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

lunch—she’s taking me out. She sat down for a cup of coffee while I sat opposite her on the sofa, beaming in my Indian dressing gown.
    “Now you can do all those things that you’ve been meaning to do for ages,” she said. “Learn Italian.”
    “Learn Italian?” I shouted so violently I spilled coffee all over myself. “Why does everyone think I want to learn Italian? I only go to Italy once every three years for a week at most. No comprendo Italiano! No quiero comprendare Italiano! No, the great thing about being sixty is that I don’t any longer feel guilty about not learning Italian!”
    “Well, Open University—” she said.
    “NO! NO! A thousand times NO! Nor the University of the Third Age! That’s what Marion does. She’s forever doing nodules or whatever they are. Forget nodules! I don’t want to learn about anything ever again! I’m fed up with learning. Learning is for young people. Done young.”
    “OK, OK,” she said. “Modules by the way. Don’t learn Italian. Join a book club, instead.”
    A book club?! Certainly not! Book club people always seem to have to wade through Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, or The God of Small Things or, groan, The Bookseller of Kabul. I think they feel that by reading and analyzing books, they’re keeping their brains lively. But either you’ve got a lively brain or you haven’t. Discussing the resonances or contexts of books or whatever they discuss in bookclubs can’t gee up a brain if it doesn’t fire on all cylinders to start with. The thing is: I don’t want to join a book club to keep young and stimulated. I don’t want to be young and stimulated anymore.
    There seems to be a common line that runs “If you’re old, you’ve got to stay mentally active, physically alive, ever fascinated by life.” You have to forever poke your brain with a pointed stick to keep it working. But I say, Why? I’ve done fascinated, I’ve done curious. I want to wind down. I want to have the blissful relief of not being interested. I don’t think those oldies who spend their lives bicycling across Mongolia at eighty and paragliding at ninety, are brilliant specimens of old age. I think they’re just tragic failures who haven’t come to terms with ageing. They’re the sort of people who disapprove of face-lifts, and yet, by their behavior, are constantly chasing a lost youth. I want to start doing old things, not young things.
    Like slowly starting to give my property away, instead of spending my time trying to acquire it. Like seeing everything from a distance, rather than close-up and personal. Like not feeling slighted all the time or hating myself twenty-four hours a day. Like realizing that this civilization, like all civilizations, will one day come to an end. Like being able to spend a day doing nothing instead of feeling obliged to cram it with diversionary activities to avoid guilt and anxiety. Like realizing that if I can’t understand an idea or a concept, it’s not my fault but the fault of the person who’s trying to put it across. Like being able to see things with a historical perspective and really understand that what goes around comes around. Like being nice to people, instead of scared of them.
    Bicycling to outer Mongolia is for people under forty. “Tekkin’ it eezee” is for people over sixty. Well, that’s how I see it. I feel relieved of that terrible Protestant work ethnic that has dogged me all my life. I feel light, calm, like a great field of ripe corn, slowly swaying in the breeze, all chubby and sun-kissed. Lovely feeling.
    Obviously I’m too young to get whisked away by a Stannah Stairlift, slip into a Damart vest, go on sea cruises or Enjoy the Luxury of a Walk-In Bath. Nor do I want to spend my days poring over church registers with a family tree in one hand, to discover that one of my ancestors was a medieval woodcutter in the Forest of Dean, a pursuit that would bore me silly. (Finding out about it, that is. Probably