Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years (Adrian Mole #5) by Sue Townsend

Format: Print
Read: May 2026

This book is a welcome return to the (almost) daily dairy format, but I did feel my interest continuing to wane, which I do recall happening the first time I read this series. It is now 1997, and Adrian is thirty. The previous book was set in 1991, so we have skipped about 5 years during which Adrian had married JoJo (the art student and Nigerian aristocracy he’d just started seeing at the end of The Wilderness Years), and they’d had a son, William, who is now 3 years old. Now JoJo is divorcing Adrian, and is absent from the book, having returned to Nigeria and left William in the care of Adrian and his parents.

The book opens with the second entry taking place on election day, where Pandora is running as a local Labour MP. As we know from history, Labour won, and (obviously fictional!) Pandora is now one of “Blair’s Babes” with a seat in the cabinet (Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food). This opening entry is very, very long and works too hard to fill in the gaps and set up the drama that will befall Adrian in 1997. I would say it’s decidedly too long, especially as local elections aren’t exactly thrilling, and it’s never fun to read about Adrian running around after a disinterested Pandora! Also, bafflingly, she is still with Professor Cavendish, who is edging into elderly years at this point! It does introduce William, sexual tension between Pauline Mole and Ivan Braithwaite, George Mole’s depression and Adrian reluctantly making another lonely elderly pensioner friend, Archie Tait.

At the start, Adrian is still working for Savage, now head chef at this trendy Soho restaurant called the Hoi Polloi. This is a ridiculous bit of satire, as Adrian, by his own admission, does not know how to cook, and the restaurant serves the cheap, processed food that the poor people would eat (particularly school dinners), which is badly cooked by Adrian, and then sold for extortionate Soho prices, to the rich and famous (including Stephen Fry, and famous diariest “Bridget Jones“!).

I began to cook the cabbages for dinner. Savage liked them to boil for at least half an hour. My work as a chef has been a doddle since Savage instituted his Traditional English, No Choice menu. Tonight’s repast is:

Heinz tomato soup
(with white bread floaters)
**
Grey lamb chops
Boiled cabbage avec Dan Quayle potatoes
Dark brown onion gravy
**
Spotted Dick à la Clinton
Bird’s custard (skin £6.00 extra)
**
Cheddar Cheese, Cream Cracker
Nescafé
After Eight Mint
**
There are two types of wine – white £46, red £46
**
Service charge not included. You are expected to smoke between courses. Pipes and cigars are particularly welcome.

The Dan Quayle “potatoes” is a reference to the US Vice President famously misspelling the word in front of a class of Elementary school students in 1992. Which is not at all English, but it’s funny.

Eventually, Adrian is forced to move back in with his family, who are living in Ashbey-del-la-zouch (I find it thrilling that this book is set there, I grew up not very far away!). Now in their fifties, his parents’ marriage and romantic life continue to be insanely messy; they basically end up doing a wife swap with Pandora’s parents. This does push the bounds of reality a bit too much, although I am aware this sort of stuff does happen in real life!

Ivan said, ‘That’s why our marriage died, Tania. You’d be out there gardening in the dark with a head torch while I was in bed, waiting for you.’

Tania screamed, ‘There were slugs to kill!’ with a dangerous edge of fanaticism to her voice, I thought.

( I have been the woman outside in the dark with a torch killing slugs, I understand Tania!)

Adrian gets a cooking show on a cable channel primarily watched by students – called Offally Good – but his incredible lack of star power means he is outshone by his co-star. He also got a book deal and fucks it up, which is a particularly frustrating part of the story because he needed the money! His aimlessness at this point is edging him out of everyman territory and into the camp of Loser. Yes, he has some bad luck, but he’s now thirty and is getting in his own way.

The only thing that gives him purpose in life is being a father. This book also confirms, after a DNA test, that Glenn Bott is indeed his child. This is the 12-year-old son he had with Sharon Botts, a yob with the reputation of being a “psycho” but appears to be a lost young lad desperately in need of a stable role model. Adrian becomes a single father to the two boys, and he puts a touching amount of effort into improving things for Glenn, including engaging with the school and paying a private tutor to teach him to read. This is the area in which the social commentary is the strongest, because it is clear that Glenn was being failed by his mother (who by this point has many kids, and is pregnant with another) and the education system because of his behavioural difficulties.

It was also, as ever, fun to remember some of the political and social events from this time. Especially as by the late 90s I was old enough to catch bits of the news. I remember poor Harriet Harman, and Robin Cook with his affairs! (Absolutely baffling if you look the man up!)

Harriet Harman, the Social Security secretary, has been on radio and television trying to explain about the government’s ‘Welfare to Work’ scheme. Several times she called it a ‘crusade’. It has to be said that Mrs Harman has the look of the zealot about her, as well as a constant air of irritation. She should let her fringe grow out, stop wearing smocks and buy an uplift bra. Also, she should stop complaining about sexism in politics. It’s most annoying.

Also, a lot of references to Peter Mandelson with Pandora having lunches and whatnot with “Mandy.” Even funnier given the more recent cavalcade of scandals around him (which looks likely to take down Kier Starmer our current Labour PM!).

And, of course, Princess Diana died in 1997, and everybody very dramatically mourned, including the Mole family (to the chagrin of anti-Royalist Ivan Braithwaite).

I am feeling a bit tired of this series now. I’m debating switching it up to have a break with a nice bit of standalone Literature or maybe some PKD. But also, I’m wondering if I just power through the last two books and get it done! Who knows what I will decide!

For Law of Fives, this gives me a book for the 1990s (and completing a second five-book series, and another re-read, but I’ve already finished those squares!).