No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year by Virginia Ironside Page A

person. Now, nearly sixty, I feel like a young and lissom old person. I feel like a new and shiny snake that has shed a middle-aged skin that was getting horribly worn, smelly and tatty.
    At last, too, my past will be truly bigger than my future. And I like it like that.
    People who love life to bits hate getting older. It means death is getting nearer. People like me, for whom life has rather resembled one of those interminable performances at the National Theatre (those ones that last all day, to which you have to take sandwiches), getting older means that at last I’m entering the final act. It means I can see freedom at the end of the tunnel. Getting older means I get happier and happier. It means that at last I can put aside those nagging guilty anxieties about whether I should take up tap-dancing (have I said this before? Am I repeating myself already?) or become an opera singer. Being sixty will mean that I don’t have to worry about doing anything anymore. I will, officially, be retired. I will pick up a pension. I will be entitled to free prescriptions. I can spend my time, as George, the black guy across the road always answers, when I ask him what he’s up to: “Tekkin’ it eezee, man.”
    I can’t wait for tomorrow.
    Michelle came in late from a nightclub. When I told her my great age her jaw dropped. “You are as old as my grandmuzair!” she said.
    January 15th
    MY BIRTHDAY!
    Hundreds of cards through the letterbox, one of which, from Penny, sings “Happy birthday to you.” Hughie and James sent me one that reads “Happy Birthday! You still look as young as ever!” Inside it reads: “Alcohol is an amazing preservative!” From Marion: “Cheer up! Being sixty isn’t too bad!” and inside: “If you were a dog you’d be 420!”
    Michelle gave me a huge box of white chocolates, which unfortunately I can’t eat because white chocolate is the only thing that gives me a headache, and Maciej gave me a weird ornament of a cat, with two great gobs of red glass for eyes, which is absolutely hideous. Unfortunately, as he’s the cleaner I’m going to have to have it on display day and night. Aren’t I an ungrateful old toad. I was touched, all the same.
    And the phone hasn’t stopped ringing.
    “Do you feel any different?” asked Lucy anxiously, when she rang.
    “Yes, I do,” I said. “I feel absolutely marvelous. It’s clear now that I was born to be sixty. And to be honest, I can’t wait to be seventy.”
    When she was seventeen, my mother wrote in her diary: “I have an absolute horror of old age nowadays; every old woman I meet, I think: ‘That’s what I’ll be like soon.’ I always feel uncomfortable and unhappy when I hear someone say: ‘What right have old people got to interfere?’ or, ‘I hate old people.’ And I hate to hear someone say: ‘Oh, she’s ancient!’ about someone of thirty-five. When I’m thirty-five I shan’t like being called ancient. Old age is a beastly thing. Why must we get old, why can’t we stay young forever, it’s so beastly to feel the days slipping past and not being able to stop them.”
    But I couldn’t disagree more. While other people hide their heads in their hands and groan: “Oh don’t! How can it be that we’re all so old ?” I am hugging myself with glee thinking: “At last, I can hold my head up and, instead of saying in a lowly worm kind of way: ‘I’m old and I’m cowed,’ I can shout (à la James Brown): ‘Say it loud! I’m old and I’m proud!’” (De! De! Deh!)
    I always remember people saying, when I gave birth to Jack, that I should be “proud” of myself. I never got it. Giving birth didn’t seem anything to be proud of. But I am proud of being sixty. I feel I have achieved such a lot just to have got here. It’s the same pride I had when I got an azalea to flower two years running.
    But no one seems to be able to understand quite why I like being sixty so much. Even Penny, who popped in to make arrangements for