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

Cuts of Chicken and Tuna.
    A fat man in front of me in the queue was wearing a T-shirt on which was written the word: WHATEVER.
    Later
    When I got back James rang to tell me that his aunt Jane—yes, the “very grown-up” one—has gone into a home, kicking and screaming at first but not for long because apparently the place is stuffed with what he calls “wingcos,” slang for “Wing Commanders.” Even if the blokes in question have lost every single marble they ever had, Jane, who retains only about half a marble, is still galvanized and rejuvenated simply by the presence of a man. Exactly, in fact, like me. Funny that. I have no interest in men at all these days on the sexual front, thank God, but I can still get flattered out of my tree by a man, any old man, turning his eyes onto me and twinkling and flirting.
    Asked Hughie round for a drink to help me with the DVD—not that he knows anything about such things but I thought he could read the instructions out to me while I followed them. More important, I wanted to tackle his cough. He dropped by but, instead of looking five years older than me, which he is, he looked pretty washed-up, more like someone of my father’s age in his final days.
    “Are you losing weight, Hughie?” I asked, when I let him in. “You’re not looking quite as…er…well-covered as you were the last time I saw you.”
    “Well-covered! What a word,” said Hughie. As he came in he coughed, which was lucky because if for some reason he hadn’t coughed I would have been up a gum tree. “Doesn’t everything look lovely?” he said, admiring the room as he sat down. “You’re so lucky to have Maciej. He’s so good-looking, too. James and I have to put up with a terrible old duck called Lilian who does nothing but call in sick.”
    We tried to work the DVD but drew a blank. It involves something called a scart plug, and whenever I hear those words my brain goes kind of dead. I don’t know what a scart plug is and I never will. When I rang Jack, he told me it was a fat thing full of prickles, so I then had a vague idea of what it looks like and he told me that we had stored several of these in his old room upstairs.
    “Mum, you’ve got dozens of scart plugs,” he said. “In that chest. In my old room.”
    I thought about it. Jack’s old room was now lived in by Michelle. I could just imagine the daunting piles of CDs, beauty products, DVDs, plastic bags and castoff handbags that Michelle would have stuffed on top of my assorted collection of wires. So I thought that enough was enough for that evening. I’d got the DVD player out of its box, and that was scary enough. I will tackle the scart situation tomorrow.
    In the meantime, it was easy to tackle Hughie about the doctor, since he coughed all the time.
    “Hughie, what are you going to do about that cough?” I said. “It’s terrible. Have you seen the doctor?”
    “No,” he said, “but you’re right. I must. James keeps nagging me. I’ll make an appointment tomorrow. I swear on my mother’s grave.”
    “Your mother was cremated. She doesn’t have a grave,” I said, Sherlock Holmes–like in my eagerness to stop up all the loopholes that Hughie might use to avoid seeing the doctor.
    “So she was,” said Hughie. “But I will. I’ve got to get it sorted out.”
    But I had a very strong feeling that he wouldn’t do anything about it at all. He looked like a man who was deceiving himself. However, I couldn’t press him any further, so I left it at that.
    March 4
    A late birthday lunch with Archie at a restaurant called Pulli in fashionable Clerkenwell. It was very nice of him to organize it, because he must still be feeling pretty grim after Philippa’s death. It was only six months ago, too. I imagined him thinking: “Why should I be celebrating Marie’s birthday when poor old Philippa never even got to sixty?” That’s how my mind would work, anyway. But Archie’s probably too nice to think like that.
    He