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

is wonderfully self-effacing. The message on my answering machine to invite me for lunch, went: “Could you bear to give me a ring if the idea of having lunch with me isn’t absolute anathema to you?” When he rang to make the date, he’d said: “Let’s meet on Thursday—if we live that long…”
    God knows how Archie booked a table, because Pulli is a restaurant in which you have to kill to get one, but no doubt he tips like a trooper. (Do troopers tip? Or do they swear?)
    I must say that catching sight of him waiting outside the restaurant did rather make my heart lurch. I know lots of people adore chunky blokes in vests or simmering young Italians with tumbling black curly hair, but for me the sight of a tall, svelte, middle-aged Englishman wearing a long, well-cut tailored coat open down the front, standing in a London street, is something to capture my heart—if my heart were capturable, that is.
    When he was my First Love (though he never knew it then and still doesn’t now, thank goodness), he can’t have been more than fifteen, and I’d met him at a bottle party I’d gate-crashed. Nightly I would walk past his parents’ house in Chelsea and stare in at the lighted window, wondering if he were inside. And yet, as I sat down at the table, it seemed quite extraordinary that my two roles could exist in a single lifetime. Once, when I was sixteen, shy, terrified, miserable, I used to crawl by his window like a stalker—and now, nearly fifty years later, I was sitting with him in a Clerkenwell restaurant, confident and relaxed with no designs on him at all, and simply deriving pleasure from being in his nice company for lunch. How wonderful not to be driven by a longing for company and sex.
    “Would you mind passing me the menu if it isn’t the most frightful bore?” he said to me. Then: “Oh, how splendid! ” to the waiter when he brought the sparkling water. “How frightfully kind!”
    Obviously I’d written to him when Philippa had died, but I felt I had to acknowledge her death again, couldn’t really avoid it after all, and he said, in that rather sweet way that some men have when talking about something that really matters to them but they don’t want to show it: “Yes, absolutely rotten luck, wasn’t it? Still makes me blub now and again.”
    Anyway, the dishes were incredibly expensive and I felt very guilty ordering one veal sweetbread in mushroom sauce and some polenta because it cost about £21. Archie ordered lobster and black pudding cappuccino, and the waiter said: “Eez that all? Here we advise our clients to order at least three portions each.”
    When the food arrived, mine was a sweetbread the size of a thumbnail with what looked like three sliced beansprouts and one chopped-up button mushroom in a teaspoon of sauce—all served on a piece of slate ! Archie’s lobster and black pudding cappuccino was a tiny bowl like a children’s tea set cup, half-filled with broth.
    Over lunch we naturally talked of old age. Our first topic was the fact that everyone we know is dropping like flies.
    “Yes, we’re getting to the difficult age,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, when I look in the obituary columns, it seems that everyone’s either between fifty-eight and sixty-five or between eighty and ninety,” he said. “Poor Philippa was fifty-nine, when you think of it. I believe that if we can get through these next few years, we’re probably in for a long stretch.”
    “You mean like in the Grand National, getting over Butcher’s Leap or whatever it is?”
    “Exactly! How frightfully well you put it!”
    Of course we got on to the subject of retiring as well, and he revealed that he had started to lose his nerve when it came to investing huge sums of money or whatever he does. And I agreed. When I’ve occasionally done the odd bit of supply teaching recently, a task that I would usually take in my stride, I feel all wobbly. I know how an acrobat must feel when she