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 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 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.

Virginia Ironside, author of No! I Don't Want to Join a Bookclub on rotating her friends, Advocaat eaten with a spoon and penguin.co.uk's nasty dose of amnesia.

1. Who or what always puts a smile on your face?
Almost any baby I see in the street.

2. What are you reading at the moment?
Alex Loma’s Jelly Roll Morton, about the great jazz pianist of the 20s and 30s.

3. Which author do you most admire?
It used to be Tolstoy until I re-read Anna Karenina recently and wondered what, exactly, I had seen in him. My favourites now are Nabokov, Graham Greene and Julian Maclaren-Ross.

4. What's your earliest memory?
Sitting on the doorstep of a house in Hampstead with my father, while he showed me how to make “fishbones” out of fern leaves.

5. What is your greatest fear?
That I’ll unwittingly harm someone else.

6. How would you like to be remembered?
I’d like to be remembered as a kind grannie, and a mother who did her best.

7. Have you even done something you've really regretted?
Of course I have! I’m human! And I’m not going to reveal any one of them!

8. How do you spoil yourself?
Disgusting as it may sound, my great treat is a half bottle of Advocaat which I drink/eat with a spoon. I have to say, lest I sound like a terminal alcoholic, that this is something I have only once every couple of years.

9. What's your favourite word/book?
Of Love and Hunger by Julian Maclaren Ross and Lolita by Nabokov

10. Who do you turn to in a crisis?
I turn to whichever of my friends I haven’t recently bored with another crisis. I try to give my friends breaks from my moans now and again, by rotating them.

11. What makes you angry?
I cannot stand seeing children being ignored or shouted at. I think children are our future and should be respected and cherished at all time. Whenever a child I’ve not met comes into a room, I always stand up and shake his or her hand, whatever age they are.

12. Have you ever had any other jobs apart from writing?
I worked as a secretary once to Dame Shirley Williams, who was then working for a left-wing group called the Fabian Society.

13. Are you in love?
Only with my grandsons. And maybe someone else…

14. What's your worst vice?
Checking my emails too often.

15. What are you proudest of?
Having reached the great age of sixty without, so far, dying of gloom.

16. Where do you write?
In my sitting room, in a very comfortable chair with the keyboard on my knees.

17. Where's your favourite city?
My new favourite city is Cadiz, in Spain. I was there recently – it’s a wonderful old-fashioned town, designed on a grid, with the most amazing baroque cathedral and barely a tourist in sight.

18. When was the last time you cried?
Yesterday evening, when someone was telling me about their son. It was rather embarrassing.

19. One wish; what would it be?
To love and be loved by another person.

20. Did you enjoy school?
I hated every single minute of it. That’s one of the reasons that I enjoy life now – life simply could never be as bad as it was when I was young.

Extra questions:

1. Will the printed word endure?
Probably not, but luckily I won’t be around to mourn its passing.

2. Which newspaper do you read?
Independent of course, since I write a weekly column called Dilemmas for it (Mondays if you’re interested).

3. Who/What is your biggest influence?
My father was my biggest influence. He was a very influential figure in my life – and if you want to know more it’s all in my book, Janey and Me, which tells of my childhood with an alcoholic mother.

4. What books are you reading at the moment?
Haven’t you asked this question before? Are you getting Alzheimers? Or is it just Alzheimers Lite as I gather it’s known to us early sixty year olds.

5. What books did you read as a child?
Well Enid Blyton of course, who I loved. Anything by E. Nesbitt. I loved Schoolfriend, the comic, and the Topper. I adored Rider Haggard’s book, and Wilkie Collins Woman in White. I loved Sheridan Le Fanu, too. I was still reading quite Victorian books, like Little Women and Little Lord Fauntleroy, books that no self-respecting child would be seen dead reading these days. There was also a wonderful author called Noel Streatfield, whose books I adored. Not to mention anything by Lorna Hill, whose books used, I remember, to contain a lot of spanking scenes which I, and most other girls I imagine, found rather titillating.

6. Which literary character would you most like to meet?
I don’t think any. I like my characters safely chained into the pages of a book.

7. Which authors do you most admire?
You HAVE got Alzheimers.

8. Where/When do you do most of your writing?
I’ve told you where. When? Whenever I get a moment… when I’m not putting the rubbish out, going to Waitrose, looking after my grandson, chatting on the phone…