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

bottles of wine in her wastepaper basket. Surely she isn’t a secret drinker? Wished I’d never gone in at all.
    Odd, that. All right for me to be a secret drinker, but not OK for her to be a secret drinker. I say secret drinker. The problem is that increasingly I need one glass of wine before I can even go out and have a drink with someone. Did I say “need?” Did I say “one” glass of wine? Oh, Marie, AA, here you come.
    March 6
    Jack and Chrissie have finally had the scan, which means that at last I’m able to tell people. Unfortunately it is no fun at all, because those who already have grandchildren aren’t remotely impressed and those who haven’t got them look so pitifully envious that I feel a complete creep for sharing my good news with them. In fact I feel like someone walking about the slums of Bangladesh carrying a huge bag of cream cakes that I stuff into my mouth, one by one with a hand covered with diamond rings.
    It is, apparently, a boy. Ever so slightly sad, because having had a boy, I’d love to experience something different, and, of course, be able to dress it up in all kinds of girlie things. But there you go. As Jack says, at least it’s not a rabbit, which would be very unsettling.
    One of Jack’s friends asked him why they wanted to know the sex of the baby and didn’t they want to keep it as a surprise, and Jack replied, rightly, that just having a baby would be quite surprise enough, and anyway, when they were told the sex after the scan, that was a surprise in itself.
    I’m going round to see them both tonight, so I’d better get cracking with the DVD player—I can’t arrive saying that I haven’t got round to working it yet.
    Later
    Spent the entire day struggling with the DVD. I got the scart plug sorted out, and then the telly went blue and the word DVD came up…so clearly it was all working. But when I put a disc in, it kept saying that there was no disc in. I eventually drew a blank and had to ring Jack.
    “I’ve put it in, and nothing happens,” I said.
    “Mum,” said Jack, with that cautious note in his voice that I know means: “I can’t believe you’re such a total idiot.” “Which way up are you putting it?”
    “The right way,” I said. “Silver side up.”
    “That’s the wrong way up,” he said, and I could practically hear his eyebrows crashing against the ceiling.
    “But the other side’s got all writing on it,” I explained. “And pictures.”
    “That’s the side you want,” he said.
    He was right.
    What would I do without a son? If I hadn’t had a son, I would still be writing letters, rather than e-mailing. It was only because he screamed and begged me to get a computer, back in the eighties, that I ever got weaned off the typewriter in the first place, and I still remember him, at eleven years old, with his curious middle-sized hands, unpacking the entire thing and setting it up and explaining it all patiently to me as if I were some total imbecile.
    “This, Mum,” he said, showing me a piece of plastic attached by a wire to a sinister-looking box, “is a mouse.”
    Already frantic with tension, I burst into tears, saying: “But it isn’t a mouse! That’s the whole thing about these horrible computer thingies! I can’t understand it! I can’t understand any of it! I’ll never understand it! I wish we’d never got this horrible thing!”
    And I remember him putting his arms round me, laughing and comforting me, and my thinking for the first time: This is the beginning of getting old, when my son comforts me. When my son teaches me. When my son looks after me. Today it’s when we’re sorting out computers, but this is the first day of many, and it’s a huge stage in our lives, and although I don’t like it right now, it’s a necessary stage and a normal stage for him and for me.
    Anyway, by the time I went to supper with them, I’d got the hang of the DVD, though I still think videos are better because you can fast forward