Dear Diary

* THE BOOK: Adrian Albert Mole was born in the late 1960s and grew up in a quintessentially ordinary town in the Midlands, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, in Leicestershire.

I can’t claim to have grown up in a place with such a romantic name, although I did live in Llandrindod Wells for a while.

But I was born in 1967 so I am Mole’s contemporary, and as a 40-something British male I am waiting nervously for my own midlife crisis.

As I read Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years I was left with the slightly alarming thought that the crisis has probably happened already and I just didn’t notice it.

For Mole’s problems as an adult surely outweigh the ones he experienced as a spotty teenager.

There are “black clouds over Mangold Parva”, Mole informs us at the start of these new confessions.

And some of the difficulties he faces in life do seem genuinely insurmountable.

Under the heading MAJOR WORRIES, Mole reminds himself that his son Glenn is fighting the Taleban in Helmand Province, it is two months and 19 days since he made love to his wife Daisy, and he has to get up three times a night to urinate (the clue to this little local difficulty is in the title).

There is something particularly relaxing about reading diaries – try Michael Palin, Samuel Pepys or even Boswell.

For if you are reading about someone else’s troubles then – for a short time anyway – you can forget about your own.

Townsend piles on the agony for Mole in this latest instalment.

The second-hand bookshop in which he works is threatened with closure, the spark is fizzling out of his marriage and his nightly trips to the lavatory are becoming alarmingly frequent.

As his troubles stack up, Mole makes a drunken call to his old flame Pandora Braithwaite, in the hope that she can find a solution.

There are hilarious moments as Townsend directs her razor-sharp wit on Mole in middle age but there are also moments of pathos too.

Mole started out as a comic teenage creation but he has become surprising real over the years.

I enjoyed this latest, rather dark, update on his troubled life which will no doubt prompt me to have a trawl through his old diary entries too.

* THE AUTHOR: Sue Townsend was born in Leicester in 1946, is married with four children and five grandchildren and still lives in Leicester.

She left school at 15 and was employed in a series of unskilled jobs.

By her 18th birthday she was married and a year later had her first baby.

She began working with children in an adventure playground on the estate where Joe Orton grew up.

While taking a canoeing course for play leaders, she met Colin Broadway and they now have a 21-year-old daughter.

In 1978, she joined a writers’ group at the Phoenix Arts Centre in Leicester and her career as an author and playwright took off from there.

Townend's first play, Womberang, won her a Thames Television bursary as writer-in-residence.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 and its sequel, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, were both number one bestsellers and made Sue Townsend the bestselling novelist of the 1980s.

In 1991 came a third volume, Adrian Mole from Minor to Major and in 1993 Adrian Mole – The Wilderness Years.

In 1999, Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years poked gentle fun at the Blair government, and in 2004 came Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction.

To make matters slightly confusing, The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole 1999-2001 were published by Penguin in 2008.

Don’t be fooled by the childish nature of some of Townend's material – Mole is publishing gold and to date the diaries have sold more than eight million copies.

They have also been adapted for radio, television and theatre and have been translated into 34 languages.

Townsend has suffered problems with her sight over the years, but her fictional vision has always remained true.

* Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years is published by Penguin, priced £7.99.