No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year by Virginia Ironside Page A
Authors: Virginia Ironside
Ads: Link
Hughie for lunch after going round the Turner exhibition.
“Can you face it?” asked Hughie. “I mean, all those sunsets and ships at sea, was there something wrong with his eyesight, all that old rubbish?”
“Lovely!” I said.
As I stepped into the tube station I was quite bowled over by the idea that I no longer had to pay. Ever. “Freedom Pass!”—the very words are like the entry to a new life. On the platform I sat in a kind of dream of coddledness waiting for the train to come, thinking how lucky I was. I haven’t been on an Underground train since I was about forty. I waited, and waited…and then it turned out that the service had been halted because someone had committed suicide. Not that we were told that, of course, but I knew it because they said it was due to “passenger action” and a train driver I know told me that that was a euphemism for what was known in the business as a “one under.”
Felt very sad that anyone could want to die like that and imagined that he was probably young, youth being one of the most depressing times of life, in my experience. At the same time felt fantastically irritated that whoever he was decided to commit suicide on the very day that I was taking my first free trip on the Underground.
When I arrived at the Tate (and no, I will not call it Tate Britain, whatever the marketing men say), Hughie looked even older than I remembered him from the DVD evening. He said that on his way a pregnant black woman had even got up for him in a bus. “Everyone is very keen on old gentlemen,” he says.
Of course, he is older. He is sixty-five and the gap in our ages, oddly, seems far greater than between me and someone of, say, forty. Or, come to that, thirty. The thing is that those people who did National Service and missed out on being young in the sixties simply don’t share the same common cultural language as those of us who, like the young today, were into sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Five years older than me and the man is still into suits. Hughie wears a jacket and tie wherever he goes. And yet these people imagine we are the same age because we both know all about thrift and pen hospitals and Lyons Corner Houses and ration books, etc.
What makes my generation so utterly distinctive is that we had one foot in an almost Victorian generation, and another in the new technological revolution. We’re much more geared to big changes in our lives than the generation just before us. We were brought up by a prepill, washing-sheets-by-hand-removing-the-water-by-putting-them-through-a-hand-turned-mangle generation, but then we lived through the affluent sixties and later through the plunge into microchips and huge advances in technology, experiencing a seismic shift that has made us far more adaptable to change than either those who were young before the sixties or those who were young after them. It helps, too, that it’s hard for us sixties’ survivors ever to shake our heads worriedly about today’s youth and say: “Ah, they aren’t like the young people of our day.” The young today are like the young of our day. If anything, they’re possibly less adventurous and more responsible.
Anyway, off we went into the exhibition. Going to an art gallery these days is like entering a rather civilized old people’s home. Everyone is nearly one hundred and smelling of pee, and they’re all bent double on walking frames and listening to the talking guides with the volume so high that you can hear every word leaking out between their ears and the headphones.
“Oh, dear,” said Hughie, looking around in rather a depressed way. “Pictures by dead people being looked at by nearly dead people. I do hope I don’t live too long. The idea of another thirty years—what total hell.”
Then, looking down at me, he suddenly asked: “What have you got on your feet?”
I explained that once I’d got out of the blue flip-flops I had to wear sensible shoes for a few weeks and
“Can you face it?” asked Hughie. “I mean, all those sunsets and ships at sea, was there something wrong with his eyesight, all that old rubbish?”
“Lovely!” I said.
As I stepped into the tube station I was quite bowled over by the idea that I no longer had to pay. Ever. “Freedom Pass!”—the very words are like the entry to a new life. On the platform I sat in a kind of dream of coddledness waiting for the train to come, thinking how lucky I was. I haven’t been on an Underground train since I was about forty. I waited, and waited…and then it turned out that the service had been halted because someone had committed suicide. Not that we were told that, of course, but I knew it because they said it was due to “passenger action” and a train driver I know told me that that was a euphemism for what was known in the business as a “one under.”
Felt very sad that anyone could want to die like that and imagined that he was probably young, youth being one of the most depressing times of life, in my experience. At the same time felt fantastically irritated that whoever he was decided to commit suicide on the very day that I was taking my first free trip on the Underground.
When I arrived at the Tate (and no, I will not call it Tate Britain, whatever the marketing men say), Hughie looked even older than I remembered him from the DVD evening. He said that on his way a pregnant black woman had even got up for him in a bus. “Everyone is very keen on old gentlemen,” he says.
Of course, he is older. He is sixty-five and the gap in our ages, oddly, seems far greater than between me and someone of, say, forty. Or, come to that, thirty. The thing is that those people who did National Service and missed out on being young in the sixties simply don’t share the same common cultural language as those of us who, like the young today, were into sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Five years older than me and the man is still into suits. Hughie wears a jacket and tie wherever he goes. And yet these people imagine we are the same age because we both know all about thrift and pen hospitals and Lyons Corner Houses and ration books, etc.
What makes my generation so utterly distinctive is that we had one foot in an almost Victorian generation, and another in the new technological revolution. We’re much more geared to big changes in our lives than the generation just before us. We were brought up by a prepill, washing-sheets-by-hand-removing-the-water-by-putting-them-through-a-hand-turned-mangle generation, but then we lived through the affluent sixties and later through the plunge into microchips and huge advances in technology, experiencing a seismic shift that has made us far more adaptable to change than either those who were young before the sixties or those who were young after them. It helps, too, that it’s hard for us sixties’ survivors ever to shake our heads worriedly about today’s youth and say: “Ah, they aren’t like the young people of our day.” The young today are like the young of our day. If anything, they’re possibly less adventurous and more responsible.
Anyway, off we went into the exhibition. Going to an art gallery these days is like entering a rather civilized old people’s home. Everyone is nearly one hundred and smelling of pee, and they’re all bent double on walking frames and listening to the talking guides with the volume so high that you can hear every word leaking out between their ears and the headphones.
“Oh, dear,” said Hughie, looking around in rather a depressed way. “Pictures by dead people being looked at by nearly dead people. I do hope I don’t live too long. The idea of another thirty years—what total hell.”
Then, looking down at me, he suddenly asked: “What have you got on your feet?”
I explained that once I’d got out of the blue flip-flops I had to wear sensible shoes for a few weeks and
Similar Books
