11 p.m.
Had a bath using my mother’s quince and apricot aromatherapy oil. The stuff floated on top of the water, looking like the oil slick that killed most of the wildlife in Nova Scotia. It took a quarter of an hour under the shower before I was able to wash the gunk off my body.
Used two mirrors to measure bald spot. It is now the size of a Trebor Extra Strong Mint.
Checked emails. There was one from my sister, Rosie, telling me that she is thinking of leaving Hull University; she is disenchanted with nano-biology. She said that Simon, her boyfriend, needed her full-time help to overcome his crack habit. She asked me not to tell our parents of her dilemma as they were both totally ‘prejudiced’ about crack addicts.
There were the usual spam deals from firms offering to stretch my penis.
Sunday October 6th
New Moon
My mother moped around the house in her dressing gown all day. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon I asked her if she was going to brush her hair and get dressed. She said, ‘Why should I? Your dad wouldn’t notice if I walked around naked with a rose between my teeth.’
My father sat all day next to the stereo, playing and replaying his Roy Orbison records.
Their marriage is obviously a dead parrot. It is like living in a Bergman film. Perhaps I should tell them that their precious daughter is unlikely to win a Nobel Prize as she is shunning the laboratory and embracing drug rehabilitation. That would liven them up a bit and get them talking to each other. Ha ha ha.
Spent the afternoon writing letters. As I was about to leave the house to walk to the post box, my mother said, ‘You are the only person I know who uses snail mail.’
I replied, ‘You are the only person I know who still believes that smoking is good for your lungs.’
She said, ‘Who are you writing to?’
I didn’t want to tell her that I was writing to Jordan and David Beckham, so I hurried out of the house before she could see the names and addresses on the envelopes.
Jordan
Wisteria Walk
c/o Daily Star
Ashby de la Zouch
Express Newspaper Group
Leicestershire
10 Lower Thames Street
London EC3
October 6th 2002
Dear Jordan
I am writing a book about celebrity and how it ruins people’s lives. I know what I am talking about. I was a celebrity in the 1990s and had my own show on cable TV called Offally Good! Then the fame machine spat me out, as it will spit you out one day.
I would like to arrange an interview on a mutually convenient date. You would have to come here to Leicester because I work full-time. Sunday afternoons are good for me.
By the way, I was talking with my father about your breasts recently. We both agreed that they are very intimidating. My father said a man could fall into that cleavage and not be found for days.
My friend Parvez described them as being like Weapons of Mass Destruction, and my chiropractor predicted that you would suffer from lower-back problems in the future due to the weight you were carrying on your ribcage.
It is rumoured that you are contemplating having even bigger implants inserted. I beg you to reconsider. Please contact me at the above address. I’m afraid I cannot offer a fee or expenses, but you will of course receive a free copy of the book (working title: Celebrity and Madness).
I remain, madam,
Your most humble and obedient servant,
A. A. Mole
David Beckham
Wisteria Walk
c/o Manchester United Football Club
Ashby de la Zouch
Old Trafford
Leicestershire
Manchester M16
October 6th 2002
Dear David
Please take a few moments to read this letter. I am not an inane football fan requesting a signed photo.
I am writing a book about celebrity and how it ruins people’s lives. I know what I am talking about. I was a celebrity in the 1990s and had my own show on cable TV called Offally Good! Then the fame machine spat me out, as it will spit you out one day.
I would like to arrange an interview on a mutually convenient date. You would have to come here to Leicester because I work full-time. A Sunday afternoon would be good for me.
And please don’t take offence at what I’m about to say – perhaps you were away when grammar was taught at school – but you do not seem to know the very basics of grammatical sentence construction, i.e. last night on television you said, ‘I seen Victoria on a video when she were a Spice Girl an’, y’know, I like said to me mate, I fink I’ve just saw the gel I’m gonna marry.’
The sentence should read: I SAW Victoria on a video when she was a Spice Girl, and I said to my mate, I think I’ve just SEEN the girl I’m going to marry.
Please contact me at the above address. I’m afraid I cannot offer a fee or expenses, but you will of course receive a free copy of the book (working title: Celebrity and Madness).
I remain, sir,
Your most humble and obedient servant,
A. A. Mole
Monday October 7th
Rang my solicitor, David Barwell, on the way to work. His secretary, Angela, said, ‘Mr Barwell is busy having an asthma attack due to the new carpet that has been fitted over the weekend.’
I advised her to expect a correspondence from Mark B’astard regarding the lease on Unit 4, The Old Battery Factory, Rat Wharf, Grand Union Canal, Leicester.
She said bitterly, ‘I shan’t bother telling Mr Barwell. It’s me that does all the work. All he does is sit behind his desk and fiddle with his inhaler.’
I had to wait ten minutes outside the shop; Mr Carlton-Hayes had trouble finding a parking space. I watched him walk up the High Street. He looked as if he was on his last legs. I don’t know how much longer he can carry on with the shop. This is just my luck.
He said, ‘Terribly sorry to keep you waiting, my dear.’
I took the keys from him and opened the door. Once inside, he leaned against the recent biographies to catch his breath.
I said to him, ‘If we had a few chairs and sofas in here like I suggested, you could sit down and be comfortable.’
He said, ‘We’re not Habitat, Adrian, my dear, we’re booksellers.’
I said, ‘Customers expect to be able to sit down in bookshops nowadays, and they also expect a cup of coffee and to be able to visit the lavatory.’
He said, ‘A properly brought-up person micturates and defecates and drinks a cup of coffee before they leave their house.’
We had the usual quotient of mad people in during the day. A steam train enthusiast with a ginger beard and sellotaped spectacles asked me if we had a copy of the 1954 Trans-Siberian timetable in Russian. I showed him our Railway section and invited him to search through the mildewed railway ephemera that Mr Carlton-Hayes insists on keeping in stock.
A woman with a crew cut and dangly earrings asked if we were interested in buying a first edition of The Female Eunuch. I wouldn’t have bought it. It was in very poor condition, missing its dust jacket, and the pages were covered in annotations and exclamation marks in red ink. But Mr Carlton-Hayes intervened and offered the woman £15. Sometimes I feel as though I work in a charity shop rather than Leicester’s oldest-established second-hand and antiquarian bookshop.
However, just as we were about to close a young woman came in and asked if we had a copy of Soft Furnishings for Your Regency Doll’s House. As far as I could make out, she had a passably good figure and a not-bad face. She had the thin wrists and fingers I like in a woman. So I spent some time pretending to search the racks.
I said, ‘Are you sure such a title exists?’
She said that she had once owned a copy but had lent it to a fellow doll’s house hobbyist who had emigrated to Australia, taking the book with her. I commiserated with her and listed all the books I had loaned over the years and had never seen again. She tol
d me that she had a collection of eighteen doll’s houses and that she had made most of the soft furnishings herself, including upholstering the tiny chairs and hanging the tiny curtains. I mentioned that I would need some curtains making when I moved into my new loft apartment and asked her if she would be interested. She said the longest curtains she had ever made were only six inches in length.
Her hair could do with a colour-wash to brighten it up a bit, but her eyes are a pretty blue behind her glasses. I told her that I would search the Internet tonight when I got home and asked her to call back tomorrow.
I asked for a name and telephone contact number.
‘My name is M. Flowers,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got a mobile, because of the health risk, but you can contact me on my parents’ landline.’ And she gave me the number.
Mr Carlton-Hayes said, ‘She works in Country Organics, the health food shop in the marketplace.’
We went into the back. I counted the takings; Mr Carlton-Hayes sat behind his desk, smoking his pipe and reading a book entitled Persia: The Birthplace of Civilization.
I asked him what had happened to Persia.
He said, ‘It turned into Iraq, my dear.’
When I got home to Ashby de la Zouch, I hurried to my room, switched my laptop on and typed ‘Soft Furnishings for Your Regency Doll’s House’ into Google. It came up with 281 sites. I clicked on Wood Books.com and they offered me a title, Making Period Doll’s House Furniture by Derek and Sheila Rowbottom, but they didn’t actually mention Regency, so I tried McMurray’s Books, who offered me two which might be suitable, Soft Furnishings for Your Doll’s House at $14.95 and Miniature Embroidery for the Georgian Doll’s House: Queen Anne, Early and Late Georgian and Regency Styles at $21.95.
I immediately rang the telephone number given to me by M. Flowers.
A man answered. He boomed, ‘Michael Flowers here. To whom am I speaking?’
I said I was Adrian Mole from the bookshop and would like to speak to Ms Flowers.
The man shouted, ‘Marigold!Chap from the bookshop.’
So her name is Marigold Flowers. No wonder she didn’t give me her full name. She took some time to come to the phone. While I waited I could hear Rolf Harris singing ‘Jake the Peg’ in the background. When that came to an end, ‘Two Little Boys’ started up. Was it possible that somebody in Marigold’s family had a long-playing record, cassette, CD or video of Rolf Harris singing and was actually playing it?
Eventually Marigold said quietly, ‘Hello. Sorry I took so long. I was at a tricky stage with the shepherd’s pie.’
‘Eating it or making it?’ I joked.
‘Oh, making it,’ she said gravely. ‘If one doesn’t distribute the carrot rings evenly, it throws the whole thing out of kilter.’
I agreed and said that she was obviously a perfectionist, like me. I told her about the titles I had tracked down. She said that she already had a copy of Soft Furnishings for Your Doll’s House, but she sounded enthusiastic about the Miniature Embroidery book and asked me to order a copy for her.
To keep her on the phone, I asked her if dolls went in for loft-type homes. She said that she would get in touch with the National Association of Miniature Enthusiasts, of which she was a member, and that it could be her next project.
When I put the telephone down I felt that old feeling, that mixture of joy and fear, I feel just before I fall in love.
Tuesday October 8th
There was an incredible coincidence last night. My mother defrosted a shepherd’s pie she had made some weeks earlier. The carrots were chaotically distributed. Surely this is a sign. I asked my mother what had compelled her to take the shepherd’s pie out of the freezer. She said, ‘Hunger.’
Wednesday October 9th
A letter from Glenn.
Royal Logistics Corps
Deepcut Barracks
Surrey
Dear Dad
Hope you are well. I am well. I’m sorry I have not wrote to you before. I have been very busy doing my basic training. They keep us going 24/7. It is nothing but shouting and being sarcastic. Some of the lads cry in the dormitories at night. Sometimes I feel like walking out and coming home, Dad. I hope I stick it. Will you come to my passing-out parade on Friday November 1st? I would like Mum and Grandma and Grandad to come. I know William can’t come because he is in Africa. I think you was wrong, Dad, to send William to live with his mum. It was you who brought him up. You should have kept him here in England with you. I know Jo Jo is nice, but William can’t speak Nigerian and he doesn’t like the food. I seen Pandora on the telly the other night. I told some of the lads that she used to be my dad’s girlfriend, but nobody believed me because she is posh. They are taking the piss out of me now, Dad, and calling me Baron Bott. That is all the news.
Warmest wishes,
Your son, Glenn
I just remembered, tell Grandma Pauline she has got to wear a hat. It is the law.
Why did he need to add ‘your son’? How many other Glenns do I know who are in the army?
I showed my mother Glenn’s letter.
She said, ‘I’ll wear the mink hat I’ve had in the wardrobe for the last thirty years. There aren’t likely to be any anti-fur protesters on an army parade ground, are there?’
Thursday October 10th
A middle-aged fat man came into the shop this morning and asked for a ‘clean copy’ of Couples by John Updike.
I said, quite wittily I thought, a clean copy of Couples is an oxymoron surely.
Fatty said irritably, ‘Have you got it or not?’
Mr Carlton-Hayes had heard our conversation and was already searching through American Hardback Fiction. When he found Couples, he delivered it into Fatty’s podgy hands, saying, ‘A fascinating social document about the sexual mores of people with rather too much time on their hands, I think.’
Fatty mumbled that he would take it. As he was leaving the shop, I saw him look at me and distinctly heard him mutter, ‘Moron.’ Though, thinking about it later, he could have said, ‘Oxymoron.’
Nigel called in this afternoon after his eye clinic appointment at the Royal Hospital. He is supposed to be my best friend, but it is over six months since I saw him in the flesh.
The last time I spoke to him was on the phone. He had said that he couldn’t bear the gay clubs in the provinces, where they huddle together for validation and companionship, instead of like the London clubbing scene, ‘the music and the sex’.
I had said that there was more to life than music and sex.
He’d replied, ‘That’s the difference between us, Moley.’
I was shocked at how much he has changed. He is still handsome, but his face looks a bit ragged around the edges, and it’s obviously been a while since he’d seen his hair colourist.
He was still visibly shocked at his recent bad news. He said, ‘The consultant examined my eyes and was quiet for a horribly long time, and then he said, “Did you drive yourself here, Mr Hetherington?” I told him that I had driven up from London. He said, “I’m afraid I can’t allow you to drive back. Your sight has deteriorated so much that I’m going to put you on the partially sighted register.”’
I desperately searched for something positive to say, but could only come up with, ‘You’ve always enjoyed wearing dark glasses, Nigel. Now you can wear them all year round, night and day, without people thinking you’re a prat.’
Nigel leaned against the bargain books table, dislodging a pile of unread Finnegans Wakes. I would have helped him to a chair had there been one in the shop.
‘How can I live without my car, Moley?’ Nigel said. ‘How am I going to get back to London? And how can I be a media analyst when I can’t read the fucking papers?’
I said that if Nigel was partially sighted, it was probably a good job that he wasn’t driving down the M1 and negotiating London traffic.
Nigel said, ‘I have been making a lot of mistakes at work lately. And it’s months since I’ve been able to read n
ormal print without a magnifying glass.’
I rang Computa Cabs and asked for a taxi to take Nigel to his parents’ house. The controller said that most of the taxi drivers were at the mosque, praying for peace, but that he would send one ASAP.
While we waited, I suggested to Nigel that he learns Braille.
He said, ‘I’ve never been good with my hands, Moley.’
I asked Nigel if he could still see colours.
He said, ‘I can’t see anything much.’
I was very shocked. I had been hoping that Nigel would help me decorate my loft apartment. He used to be good with colours.
I helped him into the cab and told the driver to take him to 5 Bill Gates Close, The Homestead Estate, near Glenfield.
Nigel said in a bad-tempered way, ‘I can still speak, Moley!’
I hope he is not going to become one of those bitter blind people, like Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre.
Friday October 11th
I phoned Johnny Bond at Latesun Ltd this morning and we wrangled over the £57.10.
He said sneeringly, ‘Has your mate the Prime Minister coughed up any proof yet?’
I replied that Mr Blair was staying with Mr Putin in his hunting lodge, trying to persuade him to join Britain and America to fight Saddam Hussein.
Bond said, ‘He’ll never get Russia, Germany and France to back his illegal little war.’
Saturday October 12th
Miniature Embroidery for the Georgian Doll’s House was delivered by FedEx this morning. Mr Carlton-Hayes was very impressed.
I said, ‘If we had a computer in the shop, Mr Carlton-Hayes, we could order books online and double our turnover.’