The Virginia Monologues

by Virginia Ironside

  Unless you really are super-fit or some ancient athlete, don’t wear sports clothes. They just draw attention to your lack of muscle tone.

  If you feel you have to wear a copper bracelet to ward off rheumatism, keep it well hidden under long sleeves. Old crock you may be, but there is no need to advertise it.

  Wear comfortable shoes by all means but don’t wear shoes that look comfortable (see above), particularly anything that involves Velcro fastenings.

  If you’ve got any gorgeous old Ossie Clark dresses hanging in your wardrobe or now-fashionable vintage bell-bottoms from the 70s, why not try them on? If they’re too small, either lose weight or get them altered so they fit. You’ll look utterly gorgeous.

  Make sure you possess and wear the most glamorous dressing-gown in the world. Because in the future, when you’re lounging around in an old people’s home staring into space, you’re going to be spending a lot of time in it.

  Have a face-lift. When talking about the joys of looking good when you’re old, I’m often accused of hypocrisy because I’ve had one. But I didn’t have it to make me look younger – honestly! I had it done because, after years of depression, I just looked so incredibly miserable. When I got up in the morning and looked at myself in the mirror, even I was brought down by what I saw staring back. It didn’t reflect the more optimistic person I now felt inside. Even when I smiled I looked miserable. I’d kind of cried my face into shapes of gloom that depressed myself and other people. And when I’d had the operation, no one told me how young I looked. They all said simply, how well I looked. Much nicer.

  Try not, unless you have a figure like a sylph, to wear trousers. As they age, men tend to appear more feminine, while women, with deepening voices and hairs sprouting out of their chin, tend to appear more masculine. Don’t encourage the slide by dressing to look like a bloke. If you’re a woman, I mean. The older you get, the more feminine you must try to look.

  If you’re a woman, don’t stint on the make-up. Not only does your face look better with it, but it declares to the world that you’ve made an effort. And that is flattering to everyone who spots you, even total strangers in Sainsbury’s or those odd people with whom you connect briefly when you spot them at the wheel of the car next to yours. (Talking of make-up, have you noticed that even though it makes no difference at all now, because your skin is so non-elastic, you still make that funny pulling face when you put on your eye make-up?)

  If you are a man, please, I beg you, do not grow a beard. They look like small sheepdogs, hanging on to your chin. They also announce a) that you have a problem with your masculinity and b) that you have no interest in giving oral sex. Also, I do find that every grey-haired man with a beard does, these days, bear a remarkable resemblance to the notorious Dr Harold Shipman.

  If you’re a man and your hair is thinning, emphasize it. Either shave your head completely, or just get a normal haircut (do not ever, ever be tempted to drag a piece of hair over your head from one ear to the other, with a parting just over the tip. It may look reasonable to you in the mirror but, I can assure you, from the back it looks repulsive.) Also, never grow your hair long when you’re old. There is something immensely depressing about the sight of long, straggly grey hair on a man, especially when dragged back into a sad old pony-tail. Far from looking like a cool old groover, you look like something from the 60s washed up on the beach, something that’s hung about in a rock pool for a very long time.

  Never wear anything that looks as if you are going on safari.

  If you’re a woman and your head looks like one of those old scrubbing brushes with only a few bristles left that you occasionally find down the back of the fridge, for God’s sake swallow your pride and get a wig. After a long course of steroids, my hair was thin and peculiarly curly so, sweating with embarrassment, I visited a wig shop and took the plunge. I even wore it a few times. They’re not vastly expensive – you don’t need real hair – and, although they are excruciatingly hot and uncomfortable, and feel rather as if you are wearing a bathing hat (an odd experience as you sit in a nightclub at two in the morning), after a while you do get used to them. Joan Crawford wore them. And if she can, you can.

  Mouths are particularly important to address when you are older. As far as teeth go, I wouldn’t encourage you having them whitened (see Rule 1, above). But watch out for crowns. Sometimes your teeth gradually get yellower and yellower leaving a few gleaming crowns – which only make the other teeth look worse. At least ensure your teeth are all the same colour. Floss often. This is particularly important since, as our gums recede (hence the phrase ‘long in the tooth’), there are tiny gaps at the tops of our teeth just made for catching spinach, raspberry seeds and bits of toast. Make sure, too, that your tongue is clean. Some old people have tongues covered with a kind of white-ish gunge, which, while not noticeable to them when they admire themselves in the mirror with their mouths closed, is repulsive for other people to spot when they’re talking to them. Tongues can be cleaned by covering them with bicarbonate of soda and then giving them a good scrub with a toothbrush. And, finally, don’t forget to check the sides of your mouth. Some old people have little bits of dried spittle at the corners of their mouths. This is totally disgusting. If you have this problem, keep a hankie in your hand and wipe your mouth constantly.

  If you have a paunch, don’t worry too much. Everyone has a slight paunch after sixty. And no amount of press-ups or exercises will make any difference. I once went to a huge show about Age in London, knee deep in Arrange Your Own Funeral parlours, Time-Shares in Spain, splendid chairs that rose up and down and flung out foot-rests at the flick of a switch, forms for writing your own will, stands advertising private health schemes and men in suits eager to flog insurance of every kind. A saucy side-line was an exhibition of the oldest muscle-man they could find. He was eighty years old, jolly wrinkly, covered with fake tan, and with admirable biceps and pecs, but I was reassured to see that even he, who no doubt worked out every day of his life, had more than a slight paunch. However, even though paunches can’t be helped, it’s a good idea to conceal them as far as you can, even if you have to pour yourself into slimming panties when you go out.

  If you still think it’s impossible to look good when you’re old, listen to what Howard Jacobson wrote in the Independent about Leonard Cohen:

  a devilishly attractive man in his middle seventies. Some men do old age better than they do youth. Especially melancholy sensual men who can’t decide whether they’re happy or not. The not knowing, like the not eating, keeps them lean. He is fascinatingly attenuated, as laconic as a snake on grass, with a face lined and amused by a desperate indulgence of the appetites, by which I don’t mean wine, women, infidelity and betrayal, but also with rhapsodic spirituality alternating with ecstatic doubt.

  If you can’t face the huge effort required to look good in old age, you can, of course, simply give up and look totally bonkers – much better than being invisible. You can cultivate the Batty Look. Now you’re old, you can get away with preposterously wild colours, layers of silk and gold, flying scarves (as long as they’re clean), and wear enormous straw hats covered with a pyramid of flowers, apples and pears. Don’t worry about being extreme. You’re confident enough, now, aren’t you?

  You may look crackers of course, but you can also look incredibly pretty at the same time.

  11

  Young People

  When I was young my teachers were the old,

  I gave up fire for form till I was cold

  I suffered like a metal being cast.

  I went to school to age to learn the past.

  Now I am old my teachers are the young.

  What can’t be molded must be cracked and sprung.

  I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.

  I go to school to youth to learn the future.

  ‘What Fifty Said’– Robert Frost

  When I was young I hated old people. I hated their wobbly old lips, their leaking ey
es and I hated their smell and I hated their wrinkly old hands with all those rivers of veins. I also hated the way they dressed and the fact that they had nothing in common with me whatsoever. Not only that but they were utterly baffled by me and my generation. Like all young people in the 60s, I was a complete mystery to older people. We were, after all, a generation which had been pretty much invented by the 60s. Okay, there were the bright young things in the 20s, but they belonged, as far as I can gather, exclusively to a certain class. The new generation of ‘swinging’ young people in the 60s could come from any class at all, and preferably not that of the oldies of my acquaintance.

  There was a social revolution going on and the old were utterly mystified as to why I, a middle-class girl, was hobnobbing with criminals and sleeping with East End boys, who turned into designers, photographers, entrepreneurs. The media were also rather irritatingly fascinated. As a pop correspondent for the Mail in the 60s I was constantly on hand to explain the workings of the Young Person’s Mind to anyone older than me. I remember having to do a Young Person’s Dictionary for the old geezers who read the paper, which gave explanations for words like ‘square’, ‘cool’, ‘fab’, ‘trendy’ and so on.

  I remember I’d be sitting at a party and some ancient old crock would come staggering up and sit down next to me and say, ‘Oh, hello! I so wanted to meet you because I do so love young people. Tell me – why do you wear your skirts so short and why do the Beatles wear their hair so long? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Ha ha ha!’ and I could feel her secretly plugging an invisible socket into my side and sucking all my youth out.

  The first thing to be said about growing old is that nobody does it deliberately in order to annoy the young. I only understand that because now I am myself old. These days no one rings me to ask about why young people like to take drugs. They ring me to ask what my views are on Alzheimer’s research, or whether sex is better when you’re ancient, or whether, as an old person presumably on the point of death, I approve of euthanasia.

  I’m in an odd position. Because on the one hand, the old really are different now. There may be an element of self-deception going on here, but I know that the cultural gap between myself and a young person of thirty is far smaller today than it would have been between me as a thirty-year-old and someone of sixty-five when I was young. In fact I have probably done more drugs, slept with more men and, crucially, experienced far more change in my lifetime than any young person born in the 80s or 90s. At the same time I remember the days of trams and when businessmen wore bowler hats and carried rolled-up umbrellas. My generation has witnessed a huge cultural shift which means that we are in a special position of being able to understand the very old – those of ninety or so – as well as understanding the young.

  I can’t deny that I am, at the same time, an old geezer – and there are things about the young that I just haven’t got a clue about. Nowadays when I hear the word ‘hip’ I don’t think of some cool groover in tight jeans, but more of the possibility of a fascinating operation that I can learn something from. (Though I was rather amused in a shop, when a very young person, to whom I gave the right change, replied, ‘Fab.’ I stared at her, wondering if she wasn’t actually someone of my age who’d had several face-lifts, but no. She was twenty. Apparently ‘fab’ is coming back. Cool. But you have to be jolly careful of what old slang you revive. If you describe yourself as ‘square’ and the young person you’re with as ‘swinging’, I think you’d soon find they were looking at their watches. Or whatever they use for watches these days. Mobile phones. Chips in their wrists.)

  The fact that this distance between young and old, while it still exists, has narrowed since I was young, makes relationships with young people far easier than they used to be. And the presence of young people in our lives means that the horizons of our friendships are immediately widened. When we were young we couldn’t have relationships with younger people because we were all young. But now I love having a semi-maternal role with anyone young. Even when I was fifty, young people could be seen as a slight threat, but now I’m sixty-five not only are they no threat to me, I’m no threat to them. I’m not going to snap up their boyfriend. I’m not going to steal their friends or betray them by repeating gossip. I’m safe. And, embarrassing to admit, I just love them.

  Now, some old people can’t stand the young. When comedian Frank Carson, who is now eighty-three, was asked what he thought of today’s comedians, he replied: ‘I hate them all – particularly Jack Dee and Jimmy Carr. Because they’re funny, much funnier than me, and so young.’ And the actor Richard Griffiths said he thought everyone over fifty should be issued every week with a plastic bag with a wet fish in it supplied by the post office so that ‘whenever you see someone young and happy you can hit them as hard as you can across the face. When they say “What was that for?” you’ll say “For being young, handsome and successful.”’

  But I just love young people. And it’s so incredibly flattering, too, to be liked back by a young person – any young person. While I used to boast that Mick Jagger had once kissed me (on the cheek, admittedly, but a kiss all the same) I now boast about the ages of some of my friends. I was asked away to Italy last year and when people enquired where was I going I said ‘Sicily… but you know the person who’s invited me is very young. She’s thirty-four. She’s a friend of mine, you know… Yes, and she asked me to stay. She likes me. She’s very young– younger than my own son, and she’s, this 34-year-old, did I mention her age? – and she’s asked me, so much older, to Italy to stay with her…’ I behaved like someone who’d been invited to dinner with some rock star. I felt flattered and flirty and lucky.

  The young are like a drug to the old. And it doesn’t matter how young, either. When I was young I’d be wheeling a pram down the road with a baby inside it minding my own business and out from behind a bush this frightful old bat would leap. ‘Oh, coochie-coo! What a lovely baby! Isn’t he bonny! Or is it a she?’

  These days, I find myself behind a bush, minding my own business, when down the road comes a young mother with a baby in a pram and I’m the one who leaps out crooning: ‘Oh, coochie-coo, girl or boy? What a bonny little person!’

  The great thing about being old is not just that I can have young friends, but that I still have friends who are older than me. And when I’m with them, I feel like a little girl. I sit at their knee and ask them about their youth, and I’m genuinely fascinated by their stories.

  Howard Jacobson, himself no spring chicken, wrote in the Independent:

  Myself, I love the company of people who are ‘past it’. Doesn’t matter what the ‘it’ is, particularly. Being past anything is enough. The commonality of self-irony is what I like. The absence of any of that competitiveness that mars the lives of the active… I like being with people who weren’t born yesterday… The acceptance that we are among the ruins…

  Then there’s also the fact that we can hear the most interesting young, those who spend their lives in noisy clubs, because they tend to shout quite naturally because their ears are already damaged with exposure to over-loud sound. And those less interesting, of course, are still delightful. As someone said: ‘What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can’t hear what they say?’

  I have friends of my own age, my peers, whom I can talk to as contemporaries, but now there’s this new type of semi-parental relationship I have with young people. I don’t think any young man knows how deeply flattering it is for an old person to be deemed worth spending more than half an hour with. When she was old, my mother used to come to life whenever a young man crossed her path. She turned embarrassingly girlish and flirtatious, completely energized by the presence not just of a young person but a young bloke. Humiliatingly, I find it hard not to act the same. I only have to catch the eye of a young man in the car next to me, and if he gives me a smile, I find that when I finally reach my destination I am dancing on air.

  It’s not just that yo
ung people are nice to have around. As our old friends drop off their perches, we need young people, just to replenish the stocks of friends, who seem to diminish daily. Every day, new names are crossed out from our address books.

  In Holland, the Dutch are apparently building an entire town for the over-fifties. Senior City in Zeeland will have no schools, discos or tattoo parlours and motorbikes will be banned.

  I have to say that it sounds like my idea of utter hell.

  12

  Travel

  When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was

  on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would

  cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy

  prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that

  greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight

  perhaps senility will do the job.

  Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still

  raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound

  of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod

  hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry

  mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach

  high up under the rib cage.

  In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once

  a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.