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

of being sixty and I slept like a baby.
    February 4
    Went to a “cozy birthday supper” with Marion and Tim, which was much jollier than the last time. Just us, and not a therapist in sight. Tim had written me a beautiful poem, which he read out, rather drunkenly, over pudding.
    Oh, how you do defy the years
    You’re half the age of all your peers
    In fact you’re only twenty-five
    Compared to you, we’re half-alive
    So clinging to your skirts we go
    While you disdain Time’s stupid flow!
    Very flattering and sweet, of course, but that preoccupation with being young unnerves me.
    I’d have been very happy with a poem that went:
    At last you’re free of youth’s cruel chains
    With time to sit and count your gains—
    Experience, peace and lack of fear
    Are gifts of this, your sixtieth year.
    So celebrate the past unroll’d
    And cheer the fact that now you’re OLD!
    Or something like that. I would never have made a poet, clearly.
    Slightly worried to find that, driving back, I couldn’t see a thing, I stopped and cleaned my glasses but still everything seemed incredibly fuzzy.
    Feb 5
    Rang up Penny and asked if she could see. She said yes, she could. I then asked her if she could see in the dark and she said no, only vampires, owls and moles can see in the dark, and I said but seriously, I can’t see when driving and I can’t see to read in bed at night. So she looked the problem up in her book Eyes: Problems Of and it turns out that after sixty, people need two-thirds more light to read by than they did when they were twenty. Made a date with the optician’s at once.
    Penny has booked a jaunt to Nice for us in June.
    Feb 6
    Is there actually something wrong these days with the word “old”? I wonder. I was in Waterstones today and saw a book that was a compilation of quotes from people over sixty with the unbelievable title Late Youth. What are all these euphemisms? I’ve even heard people talk of the “autumn of life.” I’m starting to think that “old” is becoming a dirty word. While I quite understand why we should avoid using certain words, not using the word “old” seems as coy and ludicrous as Victorians putting skirts on their piano legs because they felt so uncomfortable at the sight of them.
    Though I was rather touched by Hughie who the other day described James’s aunt of ninety-five as “ very grown up indeed.”
    Feb 7
    Had lunch with Lucy in her London pied-à-terre. She gave me a lovely pot of hyacinths. She does yoga and showed me the Sun Salutation on her carpet. Luckily, I managed to do it, too, though I didn’t like it when your leg has to be stretched out behind you.
    “We’ve got to stay fit,” she said, worriedly, “or we’ll fall to pieces.” She dreads becoming sixty because she thinks that something terrible will happen to her.
    “You know when teenagers reach fourteen they go to bed the night before their birthday perfectly sweet and amiable, and wake up on their fourteenth birthday sulky, slamming doors, spotty and telling you they wished they’d never been born,” she said. “Well, I believe that the day before I’m sixty I’ll go to bed perfectly normal, and wake up on my sixtieth birthday ranting about the state of the world, shouting that teenagers have no respect, and complaining about the amount of rubbish left on my street.”
    I assured her that I’d been complaining about the rubbish left on my street from about the age of forty. But, of course, living in Shepherds Bush it’s difficult not to complain about the rubbish because often it is hard to get out of one’s front door for the piles of old fast-food cartons, chicken bones, half-drunk Special Brew cans, broken television sets, mattresses, bags of what look like dead babies, oozing car batteries and old sofas that clog up the pavements.
    Feb 8
    I am plagued with spam. I think it’s because someone once sent me an all-singing, all-dancing birthday card via some company in the States and now I