Sue Townsend's WMDs

I found some weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) while travelling home last night. In need of a book or three, I popped into Books Etc in the rather plush 02 centre on Finchley Road and found, to my utmost pleasure, the next book in a series I’ve been reading since I was about 14. This book is….Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction. These books I like for two reasons:

1) They have been a part of my life (and I’d guess about half a million other 30somethings) since teenage years. Oh, the joy of something which isn’t changing for some faddish reason or other, or at least the sense of continuity. Well, Adrian has changed, but his OCD-related humour is as rich as ever. The same old characters, the terrible/ovely Ashby de la Zouch is a character in its own right (now Adrian has moved to a loft apartment in "The Old Battery Factory, Rat Wharf" – great names). There is Pandora, his mum Pauline, his ever eeyoreish dad and a new love interest called Marigold.

2) Lynn uses a Book Courier to read her endless pile of queued up novels. This is a little machine the size of a packet of 10 fags, which turns text files into synthesised speech and plays them back through headphones, kind of like an iPod for blindos (yes, it plays MP3s too). I use, well, my screwed up eyes to do same. However, before we married, I used to read books to her, and every now and then, a book appears which suits the ‘reading aloud’ bill perfectly. Adrian Moles are the ideal format. I also enjoyed reading Bridget Jones to her. So the reading of this book has a nice, sociable feel to it, and it does at least mean we have a good reason to skip TV for a couple of hours a night.

Sue Townsend, the AM author, is going blind – she might even be stone blind by now, and the outcome of this has surfaced in AM’s gay friend, Nigel, who is now on the partially sighted register. I wonder where ST will take us with this character? I’ve not found any wild inaccuracies yet (myself and Big Wife enjoy having a giggle when sightlings make totally incorrect assumptions about how we live). I also wonder how many pro authors have had to resort to access tech to write their stuff. I’m assuming this was written using JAWS or Window-Eyes…or at least Zoomtext.

I’m up to October 24th, and when Lynn was about to drift off to sleep (as she will do, not matter what is playing, and annoyingly, however good it is), then I had to tell her to hide the book as I’d have been taking sneaky peeks. But from what I’ve read so far, Sue Townsend, is, yet again, a folk hero, and the Victoria Wood of observational writing.