A less well-known chapter of Adrian Mole's life was chronicled in a weekly column called Diary of a Provincial Man, which ran in The Guardian.
Adrian spends this period living on a crime-ridden council estate with his sons, has an on-off romance with a woman named Pamela Pigg, and temporarily works in a lay-by trailer cafe. He befriends yet another pensioner who subsequently dies, and has a brief infatuation with his male therapist (which he insists is wholly spiritual, not homosexual). The series includes comment on the petrol crisis of 2000 and the War on Terrorism. Glenn goes through a certain amount of teen angst slightly reminiscent of his father's early diaries. Adrian's illegitimate half-brother Brett Mole, born on 5 August 1982, is reintroduced, aged 19; he is an athletic, popular, confident, promiscuous, super-intelligent Oxford undergraduate, already a published poet and TV documentarian - in short, the person Adrian always wanted to be. Brett's mediocre older sibling soon comes to regard him with envious loathing.