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

up her skirts and trying to put biscuits down her bra. Then, for about twenty minutes, she picked up my Waitrose magazine and stared, brow furrowed, at a picture of a mushroom risotto. I eventually eased the magazine from her grasp, and then, when she wasn’t reaching over and trying to pick the flowers off my floral skirt, she attempted to make a house out of the saucers and biscuits and cups of tea on the tray with disastrous results. Finally I pushed them out of her reach saying, firmly: “No, you don’t want any more tea. It’s all old and cold.”
    Suddenly my grandmother looked up at me. “Old and cold!” she said. “Just like me!” For a moment she was at her amusing best. Then she relapsed back into gibberish. It was a dreadfully sad and unnerving experience. Why did I think of this? Oh, yes. Flu makes you want your mum, just like the people in my grandmother’s home. So sad.
    I could think of nothing for hours, except the miseries of living too long, until the phone rang and it was James, who said he was coming by with a turkey dinner on a plate covered with foil and a bottle of champagne, and though he wouldn’t come in because he didn’t want to catch my horrible disease, he’d ring the bell and leave it on the doorstep.
    This time I burst into tears of gratitude and affection, and suddenly now, after a couple of glasses of champagne—funny how I can drink champagne at any time—and a telly turkey supper, I feel on the mend at last. James is a darling.
    December 28th
    Had to sign a credit slip for some petrol today. My pen didn’t appear to be working. When I looked closer I found that I was trying to write with the thermometer, which had found its way into my handbag, using the mercury as the point. Embarrassedly stuffed it back in my bag with a hysterical laugh.
    Dec 31st
    Much, much, better. Went round to Hughie and James’s for New Year’s Eve supper. Must explain Hughie and James’s situation. James is Jack’s half-uncle David’s half-brother. Oh, dear, all the halves and sixths and steps these days. It used to be bad enough with people being second cousin once removed, but the half situation is a nightmare. I have, for instance, a half-brother. I call him my half-brother, because he is and because he was born when I was twenty-five and he is a total stranger to me, lives in South Africa, making him even more of a mystery. He, on the other hand, calls me his sister because, presumably, when he was born I was on the scene and quite naturally he sees me as a full relation. When I told Penny about my scrupulosity, she said I must suffer from Asperger’s Syndrome. Charming. I said she should know—she’d read enough about it in the Family Doctor book that is her bible.
    Anyway, James is Jack’s half-uncle, and a very nice, but rather overly sentimental creature who used to be in marketing but now does odd jobs, digging people’s gardens, decorating, taking dogs for a walk. He says he’s never been happier. He’s one of the kindest people I know, always prone to tears, incredibly involved in alternative medicine and “spiritual” things. Anyway, he’s gay and he’s lived with Hughie for twenty years and I love both of them to pieces.
    Hughie, on the other hand, is dry and funny, and he’s the sort of bloke of the two, well, more of the bloke. I never understand why they’re together, nice as James is, but end up with that dreadful cliché that everyone comes up with when they simply can’t understand why two people are a couple: “It must be the great sex.” Then one’s mind boggles, and very soon one has to start thinking about something else.
    Hughie still works as a solicitor, at sixty-five, but you wouldn’t know it, one of those sorts of people. He’s always reading Spinoza and the Times Literary Supplement, has read Goethe twice in the original German, goes to the opera till he’s blue in the face and knows all about classical music and the difference between Pliny and