the front of the set, but there was no obvious button or switch. The noise became intolerable.

My mother screamed, ‘Where’s the operating manual?’

Before I could find the relevant page, there was an angry banging on my door. I opened it to find a tall, gaunt-looking young woman with long blonde hair parted in the middle. She looked like the type of woman
my mother would have described as ‘living on her nerves’.

She shouted, ‘Turn it down.’ Her voice sounded tight in her larynx. Her hands were clenched. I could imagine that under the white tracksuit she was wearing, her buttocks were also clenched.

I shouted above the screaming of the Formula One cars that I couldn’t work the remotes. The young woman pushed in, picked up one of the five remote controls and pressed a button. Silence fell.

She said, ‘Sorry, but I cannot bear noise. I live above you.’

I introduced myself and my parents. She shook our hands and said that she was Mia Fox. I apologized for disturbing her and said that I was normally a considerate neighbour. She said that she would have to go back upstairs because she had left something on the stove.

My father asked me if he could watch the Miss World Competition. He said, ‘We’ve only got terrestrial and the BBC are refusing to show it.’

I have watched the Miss World Competition with my father since I was a small boy. In those halcyon days I knew no better. My father would spend an hour before the competition started on drawing up two identical charts, one for him and one for me.

My father taught me to give points for face, bust, legs, bum and niceness. We would enter the marks for each contestant. It was one of the few activities that I ever shared with him. I was a great disappointment to him when I was a boy. I did not like football, cricket or fishing, but he was proud of my skill in predicting who would
wear the crown and sash and weep tears of joy on being pronounced Miss World.

I heard from the radio next to my futon on the BBC World Service that Miss Turkey won. Apparently they are going mad in Istanbul.

Iraq has presented the United Nations with 12,000 pages of documentation about their weapons programmes. So it looks as though war has been averted, thank God.

Marigold rang me at 8.30 this morning and begged me to come to Beeby on the Wold for lunch. She said something terrible had happened.

I said, ‘Why can’t you tell me over the phone?’

She said that she couldn’t possibly talk about it over the phone and started to cry.

I wanted to shout, ‘I don’t care what catastrophe has happened to you. I would sooner eat my own arm than drive fifteen miles and spend five or six hours with your gruesome family, being patronized and used as a domestic drudge.’

But I didn’t. I agreed to be there on time for the humanist prayer that Michael Flowers intoned at the head of the table instead of saying grace.

I stopped at an off-licence and bought a bottle of French rosé as I had read in the
Sunday Times
that it was newly fashionable if served chilled.

Marigold ran out of the house to greet me as I parked.
She didn’t look like a woman who’d had a recent terrible experience. However, she did look terrible. She was wearing harem pants, a plaid shirt and the tartan headband. Her hair needed washing and her spectacles were smeared.

I could not resist taking them off and cleaning them with my handkerchief.

She said, ‘So you do love me?’

I made a noncommittal grunting noise and said, ‘So what has happened?’

She said, ‘Mummy and Daddy might be getting a divorce. They’ve called the family together to talk about it. Daisy has come up from London and Poppy is here.’ She was pulling me towards the front door.