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

by Virginia Ironside

  “Sixty going on twenty!” said the therapist.

  “I really can’t agree,” I said. “If you’re sixty, you’re sixty. Sixty is old. I am just longing to be old, and I don’t want to be told I’m young, when I’m not. I’m fed up with being young. Boring. I was young in the sixties, and once, believe it or not, I slept with a Beatle. Been there, got the T-shirt, wore it to death and put it in a bag for Age Concern. When I was twenty, sixty was old, when I was thirty, forty and fifty, sixty was still old. I’m not going to change the goal posts now.”

  “I’m sixty,” said Marion, as she smilingly collected the plates. (It’s an odd fact that most men never realize when empty dishes are being stacked up. The therapist, who no doubt in his work prided himself on his acute sensitivity to other people’s feelings, sat with his plate firmly in front of him, unaware that major operations were being carried out, which required his cooperation.) “But I don’t feel a day over thirty!”

  “But, Marion, don’t you realize that that’s tragic?” I said. “To continue feeling thirty for the whole of your life! So boring! A nightmare! I’m longing to feel sixty! What’s wrong with that?”

  “The great thing about age,” said the therapist, whose wife had finally leaned over the table and taken his plate, “is that it’s never too late. You can do so many things. Take an Open University degree, go bungee jumping, learn a new language…”

  “But it is too late!” I argued. “That’s what’s so great about being old. You no longer have to think about going to university, or go bungee jumping! It’s a huge release! I’ve been feeling guilty about not learning another language for most of my adult life. At last I find that now, being old, I don’t have to! There aren’t enough years left to speak it. It’d be pointless!”

  “Well, I feel,” said the therapist, defiantly, “that now I am sixty-five, anything is possible.”

  “I find, approaching sixty,” I replied, “that the great pleasure is that so many things are impossible. I think,” I added, cruelly, putting my hand on his arm and smiling a great deal to pretend I meant no harm, “that you’re in what you therapists call denial.”

  This time I got the laugh, but it was cheap and I felt ashamed.

  As I drove back I was sorry for the poor old therapist, finding himself sitting next to rancid old me. Felt really guilty and horrible and wished I hadn’t been so acid. Like me, the poor man probably would have far preferred to have sat next to a lovely young person instead.

  October 11

  Woke feeling absolutely terrible, all the 1,001 muscles in my face still trapped in a rictus of insincerity. Knew, even worse, that I would have to suffer this cramped feeling till the following morning when the poison of the ghastly evening had finally drained from my body.

  To make matters worse, I looked terrible. Last night before I went to the party I saw in the mirror a raging beauty, with incredible olive skin, high cheekbones, a sensitive mouth, utterly ravishing. But when I looked in the mirror this morning, I couldn’t believe what stared back at me—I looked grotesque; Charles Laughton in a dressing gown. My face was like an uncooked doughnut. Piggy eyes, small, pursed, pale-lipped mouth, deep frown-marks, all puff. Revolting. What is it that happens in the night? Clearly Something—God knows what—Collects. Or perhaps it was the rioja. Or perhaps, more likely, the therapist, quite understandably, had put a curse on me.

  Jumped into the bath (perhaps “jump” is not the word; “clambered into” might be a better way of describing it, and yes, I do have a funny rubber mat with suckers underneath, lying on the bottom) and found that none of the rest of my body is puffy—just becoming wrinkly, like an Austrian blind. I can see, now, my grandmother’s arms sticking out of my shoulders, my skin becoming fine and papery and shiny, like hers. As I loved her so much, I don’t mind the sight. But cripes, I’m only fifty-nine. Soon I’ll be sixty. And I mean soon. In the next three months. Will everything collapse even further, I wonder?

  Even now, when I do my noble ten minutes of yoga a day, I see small folds of skin waiting to tumble down my thighs. They’re particularly in evidence when I do a shoulder stand with my legs in the air. They’ve got strange marks on them—thread veins, the odd hint of a varicose vein. My upper arms have wobbly bits hanging from them. The backs of my hands are speckled with brown spots. When did they appear? Only a few years ago, I think, when I could pretend to myself (talk about in denial!) that I was about thirty. Now, my entire body is shrieking at me that I am old. And what’s so utterly strange is that I don’t really mind a bit. It feels rather comfortable, friendly—and right.

  OK, my skin’s not young and springy with that wonderful peachy bloom and a fuzz of fine, downy hair. But it’s still good, like an expensive but worn old leather sofa from a gentleman’s club in Pall Mall.

  The older I get, I’ve decided, the more I am determined to look not so much like some deserted vandalized community hall in Hull, but more like a beautiful ruined abbey of the kind immortalized by Poussin—or the other painter who begins with P. Name escapes me…Or is it C?

  When I got out of the bath and reached for the towel I remembered the time, as a child, I excitedly told my father that I had discovered a brilliant new way of drying myself.

  “How?” he had asked. I showed him. With the towel around my back, I took one corner in each hand. I then pulled on each end alternately.

  “Isn’t it a good method?” I said.

  I’ve always remembered my father’s indulgent smile. “I remember when I discovered that, and I was around exactly your age,” he said.

  It was the first moment in my life when I had the revelation—a revelation that I have again and again and again—that not only what I think is an original thought has been thought time and time again by people throughout the ages but, worse, that thoughts that I imagine are new to myself are often thoughts that I have had again and again throughout my life. The treadmillness and Groundhog Dayery of it all is both depressing and, oddly, reassuring. It would be good, however, to have a brand-new thought just once in one’s life. I remember only recently realizing that you could hold two feelings in yourself at the same time, that you could both like someone and dislike them in one go, that you could both want a cigarette and want to give up smoking.

  As one who sees life rather in black and white—strong hates and loves—I have always tried to compromise by seeing everything in a kind of gray. The trick is not to do that at all, but to manage to hold the contrasts in oneself at exactly the same time. That results in a much more lively and invigorating approach. Very late in the day to discover that thought, but it has made relationships with people far, far easier. And, oddly, kinder.

  I then got dressed. Not an easy business these days. I think I used to balance on one foot when I put on my tights. Now I sit on the bed and roll back like a hedgehog as I tug them on, legs waggling in the air.

  October 20

  The new lodger arrived. Well, I say lodger. Michelle is the daughter of Parisian friends, and she wants a base in London from where she can look for somewhere congenial to live. She is utterly adorable. She is young! She is blonde! She is only nineteen but, of course, being French she is more like a sixteen-year-old English girl. She clearly has absolutely no idea how pretty she is, though she dresses beautifully. I opened the door to her on a bitter, gray, West London day. She stood, wearing three-quarter-length black pedalo trousers and only a thin cotton top over a bare tummy. On the ground were five enormous suitcases.

  “’Allo,” she said. “I am Michelle.”

  That was about the sum total of her English. She says “Sank you” a lot. She seemed very pleased with the room I offered her, despite the fact that it is painted a dark abattoir red, is lined with my books, has space in the cupboard for only about three things to hang up and half the chest of drawers is given over to screwdrivers, pipe wrenches, hammers, sandpaper, electric drills and old light fittings.

  “Beeg,” she said.

  I suppose it is rat
her “beeg” compared to most of the frightful shoeboxes foreign girls are offered in London. I gave her the usual spiel, in rather bad French, about how we must live completely separate lives, we do not share anything except the bathroom and the kitchen, that she has only about two inches of space in the fridge, we do not use each other’s milk, and that she is not allowed in the garden…

  Every time I give this talk I feel such a creep, but it is honed from long experience of lodgers. Once, when Jack, my son, was two years old, I found him pottering around the house one morning in the company of a huge dog. And when I went in to find the owner, a gigantic tattooed slob who was snoring next to my lodger, I found three candles burning around the bed.

  But later, as Michelle and I sat on the sofa in my sitting room, I had to really steel myself to say that we would never, ever share a meal, that although it was fine for her to ask me if she needed help with anything, I had my life and she had hers—because I could feel maternal feelings stealing through me like some kind of chemical.

  Later she crept down the stairs and I could hear her standing outside the room where I potter about doing bits and pieces, terrified to disturb me. I stopped typing out a furious letter to the council about the amount of uncollected rubbish to be found in the street, and called out to her. She wanted to know where the shops were. She looked so utterly vulnerable that when she turned to go, I found myself grabbing my bag and saying, “I’ve got to get some milk, anyway, so I’ll come with you and show you where everything is.” I even added the word “darling.”

  This is another curious sign of aging. I find myself addressing everyone as “sweetie” or “darling”—and, even odder, meaning it. It’s something I would never have done when I was young, in the days when the only people who received a “darling” were men who I loved.

  When you’re young, after all, you really only have relationships with people your own age or older. Your role is mostly as an equal or as a child. But the older you get, the more types of relationship are available. With people of eighty I still feel an innocent child. With people my own age I feel like an equal. And with young people, the bonus: I feel like a parent. I feel caring and kindly feelings that are lovely to experience when you’ve spent most of your life feeling cross-patchy and hard-done-by as I have.

  “Excuse me?” she said. Poor girl. The sooner she can find a room of her own with jolly young people rather than a mad, middle-aged woman with a maternal instinct on the loose, the better for her. What am I saying? “Middle-aged!” I might be middle-aged today but in three months I’ll be sixty, and that means I will no longer be middle-aged. I’ll be old. Well and truly old. Old! Old! Old! Excellent.

  Nov 6th

  I keep thinking about moving. But “thinking about moving” is a long way from actually moving. Penny who, having worked in PR all round the world, has lived in hundreds of homes in her life, said the other day that it was “unhealthy” to live in a house as long as me. I’ve been here for thirty years. Odd that it’s perfectly “healthy” for the dukes of Westminster or whoever they are to live in Blenheim Palace for millions of years, but for me to live in Shepherds Bush for thirty is “unhealthy.” Reminds me of the joke about the woman who had moved to Northumberland and met another woman at a party, who asked how long she’d lived in the area. “Oh, fifteen years,” she replied. “And you?” “Since the Middle Ages,” was the reply.

  Well, I’ve got used to living in Shepherds Bush. Others may regard it as the pits, but ever since finance forced me out of my spiritual home, Kensington, where I was born and brought up, I have come slowly to love Shepherds Bush. Indeed, nowadays, going to Kensington makes me feel rather claustrophobic, stuffed as it is with so many rich, middle-class whities. It’s like going to Bath, or Broadway in the Cotswolds. Wall-to-wall twee. Seas of corduroy trousers, and mountains of hard-woven baskets and well-kept dogs. Fishmongers run by people called Hugo. Members of book clubs at every turn.

  There are no wine bars in this part of Shepherds Bush, no bistros, no Starbucks, no Body Shop. Only betting shops, slightly sinister nail salons, West Indian takeaways, and shoe-repair and key-cutting shops. The multiethnicity is summed up by one shop, which announces itself as the Bush Bagel Bar—Halal Pizza Take-away. This stands next to an evil-looking place with an extremely high counter called, baldly, Money Shop and, on the other side, The Empire Fish Bar. Next to that is the Bush Dental Clinic with “Facilities for the Nervous.” Then there’s a strange place that advertises itself solely as Women’s Clothes and Islamic Books. Everywhere is interspersed, however, with the most wonderful Middle Eastern supermarkets, including the rather ineptly named Lebanese Butchery, which cater to the local mosque.

  There is a delicatessen in Shepherds Bush, but so few people buy the cheeses it sells that when you do buy them you find they’re all covered with a strange sort of elderly, sticky, smelly slime. Hope that doesn’t happen to me when I get old. No, Shepherds Bush may be an “eccentric and delightful mix of ethnic diversity” (I’m quoting from one of my many letters to the Shepherds Bush Gazette), but the drawbacks are that the pavements (just Tarmac—we haven’t yet risen to paving stones round here) are thick with chewing gum, and the streets swarm with hoodies.

  Shepherds Bush is one of those places that has always been “up and coming” but has never actually up and come. Like those promising writers. True, it is not exactly down and going, but it has never arrived.

  However, compared to Brixton, where my son, Jack, and Chrissie, his girlfriend, live, Shepherds Bush still seems to be vaguely on the up. After hearing all the rumors about Brixton, I’m scared to look anyone in the eye in the streets. Jack assures me there are only a couple of crazies about, there are everywhere, but it’s easy for him to say because he did psychology at university and knows all about body language. Recently Penny told me she’s heard that there’s a South London gang that goes round the streets in a car with no lights on at night and, as some initiation rite, they have to follow the first person who kindly flashes them to alert them that they are driving lightless, and kill them. It sounds like an urban myth, but she checked with a policeman and it’s true.

  Nov 8th

  This evening Penny came round and, over red mullet and a delicious Portuguese white wine that is only 9 percent, we discussed doctors. We are both tremendous hypochondriacs and I calm Penny down when she is convinced she has cancer of the bones and she calms me down when I become convinced I have cancer of the esophagus on account of the fact that I have drunk so much in my life and still, it has to be said, chuck down well over half a bottle of white wine every night. At least. I’m afraid anyone who knows the alcohol content of the wine she’s drinking is definitely on the way to the skids.

  Of course it’s fine chucking white wine down yourself when you’re young, but apparently, if you do it long enough, it erodes, as I read in some terrifying health piece in the Daily Mail, all the tiny little wiggly bits, or fibulae (?) on the way down, and the mucus can no longer collect and settle and moisten the whole thing, and it becomes a kind of arid passage, ripe, apparently, for cancer germs or spores or whatever they are, to flourish.

  I told her I’d made an appointment with a surgeon tomorrow to see about my feet. My feet are a nightmare—dry and cracked (gnarled might be a better word, actually. What is it about the “g” in “gnarled” that makes it such a cruel word?). I keep thinking I ought to get some Scholl’s cream to rub into them. “Has it come to that?” said Penny. “Come to that”: an expression I’ll be hearing a lot more in future, I suspect.

  But the real problem is the huge, agonizing bunion on one foot, inherited from my mother. Fixing the bunion will cure the pain, according to my podiatrist, one of a profession that hadn’t been invented when I was born, a man who has already sucked me dry of nearly all my savings by insisting that I need special orthotics, or supports.

  He’s tried all sorts of things already, of course. He gave me a catalogue of special shoes, none of which I could ever dre
am of wearing. Most of them were “stone-colored” and there were lots of trainers modeled by glamorous young girls who never in a million years would wear that kind of footwear. In real life, they’re worn more often by women who seem to spend much of their time in service stations, women with huge, fat swollen ankles and purple knees covered by very clean beige trousers, sporting mysterious kinds of blokish haircuts.

  Penny is worried about HRT. She spends a lot of her time trying to get the balance right between estrogen and progesterone, and is convinced that too much of one or the other gives her panic attacks. Luckily I gave it up three months ago, and it’s made not the slightest bit of difference. If anything, I think I look and feel rather better. I can now spot women on HRT—they all have a Teresa Gorman look about them, with huge boobs and unnaturally plumped-up skin.

  Not sure I like the idea of hormones at all, really. I always remember when I once taught in an all-girls’ school and became so freaked out on hearing that women working in close proximity menstruated at the same time that I held my breath every time I went up or down in the lift, in case my cycle started to think about getting synchronized. I couldn’t bear the idea of us all bleeding away at the same time every month.

  What a blessing to be rid of all that! It wasn’t the blood I minded; it was a very minor bore. No, it was the endless noting its date down in my diary, I remember, and then, a week before a period was due, writing: “Might feel weird…” to remind myself that any mood I got myself into should be regarded with suspicion. It is very unnerving to realize that one’s actual personality can be dominated by hormonal fluctuations. But no longer, ho ho! When I was young we used to call it the “curse,” but that extremely accurate and descriptive word has been erased by political correctness, along with other essential pieces of vocabulary: “cripples,” “loonies,” “nutters” and “old bats,” many of which apply to me.

  “By the way, do you floss your teeth?” I asked Penny before she left.