A young-at-heart nonagenarian celebrates life in a new diary

Jan Morris' first diary showcases the great non-fiction writer's ability in her 90s to look at the past with near total recall and yet analyse our muddled present with wit

Three-quarters of the way through the diary that Jan Morris started at the age of 90, a book by turns fanciful, funny and spiritual, Morris becomes momentarily morose. She has woken after a bad night to ponder “the miseries of nonagenarianism”. At last, it seems the book will behave its age. In an era when more people live to be 90 and older and, in the case of Malaysia’s Mahathir Muhammad and the Queen of England, even carry out their executive or ceremonial duties much as before, a book by one of the world’s most celebrated non-fiction writers on navigating her nineties seems so relevant.

Earlier, Morris had done a brisk countdown of signs of ageing. Her initial list, though, was not of serious ailments — catarrh, nocturnal visits to the toilet and forgetting the spelling of routine words among them. This one hardly counted, either; a reader had stopped her in the street to complain she had got some dates wrong. Morris recalls that the Bible had described the ideal duration of a life as three score years and ten. But, by the time she has breakfasted, she is her sunny self again and is back at her computer: “Good or bad, virile or senile, there’s no life like the writer’s life. Bugger the pedant! Love and laughs, Jan.”

This book is not a memoir, but it offers musings on a life with plenty of love and laughter. Morris was a man until the 1970s when he underwent a sex change operation. James became Jan and continued living with his former wife Elizabeth with whom he had had five children. Among Morris’ more than 40 books are a trilogy of the history of the British Empire and vivid biographies of Venice, Hong Kong and New York.  In 1953, James Morris broke the story of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s ascent of Everest. Morris reveals, by way of a parable about journalists who believe themselves perennially the centre of the story, that a full decade and a half after being the first to report that Everest had been conquered, he expected to be asked to witness the first successful expedition to the moon. “I was the obvious reporter to go with them for I assumed of course they would need one. I only awaited the call. Imagine the cheek of it!” 

Some of that old swagger remains. Despite being a lifelong critic of the idea of monarchy, she comes up with the novel idea that, in today’s world of illiberal and irrational leaders, an invitation from Queen Elizabeth is about the only thing guaranteed to bring these megalomaniacs to the negotiating table. She professes to be ready to be the emissary to go to North Korea, marking the “gentle start of a universal rapprochement, gratefully to be remembered by future generations as Pax Janica”.

Morris is an agnostic so there is little time spent reflecting on what death might mean, which that other nonagenarian memoirist Diana Athill, V S Naipaul’s one-time editor, dwelled on. (In Athill’s case with the added burden for this prudish reader of flashbacks to her sex life into her seventies.) Instead, Morris uses a light-hearted yet loving limerick to describe how she and her partner Elizabeth will deal with the eventuality that one will outlive the other. More than a decade ago, when I was Morris’ editor at the FT Weekend in London, Morris left a message to tell me she had sent me an article: “If it’s rubbish, chuck it in the bin. No charge for failure.” She then went on to tell my voicemail that she and Elizabeth had been reunited again in the eyes of the law in a civil partnership. When I played this aloud for colleagues, many were visibly moved by their constancy of love.

Reading Morris’ humorous anecdotes, interspersed with observations about how face-recognition technology should be speedily upgraded so that it can come to our aid when we forget the name of a person we have met before, one sees her anew; not just as a biographer of cities or as a historian but as an Anglo-Welsh Birbal, part philosopher, part poet, part jester. Birbal, of course, was the only Hindu nobleman to adopt Akbar’s multicultural religion. Morris has devised a belief system, a republic of kind people. And, so it comes to pass that she incredulously hears that her words have been recounted at a Calvinist Methodist Sunday service not far from where she lives in North Wales: “We need no theologian to expound (kindness) for us because since childhood we have all experienced just what kindness is. It is one of the few spiritual abstractions that is its own immediate reward… It is itself an instant pleasure! It is fun! The kinder you are, the happier.”

If this spirited diary fails at being a Lonely Planet guide to being 90, it succeeds in every other respect. There are delightful asides; listening to her car radio, she wonders whimsically how there are still enough musical notes to compose new concertos. There are moving revelations of Elizabeth’s dementia. On occasion, though, a couple of entries are poorly argued. Her brief comment on #MeToo seems a response to the controversy last October about George 

W Bush Sr patting women on the rear. 

But, throughout this romp of a read there is little sign that Morris’ vocabulary or powers of observation are materially ebbing or even that she is out of date. One of her sons beautifully described her as akin to Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, passages and endings. Indeed, this nonagenarian summons Siri via her iPhone to explain what a millennial is one moment, and then keeps the reader enthralled with an account of her and Elizabeth’s mishaps (involving a misplaced credit card) driving her nine-year-old Honda to its first car wash. By the end, Morris does seem a mythological character, a woman who was once a man, somehow able to scroll back to the past with near total recall and yet analyse our muddled present with wit and wisdom.