Barry Kent's father looks like a big ape and has got more hair on the back of his hands than my father has got on his entire head.

She liked people. Me, I can take them or leave them, but mostly leave them.

I have decided to keep a full journal, in the hope that my life will perhaps seem more interesting when it is written down.

I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.

Adrian Mole's father was so angry that so many pepole got divorced nowadays. HE had been unhappilly married for 30 years, why should everybody else get away?

Now I know I am an intellectual. I saw Malcolm Muggeridge on the television last night, and I understood nearly every word. It all adds up. A bad home, poor diet, not liking punk. I think I will join the library and see what happens.

I married two weeks after my 18th birthday, far too young, and by the time I was 23 I was a single mother of three small children, Sean, Daniel and Victoria, living in a prefab house.