Adrian Mole: Diary of a Provincial Man
From Adrian Mole wiki
| Adrian Mole: Diary of a Provincial Man | |
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| Date diary started | November 26 1999 |
| Date diary ended | November 24 2001 |
| Previous book | Adrian Mole The Cappuccino Years |
| next book | Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction |
Contents |
[edit] History
A less well-known chapter of Adrian Mole's life was chronicled in a weekly column called Diary of a Provincial Man, which ran in The Guardian, from December 1999 (first entry) to November 2001 (last entry). Full index here. It fills in two of the gap years between Adrian Mole The Cappuccino Years and Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction.
[edit] Content
Adrian spends this period living on a crime-ridden council estate with his sons, has an on-off romance with a woman named Pamela Pigg, and temporarily works in a lay-by trailer cafe. He befriends yet another pensioner who subsequently dies, and has a brief infatuation with his male therapist (which he insists is wholly spiritual, not homosexual). The series includes comment on the petrol crisis of 2000 and the War on Terrorism. Glenn goes through a certain amount of teen angst slightly reminiscent of his father's early diaries. Adrian's illegitimate half-brother Brett Mole, born on 5 August 1982, is reintroduced, aged 19; he is an athletic, popular, confident, promiscuous, super-intelligent Oxford undergraduate, already a published poet and TV documentarian - in short, the person Adrian always wanted to be. Brett's mediocre older sibling soon comes to regard him with envious loathing.
[edit] Continuity
Although the period on a sink council estate is referred to briefly in Weapons of Mass Destruction, the events of Diary of a Provincial Man are perhaps not strictly canonical. For example, Adrian later states that he can count the women he has had carnal knowledge of "on the fingers of one hand". Those women would be: Sharon Bott, Bianca Dartington, JoJo Mole, Marigold and Daisy Flowers. Inserting Pamela Pigg into this list makes six - more than the fingers of one hand, unless Adrian is polydactyl. The third wedding of Adrian's parents is described, but no mention is made of Ivan Braithwaite dying. Brett is mentioned in Weapons of Mass Destruction, but only as part of a round robin sent out by Tania Braithwaite and George Mole, and this letter seems to ignore previous facts established in the weekly collum.
The final entry of Diary of a Provincial Man is dated Saturday, November 24 2001 - at which point, Adrian is unemployed. According to Weapons of Mass Destruction, he must have began working at Hugh Carlton-Hayes' bookshop the very next day.
[edit] E-book
The collected pdf e-book, Adrian Mole: Diary of a Provincial Man, is available as a free download. It can also be read online, here.
