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

reaches thirty. OK, she’s leapt into the air thousands of times since she was sixteen, but suddenly it’s scary.
    “But we should get less frightened as we get older, not more frightened,” I said. And indeed one of the brilliant things about old age is the ludicrous confidence that it bestows.
    “I think we’re like old stags, frightened by new young bucks coming up with great antlers,” he said.
    “I don’t feel like an old stag,” I said. I was wearing a very nice Vivienne Westwood top, which I got in a sale, and high-heeled boots, and thought I looked rather glam.
    “You don’t look like an old stag! You look, if I may say so, like a frightfully young stag. A most attractive and beautiful young stag.”
    “Surely not stag, Archie…”
    “Of course not! How frightfully foolish I am.”
    My feeling is that there is a moment when too much experience works not to our advantage but to our disadvantage. We have found, during our lives, so many things that could happen, so many frightening possibilities, that we are constantly trying to avoid them, and that makes us nervous.
    “My parents, who when young thought nothing of driving across the world, and nothing of getting on a train, became petrified of travel when they got old,” said Archie. “Just going to Oxford was this huge production and put them into a total funk. That’s why old people are earlier and earlier for trains.”
    “I’m getting terribly early for trains,” I said. Instead of telling old people how young they look, perhaps the biggest compliment would be to say: “Oh, you look like someone who catches trains by only a couple of minutes.”
    “What about gardening?” I asked.
    Archie nodded gloomily. “Yes, very much into that, I must admit,” he said. “Partly the nurturing instinct—there’s no one left to look after when the children have flown the nest—but partly, surely, the realization that everything is recycled, it grows, it dies, it grows it dies…just like us. Did you know,” he suddenly said, rather irritatedly, “that apparently that runner Linford Christie—wasn’t he the one with the lunchbox? Anyway, he won something when he was the great age of thirty-two and he said that ‘Age is only a number.’ What did he mean, ‘only a number’? I bet if someone said he’d taken three and a half minutes to run a mile instead of two and a half minutes or whatever, and when he complained replied: ‘But it’s only a number,’ he’d be frightfully put out.”
    After the tiniest main course known to man, the sort of thing one might prepare for a goblin, I asked for a cheeseboard to finish off the meal as I was starving, and three pieces of cheese, transparent with thinness, like inch squares of net curtain, arrived; Archie’s chocolate mousse, a thin tube the size of half a pencil, was served on a piece of mirror. God knows what the bill was.
    But as he paid it, he said: “Well, we won’t be coming here again. Perhaps we should pop in to a Burger King before we go back?” Then he said, looking at me rather intently, “We must do this again soon. Let’s make a habit of it.”
    Soon? Habit? What on earth did he mean? I feel all peculiar. Surely he didn’t mean…? Of course he didn’t.
    Anyway, I’m giving all that up.
    Later
    Got back and popped into Michelle’s room to get the scart plug. Discovered that she has completely redecorated the place in dark pink. How I didn’t smell the paint I don’t know. Penny says that since one’s sight and hearing go down the drain as one gets older, one’s sense of smell gets more acute. Clearly total rubbish. Michelle has also fastened gold stars to the ceiling and erected a kind of deep blue chiffon canopy above her bed, which is covered with stuffed toys; it looks like a mixture of a tart’s boudoir and a ten-year-old’s bedroom. I was just about to be furious when I realized that actually it looks fantastically pretty.
    Noticed, to my horror, a couple of empty