The Virginia Monologues

by Virginia Ironside

  The Virginia

  Monologues

  Twenty Reasons Why Growing Old is Great

  VIRGINIA IRONSIDE

  FIG TREE

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  FIG TREE

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2009

  Copyright © Virginia Ironside, 2009

  Illustrations copyright © Dorrance, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be

  reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior

  written permission of both the copyright owner and

  the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-193087-9

  For Jennie

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. Ailments

  2. Memory

  3. Confidence

  4. Spare time

  5. Death

  6. Sex

  7. Recession

  8. Work

  9. Downsizing

  10. Looks

  11. Young people

  12. Travel

  13. Funerals

  14. Boring for Britain

  15. Alone again

  16. Old friends

  17. Time

  18. Never again

  19. Wisdom

  20. Grandchildren

  Pages 191–2 constitute an extension of the copyright page

  Introduction

  No wise man ever wished to be younger.

  Swift

  Between thirty and forty, one is distracted by the Five Lusts;

  Between seventy and eighty, one is a prey to a hundred diseases.

  But from fifty to sixty one is free from all ills;

  Calm and still – the heart enjoys rest.

  I have put behind me Love and Greed; I have done with Profit and Fame.

  I am still short of illness and decay and far from decrepit age.

  Strength of limb I still possess to seek the rivers and hills;

  Still my heart has spirit enough to listen to flutes and strings.

  At leisure I open new wine and taste several cups;

  Drunken I recall old poems and sing a whole volume.

  Po Chü (772–846)

  Tomorrow I will haul down the flag of hypocrisy,

  I will devote my grey hairs to wine:

  My life’s span has reached seventy.

  If I don’t enjoy life now, when shall I?

  The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam

  Until very recently I’d never thought of old age as anything but frightful, something to be avoided at all costs. The prospect of being in one’s sixties was hideous, particularly after the Beatles, in their rather condescending song, ‘When I’m Sixty-four’, seemed to suggest that no one of that age did anything but mend fuses, knit sweaters and dig up weeds in the garden.

  To be honest, I’ve never liked being in the higher age range of any kind – even of each decade. So although I didn’t mind finding I was thirty-one or forty-one, becoming thirty-nine or forty-nine was a different matter. From a young thirty-or forty-year-old, I turned into an old thirty- or forty-year-old. But once I was fifty-nine I wasn’t too certain that the same magic, as had been wreaked once I became a novice in other decades, would continue to exert its power once I reached sixty. Like Doris Day, I thought that ‘the really frightening thing about middle age is the knowledge that you’ll grow out of it’.

  And a friend of mine, on reaching eighty, didn’t help. ‘Those two fat circles on top of each other,’ he said, ‘followed by another great big circle. It’s grotesque.’

  However, sixty isn’t eighty, by any means. And I couldn’t help getting a bit irritated when, hearing that I was about to reach the big six-o, my friends started to get maddeningly sympathetic. ‘Oh, poor you,’ they said. Then they’d add, in a flattering whisper: ‘But you don’t look it!’ Then, a few moments later: ‘Don’t worry, we won’t say anything. And for heaven’s sake, don’t give a party – you don’t want to advertise your age to the world!’

  Indeed, lots of my friends tried to put some kind of youthful gloss on the whole ageing process. ‘Sixty going on twenty!’ they said, archly. But I couldn’t help feeling that was rather a load of tosh. Sixty isn’t ‘going on’ twenty. It’s not ‘going on’ thirty either. The only place it’s ‘going on’ is seventy and then, if you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on your view) eighty.

  Others said: ‘Sixty is really just fifty-ten!’ The tweeness of it! Or ‘Sixty is the new forty.’ But quite honestly I didn’t know what they were talking about. You wouldn’t say ‘Sea is the new land’ or ‘Life is the new death’ (or vice versa come to that). Come off it.

  Then there were those twinkling oldies who said: ‘You’re only as old as you feel!’ But you’re not only as old as you feel. I may sound rather pedantic and Asperger’s suffererish, but sixty is sixty and thirty is thirty. The only people who think that sixty is young, in my experience, are seventy-year-olds, eighty-year-olds and ninety-year-olds – in other words, the extremely old and the ancient.

  Anyway, when I was twenty years old, sixty was terribly old. And when I was thirty, I felt that, at sixty, you had one foot in the grave. At forty, I was totally uninterested in old people – and that included sixty-year-olds. When I was fifty I started worrying a bit – oh, Lord, ‘old’ was getting jolly near. So now I’m in my sixties myself (well, to be brutally frank, I’m sixty-five) I can’t suddenly turn around and say, ‘Oh, whoops! I got it completely wrong! All those years I’ve been saying sixty is old and actually it’s not. It’s frightfully young, really. For the last fifty years I’ve been totally deluded.’ It would be unfair to my younger self.

  I started to wonder: was this denial of age actually an old-fashioned view of ageing? I always remember an old agony aunt friend of mine, now dead, who advised me never to tell anyone my age. ‘I always keep my age quiet,’ she confided. ‘It’s nobody’s business but mine.’

  But I’ve never been one for pretence. And what I couldn’t bear was for anyone, when I’d been keeping quiet about my age, suddenly to find out how old I was behind my back. ‘You know, Virginia… she’s really sixty-five!’ they’d say in a stage whisper. ‘No wonder she won’t tell anyone how old she is!’

  And I was amazed at how many of my contemporaries were still reluctant to admit they
were old. Bonnie Greer, writing of her contemporaries born between 1944 and 1954, wrote in the Independent: ‘We just hang on and on, demanding our space, wanting our way, shielding our eyes from the writing on the wall. Our anthem was The Who line: “Hope I die before I get old.” Trouble is we did not die and we refuse to grow old. So here we are, caught in the feeble embers of a long dead flame whose glow still manages to white out all those behind us.’

  It seems as if age is one of the last taboos. And so few people who are old want to talk about it. I often say things like ‘I’ve only got a few years left so I might as well…’ and everyone jumps up and down (in so far as any old person is capable of jumping up and down) and says, ‘Oh, don’t say that!’ as if by mentioning a limit to my future I’m actually courting death. I often refer to myself as ‘old’ and contemporaries shout me down. ‘You’re not old!’ But what they mean is ‘Don’t say that! Because if you’re old, we’re old, and we are desperately keen not to be old! So don’t let the side down!’

  A friend of mine once said she was ‘old’ to another friend who immediately stopped her in her tracks. ‘Don’t use that word!’ she said, sharply. ‘You’re not old – you’re mature!’‘Mature?’ replied my friend. ‘Certainly not! It sounds dangerously close to “fermented”!’

  I once wrote an article in an American magazine for AARP, which stands for the American Association of Retired People. It is a magazine designed for the elderly, and it has a readership of more than 50 million people. Well, I wrote the piece and sent it over to New York and then I got a proof back and was astonished to discover that during the whole piece, in which I had, naturally, used the world ‘old’ quite a few times, those three letters together had been completely eradicated. So I rang up and left a message with the sub-editor saying: ‘This is all very nice and the layout is fine, the photograph is lovely, the illustration is just dandy – but why have you removed the word “old” from the copy?’

  I got back a call from a very quavery-voiced American woman who sounded about a hundred. ‘Oh, hi, Ginnie,’ she croaked. ‘I’m sorry that you’re confused about the sub-editing. But at AARP we don’t like to use the word “old”!’

  The American Association of Retired People? Not wanting to use the word ‘old’? It seems madness. Like trying to be a hairdresser without mentioning the word ‘shampoo’. Or talking about Monty Python without using the word ‘parrot’. To talk about age without using the word ‘old’ sounds like one of those mad parlour games where the trick is to talk for a minute without using the words ‘the’ or ‘and’.

  In the run-up to my sixtieth birthday I found that I, too, was starting to get brainwashed into thinking that ‘old’ was something ghastly, something to be avoided at all costs. It was only when the day actually came that I started to realize that being old isn’t something to deny or hush up or apologize for.

  Far from it.

  It’s something to celebrate.

  It’s true – sixty isn’t the winter of anything. It’s the springtime of old age. A poet once said: ‘The trouble with old age is that it is not interesting until one gets there. It’s a foreign country, with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.’ And she was right. It is interesting. And liberating. And one of the many reasons it’s fun is exactly contrary to so many of the myths that are currently promulgated.

  Take that ludicrous line: ‘It’s never too late!’

  And yet that’s one of the great things about being sixty. It is too late. It may sound mad but for years I’ve been secretly imagining that one day, if I put my mind to it, I could still become a world-famous ballerina. Or a concert pianist. Or a record-breaking long-jumper. But finally – rather late, I grant you – I realized that that these careers would be most unlikely. I look back and I see that all my life I have actually been a journalist. I also see that I have written and published fifteen books. It doesn’t take a forensic scientist to conclude that I must, ergo, be a writer. And nothing else. It’s such a relief, at last, to be able to put away for good the anxiety and guilt about not pursuing one of those other fantasy careers.

  Now it’s true that I’m not very old. (Though next year, when I’m sixty-six, I think I might be.) Nor am I extremely old. Once you start wandering haphazardly into those territories, life takes on a very different complexion, I’m sure. There is nothing to recommend being tied into an armchair in a nursing home, being fed with a spoon by someone else while pee trickles down your leg. Nor is there much fun in finding yourself wandering down an unknown street in the suburbs not knowing where you are or what your name is.

  No, I am talking about Being In Your Sixties – a wonderful age, I feel, to be in.

  When I reached sixty, I looked around for a book to help me through not only the joys but also the quagmires of my particular demographic (I think that’s the right word. It’s a new one introduced since I was young and I’m never quite sure how to use it. Like ‘diaspora’. A bit puzzling. Anyway, I’m sure you get the gist of what I mean.). When I was young, books like Down with Skool by Geoffrey Willans helped me through my late schooldays. Then Catcher in the Rye reflected my feelings during my teenage years. There was no Bridget Jones when I was a girl, but there was Fear of Flying by Erica Jong. And once I’d become a young mum, I often referred to books by Erma Bombeck, who wrote amusing accounts of what it was like raising a family. But then I got to sixty, and when I searched the bookshops for something entertaining and perceptive to get me through the next decade, I found nothing.

  Or rather, I did find things but they were the wrong things. Book with titles like Autumn Leaves. Or Golden Harvest. One book I discovered was called Second Youth. Another was called You’re Only Young Twice! What a con. I mean, being sixty has nothing at all to do with youth, however much you twist your mind to make it so. Being sixty is being sixty.

  Then there was Retiring Gracefully.

  And, by far the worst: Armchair Aerobics.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not denying that us baby-boomers are a different kind of old to oldies from different generations. At least I think so. (Of course this may be a complete fantasy and every generation of sixty-year-olds may think that there is something special or new about them.)

  But I was young in the 1960s, a world of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. And I feel that my generation has a lot more in common with thirty- and forty-year-olds than with people of seventy and eighty, people who have been through the war and suffered true hardship. And yet no matter that being a baby boomer who has gorged on sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in the 60s I have more in common with, say, Amy Winehouse than with a battle-scarred veteran of the Great War, the veteran and I are seen by the young as part of the same crumbling generation.

  Old people are not all the same.

  While I wouldn’t want to settle down, like my grandmother at the same age, to a life of making apple pies and listening to The Archers every night (though neither activity is something I abhor, as you will see), I can’t deny that there are, inevitably, some similarities between old people of all generations. For instance, I hate staying up late. I long to leave dinner parties at 10.30 p.m. (A friend of mine has devised a new kind of way of entertaining called Eat and Run. You ask people for drinks, give them a light supper at about eight and expect them to have left you by 9.30–10 p.m. Then you have time to watch the news, clamber into a soothing bath, get into your jim-jams, climb into bed, read a bit and get to sleep by about eleven thirty.)

  But at the same time, I can’t really go along with those of my contemporaries who want to stay young. I don’t want to be young any more. It’s so boring. I don’t want to bicycle across Mongolia or go bungee-jumping, like some of my contemporaries who feel that by showing off like this they’re demonstrating how young they really are. I like the fact that my love-affair with life is settling into comfortable companionability. People who keep pretending to be young are just pathetic specimens, the sort of folk who despise face-lifts but are, by thei
r actions, chasing a lost youth. They are tragic failures, full of vanity, who can’t come to terms with being old.

  Apparently that frightful old mucker-upper and confuser of human psyches, Freud, said: ‘The gods are merciful when they make our lives more unpleasant as we grow old. In the end death seems less intolerable than the many burdens we have to bear.’ But this book is designed to outline some of the many advantages to being old. And I mean real advantages. We tend to dwell so much on the negative aspects of being old that we forget there is an enormous amount to be said for not being young any more.

  Why not take Noël Coward’s view? ‘How foolish to think one could ever slam the door in the face of age,’ he said. ‘Much better to be polite and gracious and ask him to lunch in advance.’

  Though he probably said ‘luncheon’.

  I’m old enough to remember that.

  1

  Ailments

  Botox and nose drops and needles for knitting,

  Walkers and handrails and new dental fittings,

  Bundles of magazines tied up in string,

  These are a few of my favourite things.

  Cadillacs and cataracts, hearing aids and glasses,

  Polident and Fixodent and false teeth in glasses,

  Pacemakers, golf carts and porches with swings,

  These are a few of my favourite things.

  When the pipes leak, when the bones creak,

  When the knees go bad,

  I simply remember my favourite things,

  And then I don’t feel so bad.

  Hot tea and crumpets and corn pads for bunions,

  No spicy hot food or food cooked with onions,

  Bathrobes and heating pads and hot meals they bring,

  These are a few of my favourite things.

  Back pain, confused brains and no need for sinnin’,

  Thin bones and fractures and hair that is thinnin’,