No! I Don't Want to Join a Book Club: Diary of a Sixtieth Year Read Online Free PDF Page A

it’ and contact me? Whatever you feel, I wish you all the luck in the world in finding that special person…”
    Of course while I listen, I’m sitting back in my little house puking and sneering over every word. Goes to the gym three times a week? Has he nothing better to do? As for discussing books, forget it. As far as I’m concerned there are only two phrases to describe books. One is: “Absolutely brilliant! You must read it!” or “Total crap. Don’t touch it with a bargepole.” And what exactly, might I ask, does the verb “to wine” mean? I know about “whining”; indeed, I’m an expert, but “wining”? “I wine, you wine, he wines, we wine, you wine, they wine?” Surely not. Does it mean to get pissed? Or does it mean ordering a glass of warm Chardonnay or Pinot Grigio at the Goat and Duck from a bottle that was opened last July?
    Oh dear, I’m such an old meanie. The awful thing is that these blokes often do sound rather sweet, in spite of their ghastly habits. But GSOH! OHAT (Good Sense of Humour. Own Hair and Teeth)! Preserve me!
    In fact I’m often amazed by my women friends who manage to make really good sexual relationships with men. For me, they (relationships) have always been fantastically complicated affairs, like trying to set the video recorder to record in advance, and invariably end in tears. I think men must join the long list of things that I am never going to manage to master, like the stock market, the history of China, the structure of the European Union and tap dancing. I am seriously thinking of giving them (men, that is) up for good.
    These thoughts were checked by my cat, Pouncer, winding his tail around my legs, so I carefully picked off all the remaining red mullet from the bones and gave it to him. He sniffed at it and then looked at me in an angry, hurt way, as if he’d been offered a dish of arsenic. Aren’t cats funny? Red mullet does cost £8 a pound, after all. Woops, I mean kilothings. There are some things I have decided I will never get the hang of, and kilothings is one of them.
    Nov 9th
    This morning I knocked on Michelle’s door to see if she was OK.
    “I am good,” she said, staring straight ahead of her. She was lying in bed in an orange bedjacket made, it seemed, entirely from feathers, and a pair of knickers, watching breakfast telly. I asked if she’d been looking for flats. “No, not a beet,” she said. “I like it here. You are like my muzair.”
    Her “muzair,” as far as I remember her when I last met her on the Champs-Elysees, is a gorgeous and seductively slim blonde who looks about nineteen, wears top to toe leather, and has a card that reads “Marie Fontaine: Lady of Leisure. Expertise: Shopping and Bopping!” in French, I don’t quite know what to make of it all.
    (I, on the other hand, am, natch, full of quiet dignity, groan with Protestant work ethic and rarely spend any money at all. I was born to scrimp and save, keep pieces of string, iron old wrapping paper for use a second time around and believe it or not, even keep my tights going by cutting off one half when one leg ladders, and wearing it with another single leg to get the most wear out of them. “You don’t!” said Penny, incredulously, when I told her. “I do!” I said. I may be a wild child of the sixties still with a penchant for gorgeous clothes from Whistles and agnès b., but I’m also a frugal war baby—an odd combination. We both are.)
    Hope Michelle will be able to cope with the house on her own while I’m away this weekend staying with my old friend Lucy.
    November 10th
    Got up at six and spent the whole morning putting yellow Post-Its everywhere as reminders for Michelle. “Have you double-locked?” is stuck to the front door. “Remember to feed Pouncer!!” is on the door to her room. A series of arrows along the floor leads to my sitting room, ending up by the window, with the instruction: “Shut the shutters at night!” on the final one. The