Virginia Ironside

The other day I sat next to a man who was struggling to make conversation. I felt sorry for him because I was feeling a bit gloomy at the time and I wasn’t the best dinner party neighbour, but he bravely ploughed on. Finally he reached deep into the barrel of his conversational gambits and came up with this line: ‘Do you have a bucket list?’

I always thought this phrase was somehow connected to rubbish. Did I have anything I’d like to put into a bucket and drown sort of thing. A bucket version of Room 101. Virgin Trains would go into my bucket, as would any film more than ninety minutes in length, You and Yours, Money Box Live and, of course, the

Listening Project, programmes that always seem to be on whenever I turn on Radio 4. (Why can’t the Listening Project ever feature Right-wing taxi drivers or Ukip supporters? It’s an endless diet of mothers of disabled children or fathers discussing what they felt when their sons came out to them as gay.)

But it turns out that a bucket list is a ‘before-you-kick-the-bucket’ list, and usually oldies are longing to do the most extraordinary things. Bungee jumping is high in the bucket list charts. Can you imagine it? My joints are insecure enough, held together as they are by pieces of atrophying muscle, without subjecting them to the trauma of a fearsome leap. Also, I always imagine my body like a bag of various bits and organs. Subject it to a huge impact and heaven knows, all my innards might get rearranged – my heart ending up in my tummy, my lungs tied into an uncomfortable knot and my liver and kidneys popping up in my fingertips.

Next on their list is swimming with dolphins, not something I’m tempted to do as their song is now so ubiquitous that I imagine it would be like lying on an aromatherapist’s table with the volume up high. And I bet dolphins are covered with tics. I don’t want to float in the Dead Sea – I can do it myself at home, thanks, the amount of expensive salts I chuck into my bath every day, to alleviate the aches and pains – and nor do I want to buy a holiday home. Oh, I’ve been tempted over the years but have always drawn back at the last moment. Thank goodness for that little voice of warning that’s always stopped me marrying the wrong man, trying hard drugs, joining a cult – or buying a house in France.

Many oldies want to write a novel before they die, but I’ve written dozens, and I was amazed to see that ‘owning a designer watch’ was on the list. You don’t want a designer watch if you live in Shepherd’s Bush. You’d be a target for muggers.

So what would my bucket list consist of? Playing for time, I lobbed the question back on my neighbour. He’d clearly given the matter a lot of thought.

‘I’d like to go the Last Night of the Proms,’ he said. ‘And I want to fly a Sopwith Camel.’ Meanwhile I was racking my brains. ‘I’d like to know the secret of what Joanna Lumley calls “leapy-uppy hair”,’ I said. No matter how much I backcomb it or dry it upside-down, it still droops lank and lifeless like those poor men hanged by Hitler on piano wire.

‘I would also like,’ I added, trying to think of something more realistic, ‘to see a performance of Alan Price, P J Proby and Wilko Johnson.’ Proby’s doing a Rock Cruise around the Caribbean this month, Alan Price is gigging in Barnes every second Thursday of the month, and Wilko Johnson, rescued from the jaws of death, is appearing at the Canterbury Festival this month. But my dinner companion no more understood what I meant than I understood the appeal of the Proms or Sopwith Camels. ‘Oh, and I wouldn’t mind actually dying,’ I added. ‘The last great adventure.’ Shuddering with horror at the way the conversation had turned out, my kindly neighbour assured me that I didn’t mean that.

But I did and I do. And, come to think of it, put me in charge of a Sopwith Camel for half an hour, I could probably achieve both the flying and the dying all at the same time. Virginia is crowdfunding, with Unbound Books, her latest book, ‘Bad Granny’, a collection of her Oldie columns. If you’d like to pledge money to support it being published, and receive a special edition of the book or other goodies, please go to https://unbound. com/books/bad-granny.

‘Thank goodness for that little voice of warning that’s always stopped me marrying the wrong man, trying hard drugs, joining a cult – or buying a house in France’