Extract from : No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club

Extract from No! I Don’t Want to Join a Bookclub by Virginia Ironside

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 which reads ‘Happy Birthday! You still look as young as ever!’ Inside it says: ‘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 deaner 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 marvellous. 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 for ever, it’s so beastly to feel the days slipping past and not be 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 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 bookclub, instead,’

A bookclub?! Certainly not! Bookclub 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 analysing 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 bookclub to keep young and stimulated. I don’t want to be young and stimulated any more.

There seems to be a common line which 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 facelifts, and yet, by their behaviour, are constantly chasing a lost youth. I want to start doing old things, not young things.