Pootering About

In Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, the latest of her hilarious fictive diaries, Sue Townsend sends her hero to a ceremony. Too late he discovers that the front of his trousers is stained with dried evaporated milk. He spends the occasion slightly crouched, ‘with my hands flat against my thighs, like a man who was about to bend down and pat the head of a small child’. It is yet another of Mole’s humiliating moments.