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Mail Hack Liz Jones to Write About Life Behind The Letterbox

by | 4th, September 2009

letterbox-liz-jonesLIZ Jones, Ingrid Bettancourt look-alike and all round self-absorbed hack, has some new material to write about as shots are fired at her letterbox.

No, that’s not a euphermism for a news Botox treatment. This is Jones’s actual letterbox, in the door of her Exmoor home.

The apparent attack is, as The Evening Standard says it is, linked to her newspaper column in which she talks about her life in Brushford, Somerset and the “toothless farmers” who live there.

Local agree with the Standard’s sleuths:

I’m not saying it’s right. In fact, it’s downright wrong,” said one of her neighbours. “But something like this has been coming. She has turned up here without understanding the people and culture and she has started attacking our way of life. Nobody is surprised it’s turned nasty.”

The Guardian, for whom the country is another country, tells its readers:

Farmers complain that one of her dogs has killed a sheep – a big deal in this area – and Jones, a vegetarian, is no fan of hunting, which is just about a religion here.

That’s the country, where they pray to guns and where sheep are more then holding bays for this year’s on-trend knits.

Of courss, Jones is writing for just those urban people. Says he:

I had this dream of what it would be like living in the countryside, but the reality is about a million times harder,” Jones says. ”There are days when I long to be back in my warm, clean house in London with my nice things and Space NK up the road. I want to be all dressed up and meet my friends for a drink in a trendy hotel bar. I want my car not to be full of mud and bits of wood. I want to be warm and clean.”

In time, Jones will surely come to write about her her letterbox, but now she‘s away and a source says:

“She’s upset, traumatised and frightened. She’s worried about her own safety, as well as the person who is in her home and her animals.”

Jones enlarged on her locale in The Exmoor Files, a book. Abridged:

I’m not a real woman. I’m a meta-person. I live to write about myself and once my husband had dumped me (see previous books) and I was pushing 50 (ditto), I was a bit short of material. So buying a farm on Exmoor seemed both the perfect extension of my car-crash confessional existence and the ideal way of proving to myself that I am sooo over N, the obese cheating slob who masqueraded as my husband. Sooo over him, in fact, that I am going to spend the next 36 pages retelling how the slime-ball shagged half of London despite promising to be faithful each time I caught him out, providing I took him on an exotic foreign holiday and gave him £30,000 pocket money as a reward.

Or as the Mail puts it – and they employ Jones:

Although this book is odd in the extreme – its tone of grim frivolity and obsession with labels makes it read as though Dostoyevsky had turned his hand to writing ChickLit – beneath the emotional incontinence, the sentimentality, selfishness and painful narcissism, there lies a sort of steely courage: of a woman facing the process of ageing and mortality on her own, as best she can.

Look out for Liz Jones: My Life Behind The Lettterbox in all good, bad and indifferent book shops…



Posted: 4th, September 2009 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink