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

nicely.”
    In August I shall be a grandmother. It is the most extraordinary feeling. Grandmaternal feelings are already pouring out of me like sweat. I want to take my grandchild to the Science Museum, to the park, swimming, teach it the old songs (whatever they are), to bounce it up and down on my knee. I want to play “This little pig went to market” on its toes, and bounce it up and down on my knee saying, “My lord and my lady went into the park, To have a little airing before it got dark…My lady went trit-trot-trit-trot…” I want to make gingerbread men, and play pooh-sticks. I am desperate to be the kind of grannie that I had—and, funnily enough, most of us had—a woman full of cuddles, patience, treats and mischief.
    It’s odd—apparently a lot of women these days dread being a grannie because just the word reminds them of some tiny, bent person with a white bun shaped like a doughnut on top of her head, giving off a smell of dirty clothes, peppermint and cat’s pee. But children don’t notice these things. All they know is that Grannie is a source of fun and love and calm all at the same time.
    After delicious pheasant with apples, a recipe from the Jane Grigson Good Things book, it was ten to ten and Penny said she was knackered, and James said so was he, and Hughie said why didn’t we pretend that ten o’clock was midnight, so we opened another bottle of champagne and toasted each other and absent friends.
    “To Philippa!” said Hughie. “I remember when she was in hospital with breast cancer and she rang me saying, ‘Darling, I’m in remission!’ and I said, ‘Don’t be silly, of course you’re not,’ and she said, ‘But the doctors say I am, darling!’ Complete rubbish of course. She was dead in three weeks.”
    “Don’t be so bitchy, dear,” said James. “I know none of you liked her very much, but she was very good to Archie—and she was always very nice to me.”
    “‘Always very nice to me,’” said Hughie, with a wry smile. “Not quite good enough that, really, is it? I hope they don’t put the words ‘Well, he was always very nice to me ’ on my tombstone.”
    “Your voice is getting very high and querulous, dear,” said James to him, querulously, as it happened.
    “It happens as you get older, dear,” said Hughie to him. “I think I shall have to apply weights.”
    After that, Penny and I got up off the sofa, each saying “ugh” as we did so, another sign of growing older, and went staggering off into the night. Very nice.
    Anyway, as far as the midnight bit went, Penny and I wondered why we hadn’t thought up this ruse years ago. Black may be the new white, and night the new day, and holidays the new work, as they constantly say in the papers, but what about ten, on New Year’s Eve, being the new midnight? There is no one I know over sixty who wants to go to bed after eleven o’clock at the very latest.
    Rang Jack rather drunkenly just before I went to bed to wish him Happy New Year on his answering machine, assuming they’d be living it up at a party, but instead Jack himself answered, sounding rather grim.
    “Are you all right?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t slurring my words.
    “Well, Chrissie’s not drinking, so I’m not either,” he replied coldly. “We’re already in bed.” Made me feel dreadfully guilty because of course while I was pregnant I drank and smoked myself silly. And took a few drugs as far as I remember. But it was all different then.
    So odd. When I was young, old people took me aside and with quavering voices told me how when they were young they never had sex before marriage, and could never afford more than one pair of shoes, and were glad of a shandy at Christmas, and I’d look shocked at the austerity of it all. Now I’m taking young people aside and telling them, in a quavering voice, how when I was young I tried heroin, took uppers and downers every weekend, drank so much I once passed out in the middle of Oxford