A Liz Jones Odyssey
Lots of things make me angry. Like anyone, things that shouldn’t annoy me often do. Then sometimes I find myself at the opposite end of the spectrum. There I am, reading something so stupid it hurts, and I’ll be completely unmoved. I don’t break anything, wish death on anyone, grind my teeth or otherwise react how I should. Maybe if you listened carefully you could hear another little piece of me quietly dying, but I’ve not yet noticed it myself. One of the main culprits of this jaded response is The Daily Mail, which should cripple me with despair, yet regularly doesn’t seem to register at all. I’ve grown beyond it.
Sure, Richard Littlejohn is an objectionable turd with the intellectual prowess of a pineapple. Melanie Philips is an odious heap of rotting detritus, like someone tried to make an effigy of Archbitch Ann Coulter using only things they could find on a compost heap. Quentin Letts is… well, nobody gives a shit about Quentin Letts. No-one. It isn’t possible. He’s just a mile-wide stretch of beige vacuum.
None of these things are in doubt. It’s just that the whole thing is so obviously absurd, wrong and stupid I can’t bring myself to believe it exists. Not really. That’d be ridiculous. We don’t live in that kind of world, do we? Imagine how awful it would be if we did.
So I can’t take it seriously. The whole thing is a depressing hoax or an ironic piece of performance art that grew out of all control. Something like that. It must be. Nobody is stupid enough to think 99% of the things that get published there. The other 1%, however, is the petulant mewling of Liz Jones. This is the fragment of output that can instantaneously ruin my day, sending me from mellow to bubbling with rage in an instant. It also has the regrettable side-effect of reminding me that actually, quite a lot of people do believe an awful lot of the bilge published by The Mail. But that’s too big an issue to get my head around, so it gets pushed back into the part of my brain for “things too stupid to believe are true”, where it nestles with reality TV viewing figures, raw food veganism and Rick Santorum. Which means I can get back to absolutely hating Liz Jones. The word ‘loathe’ is often misused, much the same as ‘awesome’ or, I suppose, ‘love’. My use of it to describe how I feel about this facile, blabbering witch is no such misuse. I can’t stand her.
The thing is, unlike the rest of The Mail’s bizarre circus of wilful ignorance and delusion, Liz Jones is rooted in the kind of spoilt drivel I can recognise as real. She only gets to me because she sticks to such mundane non-topics as babies crying on planes (yeah Liz, right on! Now say something about the in-flight meals!) or the difficulties of being rich & pampered but still mysteriously repugnant and unlovable.
For each new article, she finds some way to turn the subject of her weekly therapy session into vapid, self-obsessed (and self-oblivious) whinging. I feel for anyone whose job it is to listen while she struggles, for example, to understand the overwhelming distress she felt at the bank when a poor person in a glass cage spoke to her with an accent. Like on the phone lines! All Indians & Glaswegians now, isn’t it Liz! Haha! Derkaderka put me through to your manager Wallawalla, I want to speak to someone who speaks English! Note: this may or may not be the topic of one of her columns. It probably isn’t, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out otherwise.
Depressingly, we live in a world where this ungrateful, privileged twit has a platform with which to turn utter bollocks into more money and therefore more tawdry, consumerist tat. She needs all this stuff – designer sofas, designer shoes, designer fart sparkles, Burberry cats – to fill the huge, yawning cavity that most people fill with thoughts, emotions and an awareness that if the most pressing problem in your life is the Chateau Petrus stain on your 4th most favourite pair of mink slippers then you probably shouldn’t have the jaw-dropping audacity to complain about anything in the first place. It’s sadly very believable, despite my best attempts to convince myself otherwise.
So when someone like Melanie Philips says something along the lines of “leftwing agenda wants to grind up white people’s babies to build a bridge for Islamic terrorists to cross more easily into our country and first plunder then blow up our Job Centre Pluses”, I think “nah, she’s taking the piss”. I don’t buy it at all. No-one is that fucking stupid. Well, maybe James Delingpole, but he writes for The Telegraph and I kind of expect a certain level of professional smug ignorance from those club-waving, stone age Tory twats.
But Liz Jones? Yeah, she’s real, I can believe that without any trouble at all. Of course some cosseted brat can make a living proudly embarrassing herself while also wittering on yet again about one of her upper-middleclass baubles making her life a stygian abyss of suffering and hardship. That makes sense & confirms a lot of what I think about the direction of the world anyway. That last link, for example, is to an article so typical of her unsympathetic, nauseous bitching that having read it, you might as well have read them all. For example:
“I got into my black BMW convertible and set off down my hill.”
This is textbook Jones. Establish the fact that you, the writer, have nicer stuff then them, the reader. Make it clear who is top dog here. This isn’t some boring sob story of hand-to-mouth existence, scratched out amongst poverty and drug abuse and casual violence. Oh no. This is High Tragedy, as once again Princess Precious has her life made unbearable by the trappings of wealth and shallow consumerism. It even has the egocentric tell of ‘my hill’. Do you have a hill? No, I didn’t think you did, peasant. Without wanting to spoil too much for anyone who didn’t immediately grasp what was going to unfold when they saw the headline, Liz later complains:
“Why did no one tell me I was not supposed to drive through water? Do men know about this stuff? Instead of teaching me how to make cheesy potatoes and an embroidered peg bag, why did my school not instil in me basic road sense?”
Yes, men know about this stuff Liz. So do women. As do small children, household pets, potted plants, rocks and tiny specks of interplanetary dust. I’m guessing that your school didn’t teach you that because they assumed anyone with the nous to make cheesy potatoes without suffering a fatal accident doesn’t need that level of ‘basic road sense’ being explicitly explained to them. Or as everyone else calls it, just ‘sense’. Who would honestly want to live in a world where that was a subject the education authorities felt was worth spending time on? I wouldn’t. They probably thought “don’t drive this car through water” was implied by it being a car and not, for example, a boat or a duck. A car, primary populiser of the internal combustion engine, does not work underwater.
I think the real cherry on that cake is only apparent when you appreciate the subtle, extra stupidity that she’s already – rather crassly – highlighted that it’s a convertible. I drive a BMW you know. Convertible, of course. Thought it was a great little goer at first, fantastic timbre to the doors when they close. Sadly it turns out it isn’t up to fluff when you try and drive it underwater. Terrible shame really, huge disappointment.
The rest of the piece is a disjointed attempt at hammering “I have nicer stuff than you” to “here’s a social observation that proves I’m not hilariously out of touch with reality”, using nails of “look how much of a gormless idiot I am”. Again, this is just her thing. Quite often I’ll read a Liz Jones article and have the distinct impression that three 250-word brainfarts have been cobbled together and published as one piece. These are then given the final polish of a banal closing comment that’s so forced it makes my arse clench up as the epicentre for a full-body cringe. This time is no exception. Brace yourself, because here we have a non sequitur masquerading as profundity, stating:
“It is all delaying tactics, designed to keep our money in their coffers for as long as possible. No one is allowed to use discretion. Sorry seems to be the hardest word.”
If anyone reading this has the slightest inkling of what this nonsense is supposed to mean, please tell me. What has saying sorry got to do with anything? You aren’t asking for a bloody letter of apology, you want your money back. The company doesn’t just have it sitting about in a pile of cash, ready to hand it back at any instant. They have financial practices and regulations to follow, books to balance and accounts to keep. It does take a bit longer than it should, but suggesting they can just transfer it back via online banking in the same way as you paid it to them is moronic.
Personally, I suspect this is just another mote of shit, clumsily wiped across the page in what passes for a writing process around the Jones residence, a squiggly brown signature that lets you identify the author at a glance. And also recognise them as a talentless, ego-centric hack. Shut up Liz Jones, I loathe you and everything you stand for.
FINE RUBY DRINK 