Until then…
Until the time comes for the Grim Reaper to harvest me, there are some quite jolly things to fritter away the time. I’m quite happy browsing through the obituary columns looking for friends who have dropped off the perch.
Then there’s the pleasure of writing one’s will. I have rewritten mine several times now, occasionally cutting someone out who has upset me or putting in someone I briefly love. Sometimes neither, but, rather, leaving the whole bang lot to saving Romanian orphans. It is a wonderful way of conducting one’s emotional life with all the malice and affection released into a harmless document, without ever confronting the beneficiaries (or non-beneficiaries) with one’s feelings directly. The fact that usually, after a few months, my will returns to its well-behaved norms doesn’t matter. I’ll have brief moments of wielding real behind-the-scenes power without anyone ever knowing I’ve done it – unless, of course, I happen to drop down dead in the middle of a family feud or a loopy love-affair.
Then you can always organize your funeral in advance. But do it privately. I have often written out the ideal funeral for myself, changing it here and there as a new song becomes my favourite or I swing between fancying a funeral in a church presided over by a vicar with a beard in a dress, and one in a woodland grove presided over by a humanist with a beard in a grey sweater and jeans. But don’t dream of giving your notes to the people who will survive you. It will take all the fun out of it for your relatives when it comes to their organizing it themselves (see Funerals).
And finally – famous last words. Yes, you can start dreaming them up right now. Whenever you wake in the middle of the night, worrying about something, think, instead, of what you’ll say on your deathbed. Here are some hints.
Noël Coward said:: ‘Goodnight my darlings.’
John Barrymore: ‘Die? Certainly not. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.’
A. E. Housman (to his doctor who’d just told him a good joke): ‘That is indeed very good. I shall have to repeat that on the Golden Floor!’
Louis IV, to his mourning courtiers: ‘Why are you weeping? Did you imagine that I was immortal?’
Karl Marx: ‘Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.’
Ramón Narvaez, a Spanish general, when asked by a priest to forgive his enemies: ‘I do not have to forgive my enemies. I have had them all shot.’
George Sanders, in a suicide note: ‘Dear World, I am leaving you because I am bored. I am leaving you with your worries. Good luck.’
Logan Pearsall Smith, lexicographer: ‘Another sunny day! Thank God I don’t have to go out and enjoy it!’
And, best of all, Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa: ‘Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.’
6
Sex
As I grow older and older
And totter towards the tomb
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Oh God! Not sex again! That’s how I feel these days when I see that wretched three-letter word looming up at me out of the papers. Honestly, sometimes I think that I’ve had enough sex to last me a lifetime.
Well, I am a bit of an exception, I suppose. As a child of the 60s, hopelessly insecure and depressed, it’s not surprising that when I started to add up everyone I’d slept with the other day and got to – well, I won’t tell you how many I got to – I gave rather a shudder and told myself that that was quite enough now, thank you, and could we think about something else. Like – er, rhubarb pie. Or how to get grass stains out of aprons.
Anyone who thinks this state of affairs was something to be envied, needs reminding that in the 60s no one had heard of the phrase ‘No means No’. Us girls got into the most ghastly scrapes. If you weren’t raped (and I can think of a couple of times that what happened to me could be so defined), then you were bullied into having sex. I always remember a typical 60s moment when I went out to dinner with a man. He paid. In those days if a man paid for supper he almost always expected to have sex afterwards. It was that simple. He asked me back for coffee and then suggested sex, but when I said I wanted to go home, he looked at me astonished and said: ‘But why? It’ll only take a couple of minutes.’
Sex was a kind of substitute for love, and wherever I stand now – or lie (I’m not letting on) – I know I’m fed up with sex’s lurching longing dominating my life, roaring in my brain when I want to do other things – and I don’t mean reading great books or painting great pictures, but just pottering about or mowing the lawn, or finding out the side-effects of some new anti-arthritis drug on the Internet. When – rarely now, thank God – I get that clawing feeling below my stomach, aching with want, my eyes don’t sparkle at the possibility of another night of leaping about on a mattress. Or, worse, as far as I remember from those heady days, being dragged about on a kitchen table. Frightfully uncomfortable.
No, these days I first of all groan inwardly, and then, when I realize that the feelings aren’t so strong that they have to be indulged, breathe a sigh of relief and get on with the ironing. It’s wonderful not to have to clamber into bed with some slightly pissed pal or a naïve young pick-up, just to satisfy the cravings.
(And I was rather relieved to read that even the great Diana Rigg, at sixty, was recently quoted as saying that although she’s quite comfortable with other people of her age having a continued sex life, she herself, although she had a wonderful sex life, is perfectly reconciled and happy ‘not to go there again’.)
Even when I stopped my nocturnal caperings and got back to some kind of sexual normality in the 70s, sex still played a big part in my life as an agony aunt. Until a few years ago, and for the last forty or so years before that, I’ve been answering readers’ problems – and masses of them were about sex. In the 70s, we were bludgeoned with advertising about it, told that if you didn’t have sex every night of the week you’d become shrivelled and repressed, assured at the same time that if you had a great sex life you didn’t need to worry about anything else in your relationship – and there was even a period when simultaneous orgasms, a near impossibility as far as I remember – were touted as the only way of achieving true sexual satisfaction. Men were taught how to have several orgasms a night, without ejaculating (that must have required the nerve, mind and concentration of a saddhu who’d spent years practising single-handedly at the top of a mountain) and entire books were written about G-spots and H-spots, and how to get rid of spots to attract a man, and whether there was such a thing as female ejaculation, and why anal sex could be a boost for a marriage, and never to rule out fantasies, mirrors, videos and threesomes. Or foursomes. Or moresomes.
In my time, I’ve written, believe it or not, no fewer than three A-Zs of sex for a variety of publications (A is usually for Arousal, and we go on through M for Masturbation and O for Orgasm until, finally, Z for Zzzzz – what men do when they turn over after sex). And I can understand the Zs. By the time I got to the end of writing each of these supplements, I often felt like having a good old snooze myself.
I tried to calm it all down once, I remember, by answering a letter, in my column, from a woman who said she loved sex but never had an orgasm. What was wrong with her? I replied that she was fine. If she had feelings of closeness, relaxation, sensuality, satisfaction and fulfilment, then it didn’t really matter whether she had an orgasm or not. After the magazine was published, however, I got a letter from another worried reader. ‘Dear Virginia,’ she wrote, ‘I have three orgasms every night. But I never have those lovely feelings you talk about. What is wrong with me?’
It’s small wonder that these days, older, wiser and luxuriating in my single bed, I sometimes thank God that I’ve been there, done that, got the sexy T-shirt, worn it far too often and have now given it to Age Concern.
I’m with Kingsley Amis who, on being asked, at seventy, whether he had sex, replied that he was delighted when hi
s libido vanished because he suddenly realized that for sixty years he’d been ‘chained to an idiot’.
Anyway, who is there to go to bed with?
While I can cope with looking at myself in the mirror with my clothes on, it’s not such fun when one’s stripped down to one’s birthday suit. (Isn’t that a sweet old-fashioned expression, by the way? They used to say that in the 50s when the words ‘nude’ or ‘naked’ were considered vulgar.) After all, no one looks absolutely topping naked after sixty, do they? I don’t want to go to bed with a man whose tummy rolls about like another being on the bed. Nor do I want to go to bed with a man whose chest looks like a rolled-down Austrian blind. When I was young, an old friend of mine said, when she got to sixty, ‘I do think fucking at my age is a bit undignified, my dear.’ I thought she was mad at the time, but now I rather agree with her.
When sex is physically impossible
It’s not uncommon for men to find their libidos reduce with age; many become increasingly impotent with weaker erections, and sometimes take longer to ejaculate; some women find sex just too painful to carry on with – however much hormone cream they slather on or however much HRT they cram themselves with. Having sex can sometimes feel as if someone is rubbing you down inside with sandpaper.
At ninety-one, the author Diana Athill said: ‘One reads from time to time absolutely obscene articles about senile sex – about how if you really go on trying hard enough, using all kinds of ointments, it can work, but for God’s sake! It’s supposed to be fun! If you need to use a cupboard full of Vaseline, you might as well stop.’
We women are always told to ‘Listen to our bodies…’ Well, then: listen. When many older women have sex, their bodies sometimes scream: ‘Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!’
The freedom of no sex
One of the really positive effects of being less interested in sex, is that one can have so much better relationships with men than when one was young. It’s wonderful finding that a man isn’t scared to be alone with me in case I leap upon him with a predatory roar. Or that I’m not scared to be alone with him in case he does the same to me. It’s great that my women friends don’t worry, if I go out with their partners when they’re away, that I’m on the pull. Or, worse, on the snitch. And I’ve heard that some men actually find women a lot more interesting too, now they bother to listen to them without distraction. Remember the joke about the frog who says to an old man, ‘If you kiss me I’ll turn into a beautiful princess’ and the old man replies: ‘At my age, I’d prefer a talking frog.’
No sex doesn’t mean not being sexy
But just because I may be bored with sex it doesn’t mean I’ve turned into some trouser-wearing old bag with cropped hair and not a speck of make-up. I adore looking as glam as possible, love to be told I look young and sexy; I adore flirting which is all the more fun when you know that it’s going to lead precisely nowhere. It’s great when you meet a man not thinking: ‘Oh will he ask me out, will I go to bed with him, could I be married to him? Will I have his children?’ almost before you’ve shaken hands. I just love it when ‘getting lucky’ doesn’t mean you’ve scored with a bloke but, rather, finding a space in the Waitrose car park.
Research
Although I’d always like to put the case for the ironing as preferable to sex, I can’t deny that it’s reported that some older people are still at it like rabbits. Even though some of my contemporaries agree with me that the idea of going to bed with anyone even remotely near our own age gives us the creeps –‘I suppose I could bear to go to bed with someone of fifty, just, but the catch is that he’d have to be jolly short-sighted to want to go to bed with me,’ said a girlfriend – I gather that, in Sweden, 98 per cent of married men claim still to be having sex over seventy. The only way I can understand that is by thinking, ‘Well, that’s Sweden for you. Land of pornography, blondes, booze, compulsory sex education in elementary schools – what can you expect? They may have a hundred words for snow in Inuit, but I bet they don’t have one phrase the equivalent to “Not tonight, darling” in Swedish.’
Anyway, when it comes to surveys doesn’t everyone, old blokes in particular, lie about the number of times they have sex?
Indeed, many ancients sound rather smug about it all. I feel they’re saying: ‘That bit of information will stop them throwing us on the scrapheap! We’re just as randy as everyone else!’ But I myself don’t believe a word of it. True, I don’t talk a lot about sex with my peers – people of over sixty like myself – but I strongly suspect it’s because sex just isn’t remotely as important to them as it used to be when they were younger. I’ve also noticed that an increasing number of couples not only sleep in separate beds, but in separate rooms. Most, having got divorced ages ago, actually sleep in separate houses.
And I’m sure those who do sleep together certainly agree with Mrs Patrick Campbell, the actress, who said that ‘Marriage is the result of the longing for the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue.’
Perhaps this is all just my stereotypical English reaction. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps British oldies, too, rather than curling up in their nighties and jim-jams after a soothing cup of Horlicks or a stiff double whisky, are bonking the nights away behind closed doors.
In praise of older sex
If you are one of the people who still enjoy sex despite the fact that these days you sometimes feel you’d like a ladder to help you get up into bed, there’s quite a lot to be said for older sex, which is entirely unlike younger sex.
Your sex drive changes as you get older and can be a lot more unhurried, more relaxed and less frantic. Indeed, many people say that, being less frequent and more leisurely, sex when you’re older can actually be more enjoyable. And because, presumably, couples by this stage know how to please each other, there’s less unsatisfying groping and fumbling than there used to be. A sex therapist I know once said that in the case of older sex, ‘Travelling can often be more pleasurable than arriving.’ There’s also the added relief of knowing that, at last, there is no question of your possibly getting pregnant. It’s fantastic not having to take the Pill or, even worse, jamming a rubber cap into yourself every time you have sex. (Remember taking it out? Yikes! As the kids used to say.)
Better lovers?
Of course older people can be far more adept at sex. Benjamin Franklin, advising a young man on his choice of mistress, told him, not very flatteringly, about the charms of older women, suggesting that ‘covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all cats are grey, the pleasure of corporeal enjoyment with an older woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every knack being by practice capable of improvement’ (my italics).
Older people have been around more. Whether older men can or can’t last longer, they’re certainly far less selfish lovers than younger men. They’re more experienced sexually, so there’s less fumbling, less blushing and a lot more laughing. And older men don’t go into a sulk if you don’t feel like sex or want to watch the end of the telly programme before getting down to anything. If they’re not confident about their sexuality by fifty or sixty, they never will be. The old gentleman in Sandy Wilson’s The Boyfriend might have been right when he sang, in a song called ‘It’s Never Too Late to Fall in Love’, that love is best when it’s old – like wine.
And as for women, there’s always Howard Jacobson’s view in the Independent, which is that ‘Longevity is more beautiful in my eye. No look can rival for sexual excitement that of someone who has seen the world but still sees something she desires in you… Eroticism has nothing to do with youth and beauty but everything to do with intelligence and experience, spiced, preferably, with a little disappointment.’
Older men are, of course, far more gallant than younger men, having been brought up in a totally non-PC era. An older man will open doors for a woman; an older man will bring flowers; an ol
der man will tell her how beautiful she’s looking; an older man will put on a clean shirt before he comes to visit. An older man will be shocked if his companion hurls her credit card on to the table, insisting on splitting the bill. And finally, an older man always has a place of his own so there’s no risk that he might become dependent – always a fear with a gorgeously feckless young man. (‘What do you call a musician without a girlfriend? Homeless.’)
One friend of mine who, after a fling with a dishy 22-year-old, ended up marrying a man old enough to be her father, said, when I asked what on earth she saw in the bald old buffer: ‘Not only does he make me feel young,’ she said, ‘but he’s also incredibly grateful that I should deign to go out with him. So I feel not only incredibly attractive, but like a kind and generous person as well. What more could I ask?’
Oh, yes – love
Thank God, sex isn’t love. I once watched a television programme that advised couples on how to rekindle the sparks in their relationship, and I thought – what an utterly crass thing to do. Sparks were then, not now. We’ve had sparks, done with them. What about the joy of glowing embers instead?
In a wonderful poem, Kindliness, Rupert Brooke (amazing how he knew this, when he was only twenty-seven years old when he died!) wrote of love in old age, when sexual desire has died down.
And blood lies quiet, for all you’re near;
And it’s but spoken words we hear,
The Virginia Monologues Page 8
