Biography
Adrian Albert Mole was born in 1967 and grew up with his parents in the city of Leicester in England's East Midlands. Adrian's family are largely unskilled working class/lower middle classes. He is an only child until the age of 15, when his polar opposite half-sister Rosie is born. Adrian is an average boy in many ways, not especially popular or sporty, but he does well enough at school and has friends. Deep inside, however, he perceives himself as a thwarted 'Great Writer', and spends years working on his novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, never to be published. Over several books, he developed a script for a white van comedy serial killer programme, which for some reason the BBC was reluctant to produce.
As a young man he moves to London and takes a job in a Soho restaurant catering to media types. London is going through a food-enthusiasm renaissance and offal is all the rage. Adrian is persuaded to feature in a television cookery programme called Offally Good!, supposedly to be a celebrity chef; although he is told the programme is a comedy, he typically fails to realise he is being set up as the stooge, the comic straight man.
Adrian ends up working in an antiquarian bookshop. Having lived in relative poverty for much of his life, and for some time in London in actual squalor, he overextends himself financially, lured by the banks' promises of easy credit, and buys a converted loft apartment.
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