Bring on the grim reaper

The message, I suggest, is that ageing can be liberating and fun, that it isn’t awful, but apparently I have missed the more subtle point Virginia wants to make. “I don’t think it comes across terribly well in the book but the message is that ageing is not like going on being young,” she says. “After 60 is completely new territory, so you enter it with a freshness that you had when you were young. I don’t like people who slump into miserable old age, who pack up, and I don’t like people who say I’m going to go jumping and riding and learning languages — that seems like repetition. There’s a whole new life after 60 which involves different shifts and different relationships. It’s lovely. You feel like a snake that has shed its awful 50-year-old skin that’s been getting all disgusting and smelly and covered with soup stains, and suddenly you’re a new shiny 60-year-old.”

All this is possible because she now feels free of the suspicion that she wasn’t a proper journalist (of course, she always was) and should discover where her talent really lay, and consequently feels less anxious, more confident and happier, she explains. “I’ve been a very unhappy bunny when I was younger and so while everybody else is going ‘How awful it is I’m not young,’ I’m saying, ‘How great it is I’m no longer young’. I love the idea that there’s not so much future ahead of me. That future was such a burden, all those years, what I should do, what I shouldn’t.

“Now I know — hope, anyway — that there aren’t going to be that many, so my choices are limited. No, not having a future is a great relief because I don’t have to worry about it. I’ve got, I hope, about 15 years, I don’t want much longer than that. At the moment I feel lucky to be old, it’s new and exciting and fresh, but I won’t feel like that by the time I’m 75. I hope to be dead and gone by then.”

I am sitting in an elegant Farrow and Balled house talking to a wittily self-deprecating woman who looks little more than 50. “I’m terribly vain, as you can see,” she says. “There were moments when I described my body [in the book] and actually it was rather revolting when I read it back so I had to take a bit of it out.” She may seem emotionally brittle, but she is nevertheless accomplished and successful and claims that she is now content. The joy of being 60 and the determination to expire at a pre-ordained time don’t quite add up, it strikes me. You might change your mind, I say, but Virginia objects to this.

“If I change my mind, I’m never going to tell anyone. When you’re 60 it’s sensible to start preparing for death. You should be welcoming the grim reaper and making him a cup of tea if he wants to pop in briefly. The idea of being in your Eighties and not being ready for death is tragic, so naive. I’m ready for it every morning. I’m pleased that I’m alive but, of course, as a suicidal young person, I’ve gone over dying endlessly.”

Virginia grew up in London, where her mother was a career-focused professor of fashion (and a damaged creature herself) who left when her only child was 14. When her father, a designer, remarried, Virginia, still a teenager, was left alone in the family home. She wrote a novel, became a rock correspondent, and, desperate for affection, engaged wholeheartedly with the culture of Sixties London.

“I never slept with any rock stars except a one-hit wonder nobody has ever heard of. And a lot of PRs. Horrible. I came from a generation of women who were pretty submissive, you did what men wanted. Then the sexual revolution came along and the feminist idea that ‘no means no’ was on the distant horizon so I continued to say yes to everything. Anyone who asked me to go to bed with them, I would just go to bed with them; it seemed like the right thing to do. I was depressed and screwed up and constantly not in love but just crackers about people.

“I look back and I’m amazed that I got to this age and I’m not completely barmy. I didn’t do drugs in any great quantity and even when I was suicidal there would always be a bit of me which would say, just wait till tomorrow before you go ahead. There was no fun about that time.”

She married, briefly, and had her son, Will, and these days is resolutely single. I wonder whether her youthful promiscuity had any lasting effect on her attitude to relationships? “Yes, I find it a bit confusing,” she replies. “God knows how people are meant to behave these days, but luckily I’m not especially interested in having a relationship. I’d have one if it rolled up on my doorstep but it’s not something that I’m addicted to.

“It used to be: without a bloke I was just nothing. Or without a bloke to pine after — that was more it — I couldn’t exist at all. I’m not very good at existing but that feeling that if only I had a man I’d be all right, has completely gone, which is a fantastic relief. I was bringing in awfully unsuitable characters just to fill the male role. I don’t think I want to share my life again.”

Through Marie in her book she writes about E. M. Forster’s idea, “only connect”, the need for individuals to link their rational and emotional sides. “It’s something that eluded me for a long time. Funny, being an agony aunt you should know all about these things, but one is trying very hard to make things right all the time . . .”

Does she seek it? “No. All sorts of connections involve people snoring beside you. Irritating the daylights out of one. I like men fantastically now, I find them the bee’s knees. I used to be full of hate and fear and I haven’t stopped being gloomy and full of self-loathing but I’m much more open to how nice people are. I love clever, funny blokes, I adore them, but I don’t think I ever want anybody actually . . . to wake up beside somebody. I don’t think I’d ever like anybody that much. It’s limiting. I find I’ve so many bits of me. Do you wake up with someone?”

She has certainly connected with her grandson, she says brightly. He is 3 and spends one day a week with her, a thought which makes her practically explode with happiness. This is pure love, she explains, unfiltered by the anxiety, responsibility and guilt that accompanies parenting.

“I feel with my grandson a relationship that I’ve never had with anyone. Incredible contact. Peace. Love. Of course, it’s terribly tiring being with a little person all day. But it doesn’t matter. I just love him doing anything, I love him standing up at the end of the room picking up a marble. That to me is a beautiful sight. God I sound like Mrs Mush! We do a lot of playing and this is what I remember my grandmother doing with me. She adored me and as I repeat the relationship I feel the peace that I felt with her. We have great games and private characters and it’s another world. Lovely.”

As I leave she kisses me goodbye, and when I get home there is an e-mail invitation to her party, which is friendly of her. Yet my abiding impression is of a woman who talks warm words but who is self-contained and adept at protecting herself. Her verbal openness makes her attractive, not to say endearing and fascinating, but it is not the same as letting people get close to you. It seems that the only person with whom she can truly relax is her grandson, one person who will never hurt her.

MY BODY SHRIEKS. I DON’T MIND

Even now, when I do my ten minutes of yoga a day, I see small folds of skin waiting to tumble down my thighs. They’re particularly in evidence when I do a shoulder-stand with my legs in the air. They’ve got strange marks on them — thread veins, the odd hint of a varicose vein. My upper arms have wobbly bits hanging from them. The backs of my hands are speckled with brown spots. When did they appear? Only a few years ago, I think, when I could pretend to myself (talk about in denial!) that I was about 30. Now my entire body is shrieking at me that I am old. And what’s so utterly strange is that I don’t really mind. It feels rather comfortable, friendly and right.

I’m relieved at not having to clamber into bed with a slightly pissed pal or naive young pick-up

“Archie,” I said. “It’s for the best. I’m simply hopeless at relationships. It’s something I’ve learned as I’ve got older. I’m good at lots of other things, but not that. Either I fall madly in love with people and they don’t fall in love with me, or the other way round. It’s horrible for everyone.”

“But surely you could overcome that if you just got together with a friend,” said Archie, sitting back in his chair. “A friend is all we really want in life these days. Not sex, especially, though it’s jolly good fun, or can be, but really what we all want is a pal, a number one supporter. Only connect — wasn’t that what that bloke, who was it — E. M. Forster — said? I don’t like to think of you not connecting. It sounds as if you’re making the best of a bad job, if you don’t think I’m being frightfully patronising.”

For a moment I felt touched by a huge sense of loneliness and, to my great surprise, tears came to my eyes and I could hardly speak. Then I recovered myself.

“We’re all lonely, Archie, and once we admit that to ourselves, we’re happier,” I said. “Without relationships, and I mean sexual relationships with the opposite sex, we have nothing to lose. It’s friendship alone for me from now on.”

“That,” said Archie, looking horrified, “is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard you say. Well, I do wish you well on your blind date. I rather hope he makes you change your mind.”

“Fat chance,” I said. “Anyway, this isn’t really a date. He’s not serious. I just said it to make conversation.”

It dawned on me slowly that I was actually having a proper conversation — with a grown-up man who wasn’t married or gay. Or weird. But the minute I thought that, a shutter came down inside me. The territory was far too dangerous. Anyway, there were probably platoons of Swedish bimbos in the bushes, waiting to pounce on Archie the moment I got out of the drive. In the cupboards, hiding in the great big stone urns in the garden, shivering inside the lavatory cisterns, concealed in the walls of the old ice-house . . . all lying low till they heard the door close and then springing out, like a Busby Berkeley chorus. “I must go,” I said, looking at my watch.

After I’d got back to London and waited a week it was clear that Baz wasn’t going to ring, and I’m curiously disappointed. But, really, thank God he didn’t. Because if he’d pounced, I would only have pushed him away, he would have been humiliated and I would have felt like a creep. Keep telling myself how great it is to have given up sex anyway. I hate that clawing feeling, below my stomach, aching with want. I’m relieved at not having to clamber into bed with some slightly pissed pal or a young, naive pick-up, just to satisfy a craving. Sex is no longer my be-all and end-all and when it was it took over so completely it damaged friendships, my career, my sanity.

And all I feel now is great relief that I don’t have to worry any more about faking it or not faking it, or asking for it, or pushing him away, or whether I’ve come or he’s come . . . and what a relief it is now not to care any more about whether he will ring when he said he would. What a relief, too, to be able to flirt shamelessly without any risk of it going further.

Extracted from No, I Don’t Want to Join a Bookclub, by Virginia Ironside, published by Penguin on September 28, at £12.99. Available from Times Books First for £11.69 incl p&p: 0870 16080