I wonder if it would perhaps be possible to divide people in to people who were older than Adrian Mole when they first read his secret diary, and those who were younger. The reason for this speculation is that I can’t help feeling it makes a profound difference to how you read and relate to Sue Townsend’s enduring comic creation: as someone who was perhaps a little younger than Adrian when I first encountered him, it had a major effect on my attitude towards the business of being a teenager – I was determined not to emulate Adrian’s more painful gaffes, or his intellectual pretensions. In short, I wanted to read about Moley, but never turn in to him. Years later, I can still recite Adrian’s seminal poem, ‘The Tap’ (as, it turns out in this latest volume, can his mother), I still remember what Sharon Bott would show you for 50p and a bunch of grapes, and I am still glad I am not Adrian.

At the end of the last volume, Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, things were brought to a sort of closure, with Adrian settling down with the mother of his third child, Daisy, in a coverted pigsty next door to his still-awful parents. The intention for it to be the concluding volume to the saga was fairy clear, but Townsend has exercised her prerogative to change her mind, and I for one am very glad she did. In this latest volume, Adrian is approaching middle age, yet the positives in his life seem destined to turn sour: Daisy is tiring of her nerdy husband, his mother is determined to go on the Jeremy Kyle show and address the issue of his sister’s paternity live on national television, his kind-hearted employer is ill and the business is going badly, and worst of all, Adrian is diagnosed with prostate cancer (or prostrate cancer, as various well-meaning but ill-informed characters call it).

This would not be an Adrian Mole book if Townsend did not reflect the zeitgeist, so investment banker half-brother Brett goes from superman to down-and-out when the credit crunch hits; eldest son Glenn Mole is serving in Afghanistan and repeatedly asking his dad to remind him why he’s there, and Pandora is still climbing the greasy pole of Labour politics, bending with the prevailing political winds. It’s funny stuff, combining with Adrian’s usual neuroses, pretensions and problems to evoke everything from wry smiles to sympathetic laughter.

Ultimately, though, this is, as it should be, Adrian’s story: he endures the effects of the cancer treatment with stoicism, despite being badly treated by his wife. Meanwhile the network of characters who have been touchstones throughout Adrian’s life – his parents, Nigel, and Pandora, showing here more humanity than I had hitherto suspected her to be capable of – pull him through. It’s really quite touching, and finishes on a hopeful note, though this time there is no suggestion of final closure. I suspect, in fact I sincerely hope, that Adrian Albert Mole will continue to proceed through life, always a few years ahead of me, for a good while to come, being a luckless yet likeable nerk so I don’t have to be. We can but hope.

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