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

Plato, about which, to my shame, I know nothing.
    I used to go to parties on New Year’s Eve but, like most of the rest of the world, I now discover, have never enjoyed them. Why didn’t everyone tell me before that they hated them? I wouldn’t have felt so out of it. When I was young we never really did New Year’s Eve. We never did Mother’s Day or Father’s Day actually, and when David and I got married we just went to a registry office, had a few people round for a glass of champagne and went to the Lake District for a week for the honeymoon. Nowadays you go to a wedding and you have to give up half your life…breakfasts, dinners, teas, parties, staying over at local bed and breakfasts…whine, whine, moan, moan, oh, stop it, Marie.
    Anyway, Hughie, James and me are all around the same age and that’s why this New Year’s Eve we decided just to have dinner and not make a fuss. They asked Penny and we made up a peculiar foursome.
    Penny and I walked round—they live only round the corner, in a big mansion flat—and James greeted us in a white apron and said he was cooking a couple of pheasants (my favorite) that he’d found at the back of the freezer, and we opened the bottle of champagne I’d brought.
    James was wearing, that night, a kind of weird rubber pink thing round his wrist. That was next to one of those horrible copper bracelets that people believe cures them of rheumatism. It was obviously a statement of a kind—but what statement I didn’t like to inquire since when I last asked someone what their colored bracelet was for, they replied: “It’s for breast cancer.” A surprising answer. “Don’t you mean, ‘For combating breast cancer’?” I asked, and then I really did feel as if perhaps there really might a touch of Asperger’s about me. I fell over myself apologizing.
    Anyway, I’ve seen so many people wearing these bands—yellow, white, blue—that I’m tempted, sometimes, to wear a plain brown rubber band round my wrist so that, when people ask me what it is, I can reply: “A rubber band, you idiot.”
    Luckily James wanted to show Penny the new herb garden he’d made on the roof, and because I’d already seen it and didn’t fancy staggering up a ladder by torchlight in the freezing cold, I was left with Hughie. The sitting room is all puffed-up chintz sofas and gold mirrors, very camp. He shoved some pistachio nuts at me, topped up my glass and asked me how Archie was.
    “You mean how is he ‘bearing up’?” I replied. “I don’t know. I haven’t been in touch. But no doubt in five minutes he will find some glamorous young woman to marry and, irritatingly, start a whole new family. Eligible widowers like him usually do.”
    “Or someone finds them, ” said Hughie. “I thought you were always interested in him? Didn’t you have a teenage crush on him?”
    “Oh, that was years ago,” I said rather crossly. “And he never knew about it. And anyway, I’m beyond all that. It’s the life of the grannie, for me. Oh, God, Hughie, I’m just bursting to tell everyone about this baby! I keep meeting people who say things like: ‘When you’re a grannie…’ And I want to say: ‘But I’m going to be a grannie! And I want to jump up and down!’ Instead I have to look all sorrowful and wistful and say: ‘Well, one day, perhaps…’ Then there are all these people who are never going to be grannies because they don’t have any children, and I feel so sorry for them!”
    Hughie bowed his head and pointed to himself. “Don’t mind me,” he said, in an amused way, and I suddenly felt dreadfully insensitive and rude and cursed myself.
    “Oh, I’m so sorry, Hughie, sometimes I just open my mouth and toads jump out like those princesses in fairy tales.”
    “It’s all part of your charm,” said Hughie. “But don’t worry. I couldn’t bear to be a grannie. My role as half-great-uncle-out-law, as you would no doubt insist on my being called, will do me