Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging:
Confessions of Georgia Nicolson
Copyright© 1999 by Louise Rennison
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Printed in the United States of America. For information address HarperCollins Children’s Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.
Typography by Alison Donalty
10
First American edition, 2000
Originally published by Piccadilly Press Ltd.,
5 Castle Road, London NWI 8PR
To Mutti and Vati and my little sister, also to Angus.
His huge furry outside may have gone to cat heaven,
but the scar on my ankle lingers on.
Also to Brenda and Jude and the fab gang at Piccadilly.
And thanks to John Nicolson.
A Note from Georgia
Hello, American-type chums! (Perhaps you say “Howdy” in America—I don’t know—but then I’m not really sure where Tibet is either, or my lipstick.)
I’m writing this special message to you from my bedroom in England. Here is my nub and thrust—apparently American people are not English. This means you might not always understand what I am going on about in this book. Well, join the club, I say. How do you think I feel? I am me and I don’t know what I’m going on about half the time. However, for your benefit I’ve put a glossary at the back of the book that will explain(ish) things. Things like “nuddypants” and “tosser.”
I hope you like my diary and don’t hold it against me that my great-great-great-grandparents colonized you. (Not just the two of them, obviously. . .)
august
la marche avec mystery
sunday august 23rd
my bedroom
raining
10:00 a.m.
Dad had Uncle Eddie round, so naturally they had to come and see what I was up to. If Uncle Eddie (who is bald as a coot) says to me one more time, “Should bald heads be buttered?” I may kill myself. He doesn’t seem to realize that I no longer wear romper suits. I feel like yelling at him, “I am fourteen years old, Uncle Eddie! I am bursting with womanhood, I wear a bra! OK, it’s a bit on the loose side and does ride up round my neck if I run for the bus . . . but the womanly potential is there, you bald coot!”
Talking of breasts, I’m worried that I may end up like the rest of the women in my family, with just the one bust, like a sort of shelf affair. Mum can balance things on hers when her hands are full—at parties, and so on, she can have a sandwich and drink and save a snack for later by putting it on her shelf. It’s very unattractive. I would like a proper amount of breastiness but not go too far with it, like Melanie Andrews, for instance. I got the most awful shock in the showers after hockey last term. Her bra looks like two shopping bags. I suspect she is a bit unbalanced hormonally. She certainly is when she tries to run for the ball. I thought she’d run right through the fence with the momentum of her “bosoomers,” as Jas so amusingly calls them.
still in my room
still raining
still sunday
11:30 a.m.
I don’t see why I can’t have a lock on my bedroom door. Every time I suggest anything around this place, people start shaking their heads and tutting. It’s like living in a house full of chickens dressed in frocks and trousers. Or a house full of those nodding dogs, or a house full of. . . anyway. . .I can’t have a lock on my door is the short and short of it.
“Why not?” I asked Mum reasonably (catching her in one of the rare minutes when she’s not at Italian evening class or at another party).
“Because you might have an accident and we couldn’t get in,” she said.
“An accident like what?” I persisted.
“Well . . . you might faint,” she said.
Then Dad joined in. “You might set fire to your bed and be overcome with fumes.”
What is the matter with people? I know why they don’t want me to have a lock on my door. It’s because it would be a first sign of my path to adulthood and they can’t bear the idea of that because it would mean they might have to get on with their own lives and leave me alone.
still sunday
11:35 a.m.
There are six things very wrong with my life:
(1) I have one of those under-the-skin spots that will never come to a head but lurk in a red way for the next two years.
(2) It is on my nose.
(3) I have a three-year-old sister who may have peed somewhere in my room.
(4) In fourteen days the summer hols will be over and then it will be back to Stalag 14 and Oberfuhrer Frau Simpson and her bunch of sadistic “teachers.”
(5) I am very ugly and need to go into an ugly home.
(6) I went to a party dressed as a stuffed olive.
11:40 a.m.
OK, that’s it. I’m turning over a new leaf. I found an article in Mum’s Cosmo about how to be happy if you are very unhappy (which I am). The article is called “Emotional Confidence.” What you have to do is Recall . . . Experience . . . and HEAL. So you think of a painful incident and you remember all the ghastly details of it . . . this is the Recall bit. Then you Experience the emotions and acknowledge them and then you JUST LET IT GO.
2:00 p.m.
Uncle Eddie has gone, thank the Lord. He actually asked me if I’d like to ride in the sidecar on his motorbike. Are all adults from Planet Xenon? What should I have said? “Yes, certainly, Uncle Eddie, I would like to go in your prewar sidecar and with a bit of luck all of my friends will see me with some mad, bald bloke and that will be the end of my life. Thank you.”
4:00 p.m.
Jas came round. She said it took her ages to get out of her catsuit after the fancy-dress party. I wasn’t very interested, but I asked her why out of politeness.
She said, “Well, the boy behind the counter in the fancy—dress shop was really good—looking.”
“Yes, so?”
“Well, so I lied about my size—I got a size ten catsuit instead of twelve.”
She showed me the marks around her neck and waist; they were quite deep. I said, “Your head looks a bit swollen up.”
“No, that’s just Sunday.”
I told her about the Cosmo article and so we spent a few hours recalling the fancy-dress party (i.e., the painful incident) and experiencing the emotions in order to heal them.
I blame Jas entirely. It may have been my idea to go as a stuffed olive, but she didn’t stop me like a pal should do. In fact, she encouraged me. We made the stuffed olive costume out of chicken wire and green crêpe paper—that was for the “olive” bit. It had little shoulder straps to keep it up and I wore a green T-shirt and green tights underneath. It was the “stuffed” bit that Jas helped with mostly. As I recall, it was she who suggested I use crazy color to dye my hair and head and face and neck red . . . like a sort of pimento. It was, I have to say, quite funny at the time. Well, when we were in my room. The difficulty came when I tried to get out of my room. I had to go down the stairs sideways.