No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year by Virginia Ironside
Authors: Virginia Ironside
Ads: Link
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
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
Similar Books
