In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend’s hapless teenage diarist, reeling from the news that Argentina has just occupied the Falkland Islands, fails to locate the archipelago on his world map. Eventually, his mother comes to the rescue and discovers it ‘hidden under a crumb of fruitcake’. If general awareness of the Falklands before 1982 was somewhat limited, as Townsend slyly implied, it pales into complete insignificance in comparison with the all-but-forgotten former British territory of Providence.

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