Monday 7 September 2009

LIZ JONES: These ugly one eyed yokels aren't doing themselves any favours


So I'm relaxing in a fabulous New York penthouse sipping Perrier when I get the call from one of my hundreds of lackies back home. 'One of the filthy locals has fired a shotgun at your pewter mailbox', she says. 'Call the police at once, Sooty', I reply.

Great. I better jet off back home to Exmoor. I pray there are still first class seats available on the next plane out of JFK.

Back at my vast country house, a young lady officer has been dispatched to deal with the vile hate crime against my letter box. She asks if there's anyone who might dislike me enough to shoot my property. 'Almost everyone in Britain', I say. 'People get very jealous of my expensive clothes, BMW, and whimsical lifestyle. I can tell you're envious, just standing here taking notes in my beautiful hallway', I observe.

She doesn't reply. Probably a lesbian, overcome with lust having noticed my Gucci perfume.

I suppose the atrocity could have been carried out by one of the many hairy, inbred mutants that live in these parts. Oddly enough, a local publican became quite vexed by a column in which I savaged the culinary experience offered by his establishment in the Daily Mail. The loathsome place didn't even have Beluga caviar - what was he expecting!

Apparently, a few local men had reacted equally inexplicably after I wrote, hilariously, that 'men with their own teeth are a bonus' out here in the sticks. I'd also described the people of Exmoor as mostly 'toothless', and the area as 'faintly Amish'. Really I don't see what the fuss is about - if I was some backwards country type and a high-flying young columnist gave me and my little village some valuable column inches, I'd thank her.

But instead of thanks, I get snide remarks from green-eyed local women in the supermarket. The other day I was there to buy my usual very expensive Claret and the finest Italian ham, when I heard a group of the old hags gossiping. One accused me of not even trying to join in, another said I was ‘just like Michael Jackson’.

A pox on your shabby, poorly maintained houses, I thought to myself. If immaculately coiffed locks make me the deceased King of Pop, pop me in the ground full of prescription painkillers. And if attending the fashion show of a local designer (one of the more cosmopolitan, less asthetically disgusting locals) doesn't count as 'joining in', I don't know what does. I even donated a whole day with me at London Fashion Week and lunch at the Ivy as first prize in the Dulverton raffle - not easy, given that I'd have to sit with a foul bumpkin for an hour or so in a beautiful restaurant, with the all the other diners staring at his dung crusted finger nails, wondering if he was my 'friend'. I dread to think! Thankfully, nobody bought a ticket.

Come to think of it, these grotesque local 'people' owe me a life-long debt of gratitude. I've given a whole host of the little weavels jobs on my expansive land: I employ a local gardener, tree surgeon, equine vet, two chiropractors, an equine podiatrist, a holistic shearer, an ecologist – oh, and a Somerset firm built my manege, where I allow local girls to exercise their ponies, free of charge, no less! They should be paying me to be seen on my property - I would have given my right arm to be allowed within ten feet of a glamourous London career woman when I was a girl!

Despite my charity, I'm treated like a stranger at best, and an intruding, patronising, rude, egotistical, shallow, insensitive, superior, arrogant outsider at worst. Far from the Exmoor's image suffering because of my derisive, insulting columns, it's these gossiping women and shotgun wielding maniacs who are really to blame. I wish they would all just shove off and move somewhere else, leaving me to enjoy my lovely farm, and sleep with my horses.

Maybe it's boredom or inbreeding that makes them like this. Perhaps they're not even human, having spent so many years working with animals and manure - maybe they've morphed into the countryside and devolved into wretched beings of the earth, distrustful of rich and successful women like me.

I just don't understand these narrow-minded country folk sometimes.

Liz Jones's fabulous new book, The Exmoor Files (critically derided even by The Daily Mail) is available now in The Quail's bookstore.

15 comments:

  1. I hate this woman, almost as much as I hate Melanie Phillips. Am I a bad person?

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  2. Thanks for the link to the Telegraph piece!

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  3. For the life of me I can't understand how Liz Jones got her gig at the Mail. I guess the Mail is banking on "there's no such thing as bad publicity". Mind you, it doesn't really matter because the end of the world must be nigh - I found myself today agreeing with what Janet Street Porter had to say on Ms. Jones and recent events. We're all doomed.

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  4. I love the fact that you pasted a photo of the cover from "The Witches" by Roald Dahl. She really looks like her! :D

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  5. It was a toss-up between that and Jadis.

    @No One Same here - I couldn't quite believe that I was agreeing with JSP!

    @Anonymous You're not a bad person, it's a sign you're human.

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  6. Your supposed to be doing satire Quail. Not just copy+pasting Liz Jones' article in its entirity! I can't tell the difference!

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  7. what a awful woman.She is the most back stabbing bitch ever.

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  8. There's a very odd article in the Mail tonight about why women have sex. Aside from Edwina Currie going on about shagging an olympic athlete (Yikes, did she drug him first?), Liz Jones tells us about an apparently stunning Frenchman she slept with because he was singing to her.

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  9. Liz Jones has just been on Radio 4's Woman's Hour. Horrible, horrible woman, constantly repeating how much she does for the local economy and saying the only person she ever criticised in her column was herself.

    Liz Jones on Woman's Hour

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  10. She makes me so sad...she's so vacuous, she's such a terrible writer and so deluded! when i think of all the good writers in the world and this woman has made a success from writing frankly disturbing artlces about her body and sex life, (or lack thereof) and dull articles about her day to day, and offensive articles about exmoor - scream!

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  11. great stuff - it's getting difficult to tell the difference between the parodies and the real thing these days :-)

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  12. Have you read Jones piece in the Mail today (13 Sep)? She manages to apportion responsibility for the whole wag thing not on, ummm, the papers & media promoting it, but instead on grubby working class-women tarting themselves up because they can't go to university and get jobs. Liz points out the middle-class Wag types do it 'tongue in cheek' (like her writing, according to her defenders) and don't mean to come across as shallow really. So the Mail manages to blame yet another background-crossing social issue (like footie hooligans, alcoholism and drug addiction) entirely on those manky proles. Anyone got any ideas of how to get all the people the Mail hates to stop buying it? It really is a comic these days.

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  13. Having recently moved to rural parts myself I wholeheartly sympathise and agree with everything Liz Jones had to say about the attitudes of so called friendly country folk ..I feel like a black person in the nineteen sixties ... It's a bit like being an extra in the Wicker man!!! I and the 'quaint' Kent village I live in will have to remain nameless or I will be burnt at the stake!!! Liz jones I love you and admire your courage for speaking out

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  14. Buying Ham? - Thought she was Vegan. It's all a send up written for the reaction. Written very badly at that.

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  15. This woman is just insane. Who in hell could ever be jealous of her? She's stupid, a piss-poor writer, self-absorbed, and thoroughly grotesque. I can't even feel sorry for her obvious eating disorder. Go scarf 'n' barf another one, Liz, and remove yourself from this planet as soon as possible.

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