Happy birthday Adrian Mole

Adrian Mole is 50 apparently.  Anyone who is 50 or thereabouts will be familiar with the character, and at least with the first book in the series.  'The secret diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 and 3/4' by Sue Townsend was a phenomenon book, just as many years later another book about an adolescent with spectacles would be.  Children everywhere wanted to read it, and because anything that gets kids reading is a good thing (well, anything short of out and out porn, and even then prose only is probably tolerated) it became, justly, a best seller.  I recall the first words from the school librarian when getting a tour of the school library.  'Yes, we have coped of Adrian Mole.  They are all out on loan'.

There are lots of reasons cited for the success of the book, but in truth it's probably down to it having a different appeal depending on the reader.  To some teens it would speak directly to their feelings of isolation, confusion and alienation, feelings that they would carefully cultivate because, well, that's what being a teenager is about.  Ditto sexual frustration, no matter what a hysterical media would have you believe about teenage proclivities, even back then.  Certainly when I was reading this book the was no such thing as sexual frustration, because nobody was sufficiently sophisticated to recognise frustration in any realm beyond possibly that of the lawnmower repeatedly jamming in long grass.

It must have introduced many teens to a more sophisticated world.  I was about 20 before I knew that BBC Radios 3 and 4 even existed.  Radio 1 was for ve kidz, Radio 2 for Mum and Dad.

Actually, thinking about it, that's not quite true.  Mum liked 'A book at bedtime'.  It was as a youth I heard my first Shipping Forecast but, so unsophisticated was I, I thought it was a weather forecast for trawlermen.  Now of course I understand that it is the longest running avaunt guard poetry recital in the history of broadcasting.

For me, it was all about the funny.  Adrian Mole was hysterical.  This proved to be a problem because if you are reading long after bedtime, under a duvet thick enough to repel werewolves ('more tog = less dog' as we used to say), then you could use a torch safely, but had to muffle your guffaws.  Parents are probably used to turning a deaf ear to many unusual sounds emanating from a teen bedroom, but booming laughter in the wee small hours on a school night rather gives the game away.

This, I remember, was the book I read in the back seat of the car on a long drive to or from a family holiday.  This is back in the days when a combination of reading and travelling and vinyl seats was enough to give you the kind of headache that today would land you in a CAT scanner.  But when travelling with Adrian, it wasn't a problem.

One final thing about sophistication.  I knew that girls could be called Pandora, of course I did.  I was taught Greek myths at school (that and Rural Science are, looking back on it, about all the education you need to navigate modern life).  But the likelihood of actually meeting anyone called Pandora in the West Midlands when I was growing up was about as likely as choosing the new potato option instead of chips to go with your steak when visiting a Berni Inn.

I'm pleased to say that Adrian and I have kept in touch.  His diaries were a continuing delight and he tackled growing older the same way he tackled growing up, equal parts hope and confusion.

I laughed out loud at the early books.  I actually shed a tear or two as some points in the later ones.  If you think that there is shame in that, please do fuck off.

With Sue Townsend gone, it's a great pity his diaries won't continue, I would love to have read what he thought of Brexit, and of course learn whether or not he ended up with Pandora.  He adored her, you know.

Right, I'm off to re-read the series.

Post haste

Pub quiz question.  What was the biggest Post Office robbery in history? 
Answer: when the government flogged it for far less than it was worth.
The Post Office used to occupy not just a special place on the high street, but also a special place in the British psyche, in particular, in that peculiar part of the psyche dedicated to nostalgia, which appears to be a substantial part judging by, for instance, the amount of telly programming time and endless bloody internet space given over to, for instance, recollections about kids programming in the seventies (both sweet and, more recently, sinister) and on-line conversations about some shared imagined past, most of it revolving around crisps (which is ridiculous, there was more to the seventies and Monster Munch, there were also the delicious ‘bones’, a salt ‘n’ vinegar flavoured corn snack so intense it made you feel odd).
Anyone looking at images of the seventies, documented on early video and Polaroid film, might come away thinking that the decade was mostly a brownish yellow, like the sepia of nostalgia for the man-made age.  Having lived through the seventies I can confirm that, brilliant blue skies of scorching summers apart, they were mostly brown and yellow, the exception being food in colours not found in nature, resulting in the sort of hyperactivity in kids that surely contributed to the popularity of disco and ‘the double deckers.’
Rural sub-post offices of the era were usually staffed by the sort of woman with a book of first class stamps under the counter to her left, and a double-barrelled shotgun under the counter to her right.  One of the benefits of the man made fabrics so popular at the time, and in particular the municipal carpets that typified the age, is that after an attempted stick-up, they were easy to scrape bits of villain off, as well as being remarkably stain-resistant.
The true age of nostalgia for the post office is further back, black and white rather than corduroy sepia, and of course centres around ‘Night Mail’, the film featuring poetry by Betjeman and, of course, iconic images such as steaming trains, shrieking whistles, and a carriage that was a mobile sorting office, with post office workers standing up busily sorting letters, wondering when the hell post codes are going to be invented or at least decent penmanship made mandatory in schools, and the mail bags being swung out for collection or dispatch from the moving train. 
These days of course standing on trains is a result of overcrowding rather than occupation, and the practice of collecting a sack full of letters from a pole at 80mph spectacularly fails every health and safety standard known to modern man.  And in the age of colour film, we communicate by electronic means and the importance of the mail is perhaps diminished. 
Maybe that’s why there was barely a murmur of dissent when the Post Office was sold.  Possibly it could only ever be privatised in the age of Farcebook and Blether.
There remains an affection for the postie him or herself, because you can’t help but admire anyone who struggles through the snow to deliver your Boden catalogue.  Of course, the last great act of public affection for the Post Office was the reaction to their painting certain post boxes gold in recognition of Olympic success in 2012. 
The new, privatised Post Office has declined to repeat this for the athletes who won gold in the 2014 winter Olympics, the predictable result being the guerrilla golding of certain post boxes by proud locals. 
Quite right too. 
The Post Office may no longer belong to the people, but our environment does and if some company wants to have part of its infrastructure stuck on our streets, it should show some respect and get gilding.

Haunted household objects

Unless you’re a collector, an enthusiast or a nutter, it’s more than likely that the things that fill your home are a mixture of the essential, the useful and the occasional luxury. If you have extra soft quilted loo paper then you’re covering all three categories there.

If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie dolls still in their boxes then you are collector. If you have a chest of draws full of Barbie doll heads that have been wrenched off their bodies, then you are nutter.

For most folk though ordinary, everyday households are, by and large, filled with ordinary, everyday objects that are, on the whole, fairly innocuous. Occasionally something has the capacity to be odd, creepy or sinister, if you have something that’s antique, or stuffed, or both, then this can often be the case. Folk had a different aesthetic and the Victorians in particular thought that no home was complete without a stuffed raven or a hunting scene diorama. Such items look a little incongruous today when placed on Ikea furniture.

Then there are things that are just too jolly to ever be creepy, like clockwork chickens! What’s not to love?


Paintings though, can be odd, in any number of ways. There’s the portrait where there’s something just not quite right; on the plus side, it may hold the key to a puzzle that will point the way to lost treasure (if you’re lucky it’s a figure pointing to the base of a familiar tree while holding a spade, if you’re unlucky it’s a figure sitting at a chess table which has been set up with a problem, in an unfamiliar landscape, with notes in mirror writing in a foreign language and you just have to hope beyond hope that the painter wasn’t a practical joker). Occasionally of course paintings provide useful places with assassins – with exactly the same eyes as the person in the painting – to lurk behind, peeping and awaiting their pouncing opportunity.

Or the painting of somewhere that turns out to have something of a gruesome history, which you only find out about after you’ve bought it. Or, always my favourite, the painting that actually changes appearance when you’re not looking.






M.R. James combined these to great effect in his short story ‘The mezziotint’. If you thought the scariest thing about buying art was the price tag, think again.

Art, of course, is all about provenance. That creepy washed out sketch on the wall, the one that’s signed ‘Vincent’, that’s worth something. But giving an object an interesting back story can also boost value, and nobody wants any romantic crap – it’s got to be action, adventure or, best of all, horror.

Clocks are another good example of an ordinary object that can, with the twist of a pen, become far more interesting as you note that it has, on more than one occasion, struck thirteen. Grease in the mechanism or something more sinister?

The oddest object I know of? A mass produced camera from the 1930s.


Why? Well, it’s all because of a comic. ‘The Collector’ was a British horror anthology comic that ran for precisely one issue in 1977. The story goes that it was beset with misfortune from the outset. Competing with an already crowded comics scene, not only did a distribution cock up mean that only a few copies made it into the shops (the remainder somehow being delivered to a chicken rendering plant where they were put to a use that is as baffling as it is unappetising), but it was released in the summer of Star Wars, and if your comic didn’t have wookies, robots, glowing swords and space ships, you were toast.

Frankly, an old fart who owned a junk shop making Hitchcock-like appearances in comic strips about haunted, cursed or otherwise macabre objects wasn’t cutting it, and The Collector sank after just one issue.

But not without a trace. The comic came with a free gift – allegedly the very same cursed poker chip that featured in the lead story.

Not long after, gruesome tales started circulating the playgrounds that kids who had been lucky, or unlucky, to get hold of the issue had come to bad ends, just like the owners of the chip in the story. The only thing that kids like doing more than teasing other kids is delivering tales of misfortune about their peers with more relish than you’d find in McTavishe’s House of Condiments.

Not many people remember ‘The Collector’ these days, (it’s unlikely you’ll even find a reference to it on the web) and the only time you’re likely to see an issue is bagged at some comics fair. The copies with the free gift still attached don’t sell well.

As for why this makes the camera creepy? One of the other stories was about an investigator of the paranormal brought in to investigate a mysterious death at a church, where the warden has apparently been scared to death. The investigator, armed with a camera to collect evidence, spends a night in the crypt and is found, the next morning, stone dead, a look of terror on his face. The camera has taken one shot; could it be that a photograph exists of something with the power to kill men with sheer terror. Is there a photograph of the devil himself? The collector isn’t saying.

Spooky enough? Well, the thing is, the story itself is based on a local myth from the area where I grew up. Okay, so I’m sure that just about every postcode with an old building of some sort has a story like that issued by the Department of Tourism. Heritage ghost stories are probably handed out to churches just like anyone with an interest in promoting tourism near a body of water bigger than a puddle can whip up a story about the creature in the lake. If you have a hotel on a moor or heath, it’s a difficult balancing act between making sure there are regular blurred photographs of ‘The Beast’ to intrigue visitors and hoping that nobody recognises that for the last one, you forgot to take Mr Tibbles’s collar off.

Thing is, and a friend of mine picked up a camera, just like the one in the story, at a church fete many years ago.

He’s never opened it but apparently it’s taken one exposure.

So the question I like to tease him with is this: did he buy a camera or did he buy the camera?

Does he have a camera, sitting on a shelf in his shed, that has a photograph of whatever was in that crypt?

He’s fairly pragmatic about it. Apparently he was expecting to pick up an antique, collectable, camera at the fete and flog it on Ebay, netting a tidy profit. Unfortunately the cameras were mass produced, are incredibly hard wearing and, as a result, they go for peanuts on auction sites. What he needs, he assures me, is a rumour that it’s not just a camera, it’s a camera with a story, a camera with a secret.

I asked him: do you really think I’ve got nothing better to do with my time than make up some tosh about a haunted camera and post it on my blog?

Tut.