No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year

by Virginia Ironside

  Rang Jack rather drunkenly just before I went to bed to wish him Happy New Year on his answering machine, assuming they’d be living it up at a party, but instead Jack himself answered, sounding rather grim.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t slurring my words.

  “Well, Chrissie’s not drinking, so I’m not either,” he replied coldly. “We’re already in bed.” Made me feel dreadfully guilty because of course while I was pregnant I drank and smoked myself silly. And took a few drugs as far as I remember. But it was all different then.

  So odd. When I was young, old people took me aside and with quavering voices told me how when they were young they never had sex before marriage, and could never afford more than one pair of shoes, and were glad of a shandy at Christmas, and I’d look shocked at the austerity of it all. Now I’m taking young people aside and telling them, in a quavering voice, how when I was young I tried heroin, took uppers and downers every weekend, drank so much I once passed out in the middle of Oxford Street, slept with every man who asked me without using a condom and they look shocked.

  Jan 1

  Had a terrible dream that I was walking home where I used to live as a child in the dense fogs we used to have then, and on the way a half-naked man appeared, led in chains by two thugs. He was totally gray and an iron spike seemed to have been driven into the top of his head. He was about to be executed. I kissed his pleading hand, at which point the thugs put me in chains, too. Luckily I woke before they could do anything else.

  Later

  Had mad feeling that since it was January 1st I ought to take some exercise. Particularly as my bunion op is coming up and I may not be able to walk properly for months. Went to Holland Park and pottered about and in the shrubbery by the pond, who should I meet, walking her dog, but Philippa’s sister, whom I hadn’t seen for years. We both said how well and young each other looked—complete lie in my case, as she looked drawn and pinched. Commiserated with her about her sister’s death, and then she started a sentence with the words I hate to hear: “When you get to our age…”

  I don’t want to be “our age” with anyone. I’m quite happy for it to be my age, but not ours.

  Then she said how rude people were these days, and how violence was getting out of control, and wasn’t it awful, and I rather meanly said that that was exactly what the oldies in ancient Rome used to say when they pushed forty or whatever age passed for ancientness when they were around, and she simply didn’t listen. I got so infuriated at her moaning on about how wonderful the past was and how beastly things are today that I had to restrain myself from punching her in the face. It doesn’t usually occur to me to want to hit anyone, being a peaceable antiwar march, watering-dried-up-plants-in-strange-restaurants, picking-up-wounded-worms-from-roads-and-placing-them-on-cool-grassy-banks kind of person, but faced with attitudes like those of Philippa’s sister, it’s no wonder people are violent. However, halfway through her droning on about the ghastliness of traffic wardens and how unfair it was that second homes were going to be taxed, and wringing her hands generally about progress and how rushed everyone was and how they didn’t have time to stand and stare, I looked at my watch, gasped and, muttering something about us all being busy people, hared off.

  January 8th

  Had bunion operation. I don’t think it was very wise. I stupidly agreed to having the little toenail on my other foot cut back, so now I am kitted up in two great blue flip-flops and my feet are covered in bandages. It is true that I can walk, but with difficulty. When I returned home; Pouncer took one look at my feet, arched his back and spat at them. I think he thought I’d brought home two new strange pets. As I shuffle round the streets, I really do feel like a very, very old person. It’s all very well to like being old, but very, very old, no thanks.

  January 14th

  “So, tomorrow’s the big day, is it?” asked Penny, when she rang up to tell me what the last doctor she’d seen had told her about whether her white platelets were behaving themselves. Or something. Could have been the red ones. Or the green for all I know.

  Tomorrow is the big day. My birthday.

  “Is it a big birthday?” say friends, tactfully. I don’t remember anyone asking me that when I was thirty. The truly big birthdays are twenty-one, forty, sixty, eighty and one hundred. “Or perhaps I shouldn’t ask,” they add coyly. Sometimes they add, facetiously: “Surely it can’t be! You don’t look thirty yet!” which is rather irritating.

  But I am just longing for my birthday. Fifty-eight and fifty-nine are stupid ages to be. I always felt, when I said I was fifty-nine, that people must think I was lying, like some pathetic old actress. Fifty-nine was nowhere, neither fish nor fowl. If anything, in fact, it seemed to declare me a truly ancient middle-aged person. Now, nearly sixty, I feel like a young and lissom old person. I feel like a new and shiny snake that has shed a middle-aged skin that was getting horribly worn, smelly and tatty.

  At last, too, my past will be truly bigger than my future. And I like it like that.

  People who love life to bits hate getting older. It means death is getting nearer. People like me, for whom life has rather resembled one of those interminable performances at the National Theatre (those ones that last all day, to which you have to take sandwiches), getting older means that at last I’m entering the final act. It means I can see freedom at the end of the tunnel. Getting older means I get happier and happier. It means that at last I can put aside those nagging guilty anxieties about whether I should take up tap-dancing (have I said this before? Am I repeating myself already?) or become an opera singer. Being sixty will mean that I don’t have to worry about doing anything anymore. I will, officially, be retired. I will pick up a pension. I will be entitled to free prescriptions. I can spend my time, as George, the black guy across the road always answers, when I ask him what he’s up to: “Tekkin’ it eezee, man.”

  I can’t wait for tomorrow.

  Michelle came in late from a nightclub. When I told her my great age her jaw dropped. “You are as old as my grandmuzair!” she said.

  January 15th

  MY BIRTHDAY!

  Hundreds of cards through the letterbox, one of which, from Penny, sings “Happy birthday to you.” Hughie and James sent me one that reads “Happy Birthday! You still look as young as ever!” Inside it reads: “Alcohol is an amazing preservative!” From Marion: “Cheer up! Being sixty isn’t too bad!” and inside: “If you were a dog you’d be 420!”

  Michelle gave me a huge box of white chocolates, which unfortunately I can’t eat because white chocolate is the only thing that gives me a headache, and Maciej gave me a weird ornament of a cat, with two great gobs of red glass for eyes, which is absolutely hideous. Unfortunately, as he’s the cleaner I’m going to have to have it on display day and night. Aren’t I an ungrateful old toad. I was touched, all the same.

  And the phone hasn’t stopped ringing.

  “Do you feel any different?” asked Lucy anxiously, when she rang.

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “I feel absolutely marvelous. It’s clear now that I was born to be sixty. And to be honest, I can’t wait to be seventy.”

  When she was seventeen, my mother wrote in her diary: “I have an absolute horror of old age nowadays; every old woman I meet, I think: ‘That’s what I’ll be like soon.’ I always feel uncomfortable and unhappy when I hear someone say: ‘What right have old people got to interfere?’ or, ‘I hate old people.’ And I hate to hear someone say: ‘Oh, she’s ancient!’ about someone of thirty-five. When I’m thirty-five I shan’t like being called ancient. Old age is a beastly thing. Why must we get old, why can’t we stay young forever, it’s so beastly to feel the days slipping past and not being able to stop them.”

  But I couldn’t disagree more. While other people hide their heads in their hands and groan: “Oh don’t! How can it be that we’re all so old?” I am hugging myself with glee thinking: “At last, I can hold my head up and, instead of saying in a lowly worm ki
nd of way: ‘I’m old and I’m cowed,’ I can shout (à la James Brown): ‘Say it loud! I’m old and I’m proud!’” (De! De! Deh!)

  I always remember people saying, when I gave birth to Jack, that I should be “proud” of myself. I never got it. Giving birth didn’t seem anything to be proud of. But I am proud of being sixty. I feel I have achieved such a lot just to have got here. It’s the same pride I had when I got an azalea to flower two years running.

  But no one seems to be able to understand quite why I like being sixty so much. Even Penny, who popped in to make arrangements for lunch—she’s taking me out. She sat down for a cup of coffee while I sat opposite her on the sofa, beaming in my Indian dressing gown.

  “Now you can do all those things that you’ve been meaning to do for ages,” she said. “Learn Italian.”

  “Learn Italian?” I shouted so violently I spilled coffee all over myself. “Why does everyone think I want to learn Italian? I only go to Italy once every three years for a week at most. No comprendo Italiano! No quiero comprendare Italiano! No, the great thing about being sixty is that I don’t any longer feel guilty about not learning Italian!”

  “Well, Open University—” she said.

  “NO! NO! A thousand times NO! Nor the University of the Third Age! That’s what Marion does. She’s forever doing nodules or whatever they are. Forget nodules! I don’t want to learn about anything ever again! I’m fed up with learning. Learning is for young people. Done young.”

  “OK, OK,” she said. “Modules by the way. Don’t learn Italian. Join a book club, instead.”

  A book club?! Certainly not! Book club people always seem to have to wade through Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, or The God of Small Things or, groan, The Bookseller of Kabul. I think they feel that by reading and analyzing books, they’re keeping their brains lively. But either you’ve got a lively brain or you haven’t. Discussing the resonances or contexts of books or whatever they discuss in bookclubs can’t gee up a brain if it doesn’t fire on all cylinders to start with. The thing is: I don’t want to join a book club to keep young and stimulated. I don’t want to be young and stimulated anymore.

  There seems to be a common line that runs “If you’re old, you’ve got to stay mentally active, physically alive, ever fascinated by life.” You have to forever poke your brain with a pointed stick to keep it working. But I say, Why? I’ve done fascinated, I’ve done curious. I want to wind down. I want to have the blissful relief of not being interested. I don’t think those oldies who spend their lives bicycling across Mongolia at eighty and paragliding at ninety, are brilliant specimens of old age. I think they’re just tragic failures who haven’t come to terms with ageing. They’re the sort of people who disapprove of face-lifts, and yet, by their behavior, are constantly chasing a lost youth. I want to start doing old things, not young things.

  Like slowly starting to give my property away, instead of spending my time trying to acquire it. Like seeing everything from a distance, rather than close-up and personal. Like not feeling slighted all the time or hating myself twenty-four hours a day. Like realizing that this civilization, like all civilizations, will one day come to an end. Like being able to spend a day doing nothing instead of feeling obliged to cram it with diversionary activities to avoid guilt and anxiety. Like realizing that if I can’t understand an idea or a concept, it’s not my fault but the fault of the person who’s trying to put it across. Like being able to see things with a historical perspective and really understand that what goes around comes around. Like being nice to people, instead of scared of them.

  Bicycling to outer Mongolia is for people under forty. “Tekkin’ it eezee” is for people over sixty. Well, that’s how I see it. I feel relieved of that terrible Protestant work ethnic that has dogged me all my life. I feel light, calm, like a great field of ripe corn, slowly swaying in the breeze, all chubby and sun-kissed. Lovely feeling.

  Obviously I’m too young to get whisked away by a Stannah Stairlift, slip into a Damart vest, go on sea cruises or Enjoy the Luxury of a Walk-In Bath. Nor do I want to spend my days poring over church registers with a family tree in one hand, to discover that one of my ancestors was a medieval woodcutter in the Forest of Dean, a pursuit that would bore me silly. (Finding out about it, that is. Probably actually being a woodcutter in the Forest of Dean had its good points.) As for joining a book club—no thanks!

  Nick, the plumber, came and fixed a tiny gas leak in my pipe. He is a huge, nice black guy, about eighteen feet tall.

  “You’re looking well,” he said.

  “I’m feeling well!” I said, as I brought him an orange juice. “I’m sixty today!”

  “You don’t look it!” he said.

  Wasn’t sure quite what to make of that. In a way I do rather want to look sixty. Anyway, when I asked him how much I should pay him, he said: “As it’s your birthday, nothing.”

  I spent all morning following up tips given me on a “So Now You’re Sixty” list, sent me by Lucy, which included information not only about bus passes and the like, but also the news that I might be able to get into swimming pools and sports centers at a special concession price. Despite the fact that several of my friends have taken up gym, and spend three mornings a week bicycling, like elderly hamsters on wheels, till they are red in the face, trying all the while to listen to improving tapes that promise to teach them Italian in eight sessions, I shall not be joining them. I have done my time in gyms and have no desire to enter another one, however cheap the entrance. So smelly! So noisy! So embarrassing! And the clothes you have to wear! It is simply impossible to look attractive, in my view, in a pair of Lycra shorts.

  More interesting is the information, on Lucy’s list, that after sixty I can now get my prescriptions free. Brilliant! I wonder if I could get my pills on standing order, like with banks, so I could have a constant supply of Diazepam, Migril and all the strangely creepy things I have wheedled out of my doctor over the years. When it comes to sleeping, I’m not someone for whom milky drinks at bedtime, plant extracts and natural essences do the trick; namby pamby Valerian and things you can get over the counter at pharmacists, with euphemistic names like Natracalm and Sleepeeze don’t work for me. Instead, give me a prescription for a heavy-duty pharmaceutical knock-out pill. I get on much better with pop-out packs of goodies, things that come with leaflets listing at least three pages of possible side effects, made in laboratories by nice men in white coats.

  According to Lucy, I am, apparently, also due a winter fuel payment of £200 a year. But my warming fuel will come in a bottle and not through a plug in the wall. And finally, my house insurance might be lower because old people are considered more reliable than young ones. Which is odd. Surely all old people leave the gas on regularly?

  It’s a funny old business. I would have thought that if the government was sensible it would double the cost of prescriptions for old people, exclude them from gym, triple their heating bills, raise their taxes and generally do everything in their power to curtail their lives, thus saving the country billions of pounds, but no, they seem determined to keep us dragging on and on. I can see the point when it comes to animals and vets—the vets make a fortune out of keeping pets hanging on to the bitter end. But what’s in it for the government? Absolutely nothing.

  Lucy had helpfully added telephone numbers, Web sites and information lines, so of course I got cracking at once and rang the number advertised as the Pension Helpline. I was taken by a mechanized voice through all the options I had, which reminded me that if I was hard of hearing I could get special assistance or, if I found it all confusing, I could get a friend to help me.

  My query was finally answered by an old duck called Ernest, not a name I hear a lot these days. He spoke extremely slowly and clearly all the way through the call, and maintained a kindly smile in his voice. At the end of the conversation, he said, in a gentle, friendly, but distinctly raised, voice: “Ta-ra, dearie. And you take care, now!”

  I am now a “conces
sion” and can get into most films, art galleries, exhibitions and theaters at special rates. I’m told that abroad the over-sixties have an even better time of it, wandering anywhere they like, their wrinkles a passport to free entrance. The greatest perk of all is that, if I am rudely challenged about my ancient status, I shall not be offended but, rather, deeply flattered.

  Tomorrow I shall apply for my Freedom Pass, which will give me free transport—whether it’s for a lazy trip from one bus stop to the next, or from one side of London to the other. In the Underground I shall simply wave my card over something and sail in. None of that fiddling around with money, feeling pathetically inadequate as I stare at a blinking computer screen wondering what zone I’m in. Now I’m in the free zone, the old zone, and that’s the zone I like.

  I’m also suddenly in receipt of a pension—£74 a week. True, I will be taxed on it, but still, I shall be quite a bit better off.

  Even more fun, I then spent hours trying to cancel standing orders, get passport-sized photographs for the bus pass—all the pleasant rituals of stepping from one age into another.

  As a treat, Penny had organized a birthday lunch at an incredibly smart restaurant in Piccadilly called the Wolseley. I remember it as a gleaming bank; later it turned into a Chinese restaurant, and now it is owned by a couple of people who used to own the Ivy. Penny had very sweetly bought me a scarf, though I am not very keen on scarves: they seem to be worn by people who want to hide lizardy necks, and if you haven’t got a lizardy neck there’s no point in wearing one. Wearing a scarf always seems to me rather like planting a row of Leylandii when there’s no nuclear power station to hide.

  Unfortunately, as is so often the case these days, the restaurant was so noisy that neither of us could hear the other speak, and we spent an hour just mouthing across the table, pretending we could hear what the other one was saying. All I could gather was that she wanted us to go for a weekend to France as a big birthday treat, on her, which was incredibly kind.