She’s infuriated virtually the whole of Exmoor with
her excoriating columns about the unfriendliness and the cold and shops closing
on Saturday afternoons and she hit the headlines again last week with a piece
about the bloggers she met at the recent Mumsnet Blogfest. Just to give you a
flavour, she wrote about being in “a tangled teepee of virtual knitters,
spinning yarns so they can remain inside their cupcake-scented world.” Oh dear. And completely wrong.
But despite the brickbats that get thrown at her on a
regular basis, she’s just been named Columnist of the Year at the British
Society of Magazine Editors awards.
Announcing the award last week, BSME chairman Kitty
Finstad said she’d been chosen “for her instinctive feel for personal narrative
and for dividing opinion – as a good columnist should.”
The BSME are right, I reckon. Liz Jones maddens me
more often than not, and I’m a bit sick of her writing about her cats, her horses and RS, her rock star boyfriend (despite all sorts of rumours no one has
a clue who he is). But, and it’s a big but, I still turn to her column in the Mail on Sunday’s You magazine before I read the rest of the papers.
Actually, this week I felt a bit sorry for her.
Writing in the main bit of the paper, she said she was feeling nostalgic for
Exmoor just a week after selling her stunning house. She’s now moved back to
London, but is missing the country already, the wildlife, the space and
the peace and quiet.
I know how she feels. I love the city, but even
now there are days when I yearn to be living in the middle of nowhere once more.
It’s fantastic to be able to walk into Oxford to meet a friend for a coffee or
to see the latest (brilliant) James Bond movie. But I still miss the autumn
afternoons when we strode up Pendle Hill (above) and saw no one at all apart from the
odd fell walker and countless sheep.
PS. Back in the days when Liz Jones was features
editor of the Evening Standard, she
asked me to write a freelance piece about living in France. I never met her (we only spoke on the phone) but she was easily one of
the most charming, appreciative editors I’ve ever been commissioned by.
