Hello. My Not Writer Of The Week this week is Liz Jones. Not because she writes for The Daily Mail. Not because she is self-obsessed to the point of mirror frottage. Not because she has the wrong kind of hair for a woman of her age. Not because she wrote a book full of the newapaper columns she wrote about her relationship / marriage / divorce and thought she really was a real-life Bridget Jones when she was just an annoying woman. Not because she is obsessed with cats, clothes and money. Not because… etc…
Here is why:
On her failed relationships: “I had never been loved by a man, not properly (I’d had only three boyfriends before I met my husband, and two of them didn’t like me that much)”
On marrying a younger man: “They might pretend to be able to cope with you but they are, instead, storing up anger and will hate you for being fabulous, for being independent, for not needing them in your life but just wanting them there.”
On divorcing a younger man: “I slammed the phone down, shouting, “I can’t believe you are doing this to me, after I bought you a car and a bike and a computer and holidays, and food and clothes and everything!”
On viewing a house: “The house was quite dark and gothic and hideous inside. (I really can’t understand how people live with so many awful knick-knacks, and don’t even make the bed – candlewick bedspreads! – when they know someone will be viewing their property.) I would have to rip it all out (bar the original flagstone floors) and start again.”
On the danger of ‘edgy’ celebrities: “Should parents be worried that their daughter is listening to Amy (Winehouse)’s records or queueing outside Topshop to buy Kate Moss’s latest designs? That their son is listening to Babyshambles?
Can you really catch a drug addiction (or alcoholism or anorexia) from a magazine or an iPod? Well, I am here to tell you that you can.”
On zero tolerance of rudeness: “I feel like screaming: “No! I don’t! I didn’t have one yesterday-and I haven’t rushed out and applied for the wretched thing, whatever it is, in the brief passage of time since!” Perhaps I am feeling particularly fragile having spent the past three weeks at fashion shows in New York, London and Milan.”
On not being a racist: “I pointed out that my mum’s live-in nurse, Rita, is Ugandan and I like and respect her.”
On abortion: “Feminist commentators will insist that abortion is never entered into lightly. Among the chattering classes, I’m sure this is the case. Among the group of teenagers I spoke to on Thursday night who live in Hackney, East London, abortion is seen as a rite of passage, a completely normal part of life.”
On teenage parenthod: “She needs to go on a gap year and to university; otherwise, she will never have a hope in hell of a highly paid career.”
It’s because she is a really awful writer with a strange hardcore following of those awful women that you see being awful in public. You know the ones? I genuinely thought that her columns were a spoof character until somebody pointed out that The Daily Mail doesn’t do irony and she was real. She almost works on that level but alas it was not to be.
Stop it, Rapunzel!
In other shitness, The Express (Sunday version) went for another bleedin’ obvious headline:
Are the papers still not allowed to mention the sw*****g then?
Today’s Random Comic Moment is…
Mighty Avengers 5. Only on issue 5 and already running months late. Hurrah!
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