Adrian Mole: The Crappy Chino Years

I've been chatting to my mum while she's in the hospital. She reminded me of an incident that took place thirty five years ago. I was in Tesco in Chineham with my mum and I was packing the bags. Behind us in the queue was a small boy who seemed excited by something and eventually he couldn't contain it, blurting out "Mum! Mum! Its Adrian Mole!" Everybody laughed and my cheeks burned hot red.

This definitely happened. But in the retelling I noticed something interesting. My mum added the line: "Well, after that the glasses stayed on..."

"What do you mean "The glasses stayed on?"

"You wore your glasses every day." My mum always had a slightly cavalier attitude to being able to see even, on occasion, while she was driving. But then she wasn't being bullied at school every day - she didn't need my well-honed flight response.

"I wore them so I could see." I said.

"Ach, you wore them to look cool. You wanted to look like Adrian Mole." And this is the point that a yawning chasm opens up in front of us. Far, far away on the other side of this impassable gulf is my mother's reading of events. On my side is Gian Sammarco.

Gian Sammarco played Adrian Mole on telly. He also played Whizz Kid in an episode of Doctor Who and a geeky, trainspotter on an episode of Press Gang. He was pudding faced and a bit slow, with round glasses and Hitler hair. He married a super-fan when he was twenty and gave up acting to become a psychiatric nurse in Northampton. The characters he played were not cool. They were the opposite of that. Annoyingly he looked quite a lot like me. Every week this penis measuring plodder appeared on national television, failing to cop off with Pandora, being bullied by Barry Kent and doing it all with my stupid face. And my mum thought I could make that work for me.

"You thought I thought Adrian Mole was cool?" I scoffed. Hadn't she heard of Nick Rhodes?

"Well why did you do your hair and glasses like that then?"

"Because they were cheapest glasses in the shop and you used to cut my hair in the kitchen over the sink. Why do you think I got contact lenses as soon as possible? Why do you think my bedroom always stank of Falcon hairspray? So I could look as little as possible like Adrian bloody Mole."

She laughed and as usual I didn't know whether she was trolling me or not. And then I remembered her previous theory on why I used to wear my glasses all the time: because my school-friend, Paul Sutton, got glasses and I wanted to be like him. Again, trying to be cool. My mother sees my entire life as a series of failed attempts to be cool, which may actually be true.

I hated my glasses though. I thought I had nice eyes with long dark eyelashes. I used to get beaten up for wearing makeup even though I wasn't. Those were the beatings I was most proud of. Sticking my shitty National Health specs over the top of them robbed me of my greatest attribute. But I could see. I grew up not knowing I couldn't see. Getting glasses for the first time made me realise the world is actually quite detailed, that trees are not just one thing, like a big green cloud on a stick, but lots of different things in astonishing profusion. Being able to see was intoxicating. And I always wanted to see more. So I was stuck with the glasses and looking like Walter the Softy from the Beano. I was destined for a life of pressing wild flowers in big books and appreciating poetry.

Which doesn't sound so bad now. At least Walter had interests - Dennis the Menace just stood for low level thuggery. Good, I picked the right team. Or rather my hated glasses did.

Within a year of the Adrian Mole debacle I had started listening to "alternative" music. I had contact lenses and washed my hair every day. Psychocandy had been released and I tried to do my hair like Jim Reid. I was fronting my first band and if I was still a weirdo at school it was the right type of weirdo. And if my mother believed that I was doing any of that to be cool she was dead right.