Jilly Cooper’s state of the nation style summary strikes chords with Matthew Steeples
Best-selling bonkbuster author Jilly Cooper might be best known for novels such as Riders and Jump! but in the 1980s and 90s she was equally lauded as “one of the Conservative Party’s most ardent supporters.”
Jilly Cooper
Cooper, born in 1937, showed she still has a grip on the nation’s pulse yesterday when she declared that the Conservative Party is “full of terrible people now” to The Spectator’s “Steerpike.”
Separately, in a comment to The Telegraph’s “Mandrake,” Mrs Cooper shared her thoughts on Pippa Middleton’s first book, Celebrate:
“[It] wasn’t a good idea. I don’t blame her – I think that she was ill-advised… All I can say is that I hope the British don’t demonise her because of it. She seems a lovely girl and her sister is wonderful.”
Ever the diplomat, Jilly Cooper, in these comments, shows herself as a truly brilliant wordsmith. She has tact and decency but at the same time doesn’t hold back when it comes to honesty.
Nigel Farage should put in a call. Mrs Cooper could be just the asset UKIP needs to transform them from a “bunch of loons” to electability.
Best known for a brilliant performance in the 2007 prequel Hannibal Rising, this talented Frenchman is to play a young Yves Saint Laurent in an unauthorised forthcoming biopic of the designer’s early career. Having attempted to ride a doberman like at horse at the age of six, he was attacked and claims the resulting scar improves his emotional acting abilities. It hasn’t harmed his modeling career either as he has contracts with both Chanel and Longchamp.
Gina Miller reports on the death of the typewriter
I noted that Britain’s last ever typewriter rolled off the assembly line at Brother’s factory in Wales last week, the Brother CM1000 electronic typewriter. This was one of 5.8 million typewriters made at the factory since 1985 and it has been donated to the Science Museum in London.
The power of words
Over the weekend, whilst perusing the Sunday newspapers, I shuddered at the disgraceful dumbing down of language. Then, last night, whilst watching the evening news, I was appalled by the grammar being used by newsreaders as my radar is now fully focused on honing in on grammatical sabotage.
It has struck me that with the death of the typewriter we are also experiencing the death of an era. An era in which the art and craft of writing, grammar, attention to detail, concentration and a love of words was celebrated has passed. Gone is a time where cutting and pasting required dexterity and glue. A time when mistakes, typos and bad grammar all had consequences; and when people enjoyed a romance with words has indeed moved on. Words that could be simple yet sophisticated have been sadly forgotten. I love the power of words. They are an amazing form of self-expression that can convey such beauty and such emotion. They have the power to make or break a person. They can lift or depress the spirit, they can make us rejoice or cry.
As a young girl I would sneak into the back of a courtroom and marvel as my father, a noted criminal barrister, defended a client. Years later reading the John Mortimer play, A Voyage Round My Father, I found the exact words to express my childhood wonderment. ‘He sent words into the darkness as if they were soldiers into battle,’ Mortimer wrote.
In the work environment we now use computers, which often means people are less productive and lack concentration as they are distracted by the Internet and auto spell checks which dull the intellect. Typewriters used to be chained to desks so they were not stolen or thrown out of windows. But now staff can steal time by using office hours to communicate with friends on Facebook or Twitter, shop online and book leisure activities and holidays.
Outside of work, letter writing is dying; people text to say thank you, to make up – even to break up. Communication lacks emotion, style, considered phrases and politeness. Written communications have been reduced to rough, short, sharp, harsh expressions of functionality.
I love how words taste just before you say them, how some of them have to roll around your mouth for a while before they can be uttered and how others explode off the pad of your tongue, excited to be leaving your thoughts and heading out into the world. Words like ‘strident’, ‘garrulous’, ‘mosquito’, ‘svelte’, ‘sanguine’, ‘parlour’. The word ‘rat’ that you can’t say and be tearful at the same time – it’s a great word to repeat several times when you can’t control your emotions. I love coming across words that I’ve never heard before – sometimes just hearing them is enough to satisfy my appetite but more often than not I need to get the full effect of them by thinking of how to use them. This I explore with my children where we have rhyming games, opposite games; if a word was a colour, what colour might it be?
There are some words that you can’t help but ‘feel’ as you say them – say the word ‘whisper’ and the very air around you changes as you say it. Words are beautiful to say and hear but they really come into their own when they are written down.
I’m certainly not as clever with the use of words and language as I would like to be and I probably use each and every forbidden type of style and grammar error known to man. But I firmly believe that in these fast-paced, hectic times we should all encourage a wider expansion and usage of vocabulary so that generations to come can enjoy the pleasure of words and language.
Like the health message of ‘eat 5 a day’ in terms of fruit and vegetables, I would encourage parents to ensure their children to ‘use 5 a day’ – at least 5 adjectives a day to ensure the beauty of language is kept alive.
Gina Miller is an entrepreneur, philanthropist and lover of words.
This mouthpiece was born in Rettendon, Essex in 1958 and vents bile on all manner of subjects. Articles such as: “Why don’t more women moan like me?” and “Liz Jones’ baby craving drove her to steal husband’s sperm in ultimate deception” are frankly illustrative of why she’s so unpopular. After she got banned from the majority of fashion shows and her husband left her, she quit London for Somerset in 2007 to feed organic muesli to the rats in the barns of a 47-acre farm she purchased as her “rural idyll.” That misadventure came to a sticky end in November 2012 after she’d alienated the whole county by calling them, amongst other things, “smelly” and “faintly Amish.” Goodness knows whom she’ll choose to offend next. Phillip Schofield sums her up best: “She is inconsistent, bitter, nasty and unhinged.” Our advice: Just steer well clear of this acid tongued poison pen.
Matthew Steeples examines the truth behind Liz Jones giving up on her “rural idyll”
The Mail’s Liz Jones is a waspish woman who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Those who’ve paid even a moment’s attention to her bleating, will be familiar with lines such as: “Last week, my brand new £1,300 MacBook Pro broke” and “Phil Spencer wanted his £46,000 and he wanted it now!” She never stops talking about money and the size of what she both owns and owes.
Liz Jones
In today’s Femail, Jones bores on about about how she feels “like a cross-dresser” trying out the Kardashian Kollection of clothing in a pointed attack on Kim Kardashian, but it was for her diatribe yesterday that she truly got the goat of the nation in “[bidding] a ferocious farewell” to life in the country in an article entitled “Goodbye… and good riddance!” 2,151 people have commented so far and most of them have been far from sympathetic.
When Upcott Farm at Brushford, near Dulverton in Somerset came up for sale in 2007 at a price of £1.6 million, it featured in an article by The Telegraph’s Caroline McGhie. The 5-bedroomed farmhouse came with a 2-bedroom annexe, a courtyard of barns and stables and 47 acres of land. McGhie waxed lyrical about the merits of moving to this location: “People come here for the peace and quiet, the night skies, the dramatic coastline, and they work from home,” she stated before adding: “You can find everything here, including butchers, bakers, afternoon tea and cake, fish and chips, an art gallery and a shop selling fishing tackle.” Of Upcott Farm itself, she concluded:
“This would suit a member of the new wave of buyers dubbed Droppies (Disillusioned Relatively Ordinary Professionals Preferring Independent Employment Situations).”
McGhie got it half right: Upcott Farm sold to someone who considers herself far from “relatively ordinary” and someone who is far from “professional.” The purchaser, however, was certainly someone who’d become “disillusioned” with what she’d bought and someone whose desire to be “independent” and create a “situation” just alienated all she encountered. The buyer, you’ve guessed it, was none other than Elizabeth Ann Jones.
Jones was born in Brentwood, Essex in 1958 and studied journalism at the London College of Printing. She became editor of Marie Claire in 1999 but was sacked, she herself suggests, for “listing in the magazine the freebies she had been offered in the previous month.” Here, it seems, began Jones’s obsession with all things material and here she also met an Indian BBC radio journalist named Nirpal Dhaliwal in 2000.
Jones married Dhaliwal but the union was to prove an “utter disaster” as he had affairs with women she terms “younger, dimmer [and] slimmer.” “I’m no racist” Jones was divorced in 2007 and said goodbye to her “3,000 square foot of Islington real estate” and “easy, if super-busy, London life” in favour of the green, green grass of Somerset.
Whoever’s side you see it from, five years of hell followed. Jones baited the locals and they grew to loathe her. She wrote columns and a book, The Exmoor Files, where she attacked them as “faintly Amish… feral, old and smelly” and another hack and neighbour, Jane Alexander of The Telegraph, responded: “Dulverton [was] positively fizzing with fury” after each and every publication.
Of the local restaurants, Jones stated:
“I have given up trying to eat out in restaurants here on Exmoor… It is still stuck in the Seventies, with only things in baskets and rum babas on the menu… If you tell the waiter you are vegetarian, you are stared at, incredulously, as if you are black.”
She whinged about her inability to find love:
”I will never, ever meet a man here in the middle of a moor, where even to be in possession of your own teeth is a bonus.”
And whined about fieldsports:
“I didn’t increase my popularity by being unable to pass a party of men and often children with guns, shooting rabbits and deer, without getting out of my BMW and saying: ‘Do you really have nothing better to do with your Saturday morning?’ The look of shock on their faces that I had the cheek to challenge them was priceless. I would stop, too, and shout at huntsmen on horses, galloping on tarmaced roads, one hand on the reins, the other clamping a mobile phone to their heads. ‘You will ruin your horses’ tendons!’ I would wail.”
Whilst Jones found little to like in her new community, they found nothing positive in her arrival either. Her dog was blamed for worrying lambs, and Jones’s inability to control it, locals say, was an indicator of the chasm between her life and theirs. In 2009, one neighbour went as far as to tell Danny Brierley of The Independent:
“We have got nothing in common with her, really. I think she may find it difficult to make any kind of life here now. She is not a very friendly person and we are all sick to death of talking about Liz Jones. A hatred has been building up for months. She is actually having a go at people and they are not going to tolerate that. She has feelings like all people, of course she has. But everyone wants her to leave and leave now. No one can make her, but we think she will go. I don’t see how you can live in such a small community with people who think that way about you.”
Matters came to a head when Jones’s precious black BMW convertible, “bought in 2005 for £26,000,” was pelted with eggs and teenagers fired shots at her letterbox with an air rifle. A local councilor even dressed up as her in the local carnival and yesterday Jones took revenge on those she blames for her “five-year prison sentence” and deprivation from Space NK, Cath Kidston and Illy coffee.
Instead, the article just shows the true reality of this bombastic harpy. The lines Jones penned speak for themselves. Country people don’t welcome someone who planned to “hack for miles across the open moorland in my Prada jodhpurs” anymore than the folk of Knightsbridge welcome Arabs treating their roads like racetracks. The gardener who had to endure Jones yelling “walk faster!” at him didn’t deserve such anymore than a bus driver in SW11 deserves abuse from his passengers. Jones concludes:
“I’m now a different person. I became so lonely. I would often get in my car, not just for the warmth, but for the kind voice of the satnav lady. I’ve learned that an amazing view and a pair of nesting grey herons are not enough to make me happy.”
27 acres of land including paddocks and a fishing lake remain on the market through Savills and Strutt & Parker at a price of £200,000 at Upcott Farm
Miss Jones bleats that she’s taken a £500,000 loss on Upcott Farm, which languished on the market at first at £1,900,000 and then £1,750,000 for three years. The “unexpected” sale of the property has given her the ability to “flee back to the city” but the locals and even the “Droopies” should be warned: there’s still 27 acres of the farm unsold and on the market at a price of £200,000. Halloween may have passed but the battleaxe in the Beemer could still call again.
The Steeple Times asks hotelier and chairman of Bespoke Hotels Robin Sheppard: “What’s on your mantelpiece?”
The Steeple Times shares “wit and wisdom.” What’s your guiding force?
Hunger.
“Don’t get even, get medieval” is, in our humble opinion, a great motto. What’s yours?
“While I breath, I hope.”
Kerry Katona was considered unacceptable in 2007. Who or what is unacceptable in 2012?
Piers Morgan.
Tony Blair misses being Prime Minister. What do you miss most in your life?
The ability to fit into non-elasticated trousers.
What might you swap all your wealth for?
I might swap it for anything. However, I would swap it for nothing.
Donald Trump was once a case of: “If you owe the bank a thousand, they close you down; but if you owe the bank a billion, you own the bank.” What’s your view on the banking crisis?
I think it’s a great shame that people no longer consider their bank manager to be a friend. We’ve lost the trust. It’s very different now to how it once was.
What phrase or word do you most loathe?
“At this moment in time”: What a waste of words.
In the UK, some people consider charity to “begin at home.” What’s your view and what causes do you personally support?
I am affiliated with the Guillan-Barre Syndrome Support Group.
The judge in “Law Abiding Citizen” states: “I can pretty do whatever I want” before being blown up whilst answering her mobile phone. What’s your view on the appropriate use of such devices?
Turn them off when you’re on the loo. Or at least try not to use them.
If you could fill a carriage on The Orient Express, who would be your fellow passengers?
Are we murdering or sightseeing? Either way, the answer’s probably family.
Hotelier Robin Sheppard
If you were unfortunate enough to end up on death row, what would be your last meal and where would you eat it?
Presumably I’d have to eat it in the prison I doubt they’d let me go on a picnic. I think I’d have spaghetti bolognaise with a robust Chianti.
What time is it acceptable to consume the first drink of the day?
Immediately after you finish work. Whichever time that may be.
A Negroni, a martini or a cup of tea?
Cup of tea.
Whose parties do you enjoy the most and why?
If I remembered them, they can’t have been that much fun, can they?
Who is the most positive person you know?
My golf instructor. He’s always laughing whenever I take a shot.
What’s your most guilty pleasure?
Pork scratchings.
If a tattoo were to sum you up, what would it be of?
That festival in Edinburgh.
If you were a car, what marque would you be?
A monster truck.
Cilla Black presented “Surprise, Surprise.” Tell us the most surprising thing about you.
I’m an only child.
What’s currently sitting on your mantelpiece?
A handful of birthday cards.
Robin Sheppard is a classically trained hotelier and chairman of Bespoke Hotels. He is also managing director of Alfresco, designed the iconic bottle for Ty-Nant mineral water and is the author of A Solitary Confinement (2007).
This talented author was born in South Africa but educated at Eton and New College, Oxford. The Drowning People, his first novel, gained him a “vast” advance and was published during his first year at university. It’s been translated into 22 languages and has sold over 3 million copies. Richard Mason funds a foundation in memory of his sister that pays for gifted South African children from poor backgrounds to attend the country’s top private schools and with a writing style that’s been compared to “Henry James on Viagra”, he’s definitely got many more pages to pen. An early critic, who told him he “should have killed [himself] rather than publish”, is now writing reviews of home décor shows.
Matthew Steeples updates readers on John Goodman’s return to jail
The conviction of John Goodman in West Palm Beach earlier this year was a tragedy for all concerned but the twists and turns that have followed have been quite something else.
John Goodman in court prior to returning to jail on Friday 12th October 2012
Goodman, who sold his family business, Goodman Manufacturing, for $1.43 billion in 2004 and who also founded the International Polo Club Palm Beach, was found guilty of the offences of DUI Manslaughter and vehicular homicide on 23rd March.
In February 2010, Goodman had crashed his Bentley Continental GTC at speed into a Hyundai Sonata and in the process catapulted it into a canal. Whilst the driver, Scott Wilson, was left to drown, Goodman fled the scene of the accident and later claimed he did not know he’d hit another driver. On the night in question, Goodman had settled a $272 bar bill for himself and friends at The Players Club in Wellington, Florida at 12:52am and had later drunk more alcohol after the accident in a “man cave” to “alleviate [his] pain.”
Scott Wilson’s Hyundai after it was retrieved from the canal into which John Goodman’s Bentley catapulted it
In May 2012, Goodman was sentenced to 16 years in jail but shortly afterwards was released on a $7 million bond pending appeal. At exactly the same time, a juror in the case, Dennis DeMartin, self-published a “tell-all” book, Believing in the Truth, in which he revealed that he conducted drinking experiments to see if he could get drunk after three vodka and tonics. After DeMartin was called in for questioning by Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Jeffrey Colbath, he stated:
“I’m only human. I made a mistake, just like John Goodman made a mistake… What can I say? I’m getting senile.”
John Goodman has spent most of the year under house arrest at his hacienda at 3665 120th Avenue, Wellington with his girlfriend, whom he also adopted as his daughter to protect his wealth, Heather Laurso Hutchins (also known as Heather Colby). In a further twist, Goodman was caught at the property by two of the $2,000 a day off-duty deputies employed to monitor him at 11pm on Wednesday in an upstairs bathroom with a small mirror. He was allegedly using it to pry open his ankle monitor and disable it with water.
Though Goodman claimed he had hit the monitor on a shower door accidentally, Sheriff Ric Bradshaw of West Palm Beach County commented:
“I think he thought, you know, in my estimation he thought that was going to disable it. [It] doesn’t work like that… He paid the price for it because he’s back in the ‘Gun Club Hotel’ [Palm Beach County Jail]. That’s where he’s going to stay.”
“Think about what’s going on in America right now. You know you’ve got celebrities and people with a lot of money, they get arrested, they break the law. And, after a while they just think the rules don’t apply to them.”
“Well, guess what? That don’t happen here. He gets treated just like every other person that’s in my custody. He violates the rules, he’s back in jail.”
As a result, John Goodman will now temporarily remain in jail until the 26th November.
We await the next twist in this case with anticipation.
The Steeple Times asks the chef, author and television personality Sophie Michell: “What’s on your mantelpiece?”
The Steeple Times shares “wit and wisdom.” What’s your guiding force?
“Independence and the life choices that come with it.”
“Never regret, never explain, never apologise” is, in our humble opinion, a great motto. What’s yours?
As Virginia Woolf once said: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
Kerry Katona was unacceptable in 2007. Who is unacceptable in 2012?
Samantha Brick: She gave women a bad name by writing so many self-serving articles implying that all women are as shallow and as vacuous as she, and that we as a gender make judgements solely on looks.
Tony Blair misses being Prime Minister. What do you miss most in your life?
Friends and family who I have loved and lost.
What might you swap all your wealth for?
A simple life living by the sea and working in a job that involved the ocean and it’s stunning environment and creatures.
What phrase or word do you most loathe?
I hate the abbreviated text language that people use, it makes people sound very moronic
In the UK, some people consider charity to “begin at home.” What’s your view and what causes do you personally support?
I try and support charities as much as possible within my means and I think we should all do the same. Time is also as worth as much as money in many cases. I generally support Breakthrough Breast Cancer, but I am very keen to get involved in a charity that works for abused women and children. It’s a bigger issue than people think, routinely ignored and sadly it’s on our doorstep.
Have you ever been arrested and if so, for what?
Hahaha, nope! But that could just mean that I’ve never been caught… Only joking.
If you could fill a carriage on The Orient Express, who would be your fellow passengers?
Definitely Marie Antoinette as she knew how to party and I love the clothes of that era. Cleopatra was a glamorous and formidable woman so she must come too. I’d also like Gregory Peck as he seemed like a real gentleman and my great grandfather Admiral Godfrey, who was head of Naval Intelligence in World War II. Ian Fleming was his PA and apparently the James Bond books were based on Ian Fleming’s time working with him. In fact, the character ‘M’ was based on my great grandfather and I would just love to hear the stories in person. There are many more people too, but those four would make an interesting start.
Sophie Michell
If you were unfortunate enough to end up on death row, what would be your last meal and where would you eat it?
It would be a classic seafood platter by the sea somewhere possibly on the French Riviera. I suggest this mainly because with all the shells you have to crack open to extract the tasty morsels taking such a long time to get through, it would give me time to plan my escape.
What time is it acceptable to consume the first drink of the day?
Any time after noon if on holiday. Any time after 6pm if at home. Failing those terms, you can always bend the rules by proclaiming loudly that it is always cocktail hour somewhere in the world at any given time. This works for me.
A Negroni, a martini or a cup of tea?
A dirty martini every time.
Whose parties do you enjoy the most and why?
I love private house parties as they are personal and always great fun. I entertain a lot when I can for both work and pleasure. I think it enables one to be quite creative and I love seeing an event come off well. I also love really chilled out beach parties, when everyone is glowing from a day in the sunshine and you can hear the sea.
Who is the most positive person you know?
My darling friend Miss Emma Nettleton. Nothing seems so serious after some dancing and giggles with her.
What’s your most guilty pleasure?
Ha ha ha: Guilt is a pointless emotion, so a pleasure should be left at that and basically if you feel guilt creeping in, then just don’t do it.
What was the first bone that you broke?
An ankle bone due to my first foray into ridiculously large platform shoes, aged 14. I haven’t stopped wearing large heels, but I have since mastered the art.
If a tattoo were to sum you up, what would it be of?
Probably a dolphin. I am happier in the sea than anywhere else. Although for the record I think tattoos are vile.
If you were a car, what marque would you be?
God knows. I don’t drive and have never tried. I am not adverse to beautiful cars, but also not attached to them either.
Cilla Black presented “Surprise, Surprise.” Tell us the most surprising thing about you.
I am actually quite shy and have faint OCD according to my friends. I think it’s otherwise known as being tidy.
What’s currently sitting on your mantelpiece?
A French antique mirror, a beautiful fluorite crystal, a Dyptique blackberry leaf candle and a couple of out of date invites that will soon be removed.
Sophie Michell is a chef with a true passion for nutrition and healthy eating. She was the private chef for Claudia Schiffer for two years and has cooked for various other famous names including Leonardo DiCaprio and David Cameron. She has presented and appeared on a number of television shows including Cook Yourself Thin, Market Kitchen and Ready Steady Cook.
