Sunday, August 05, 2007
Nirpal Dhaliwal - Watch Part Fourteen
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen.
They bitch and fight, moan and carp and moan, bitch bitch bitch, moan moan moan, The Nirpal and Liz Jones Show!
So, singleton and ladies man Nirpal has been playing on his computer...
You have to be feisty to be a Facebook flirt
Evening Standard (London); Jul 4, 2007
I'VE JOINED the 4.3 million people poking and schmoozing each other on the social networking site, Facebook. It's proving an odd experience.
Since I put my profile on there, I've had a bunch of people trying to initiate dialogues. Some are in the media and have some professional reason for getting in touch. But of those who've contacted me for no apparent reason, it's been surprising to note that the overwhelming majority have been young women. Having a public reputation as a boorish, adulterous sleazebag, it seems, really stirs female curiosity.
Nirpal has spoken before on his deep-seated belief that women want men who will treat them like the dirty sluts they are.
I've replied to almost none of them. There is nothing sexy about a twentysomething pestering you online with a photo of herself sucking a beer bottle like it was a baby's dummy, offering the lame chat-up line: "Are you Nirpal Dhaliwal the writer, or just someone who shares his name?" Facebook shows that young women today have no idea of how to flirt. Their attempts to get my attention are wholly banal. "I've read all about you and your exwife," wrote one, "but don't worry, I'll never mention it with you".
"So why have you contacted me?" I replied. "To talk about the weather?" It would've been so much more attractive if she'd offered some caustic remark or pithy observation that sparked a spiky badinage. I love feisty women; but the women on Facebook are no modern Katharine Hepburns.
They look cute in their pictures, but are timid and boring beyond belief. Often I get a friendship request with no message, just a photo of her looking sweet and pretty. Do they expect me to respond to an approach as weak as that? I amuse myself with replies such as, "What the f*** do you want?"
Ahhh, what a way with words this master wordsmith has! Tell me more Nirpal, badinage me baby!
I've properly replied to only one, who wanted advice on becoming a writer. I gave her a few brief tips; but in reply, I got a tedious peroration on all her insecurities.
You'd think that anyone who knew who Nirpal was would also realise how shallow and self-absorbed he was.
Do women think that whining is the way to a man's heart? Right now, I'm seeing my ex-wife again and unpacking a lot of emotional baggage with her, so have even less interest in meeting these women.
Well, for a few weeks anyway.
After seven years together, I owed it to her to talk about our break- up, rather than simply disappear. Neither of us believes we have a future together, but we both agree I need to grow up which requires hearing some home truths. Swallowing my pride and listening to her tell me just how selfish I was deters me from inflicting myself on another woman.
Well, for a few weeks anyway.
But there is one delicious pleasure to be had on Facebook. I've had some old acquaintances poke me, wanting to buddy-up, none of whom I liked in the first place. Their advances drown in unresponsive silence. And it's so much more humiliating for them and exquisite for me to see their advances ignored rather than spurned..
Wow, Dorothy Parker must be simply livid that she'd dead and so can't meet this master of the withering put-down.
On the 11th of July Nirpal gives a piece comparing himself to P Diddy when it comes to fancying posh white girls, key sentences:
Upper-class English girls conduct themselves with such confidence and refinement that they blow boys from the lower orders away. I remember lying in bed with one and thinking I'd finally arrived, that I was somebody and not just trash destined for nothing. For her, I guess, I represented a rebellion and escape from her background. It was a disgraceful thought for me to have to think that sex with the white-skinned upper classes marked a sort of social triumph but it showed the power that race and class exert over people's imagination. It took me a while to realise that the controlled exterior those girls had cultivated at public school covered up a seething cauldron of hang-ups, and that they were as flawed and fallible as anyone.
You'd think he'd stop bringing Liz into his articles at some point.
On the 15th he takes The Observer's shilling and delivers a few hundred words on 'the alpha male', specifically Conrad Black and Alistair Campbell, the article is headlined Conrad, they're out to neuter us but, to be fair to him, Nirps doesn't specifically compare himself to either the embezzler or the liar in the text.
He returns to the subject of Facebook and his infidelity on the 18th of July.
High-tech life is a minefield for us love cheats
Evening Standard (London); Jul 18, 2007;
MODERN technology is no proof of human progress. Today's communications gadgetry only proves we members of Homo sapiens are the same retarded monkeys we've always been; except now we poke each other on Facebook rather than with sticks, and swap pictures via mobile phones rather than picking nits from one another's body hair.
The internet was supposed to enable our species to share meaningful ideas, but most people use it to watch porn and blow money on poker.
And lately, because of Facebook and MySpace, the web has become a forum for pointless self-promotion and networking, making it a cinch for institutions and employers to spy on you.
Some Oxford University students face being not being allowed to graduate and fined because officials cited photographs posted on Facebook of their drunken campus high jinks as evidence of disorderly conduct. Oxford students are supposed to be clever, but having uploaded pictures of themselves getting up to no good on a website with worldwide access, these dummies are now outraged that someone had the gall actually to use them against them.
"We believe the university's use of private photos from the Facebook site in disciplinary procedures is disgraceful," wailed one student union crybaby. It would have been better for him to advise other students to avoid trouble and not publicise what internet attention-seekers they are.
Because newspaper columnists are just shy and retiring types, just like Nirpal and his friend Julie Burchill, who positively fades into the background at all times.
But it's not just the net that's lulled people into dropping their guard; mobile phones are also becoming a store of information on our tawdry activities.
It appears Thierry Henry's transfer to Barcelona was as much to escape his irate wife as wanting to win the Champions League.
He faces having to fork out 10 million in alimony after she reportedly found compromising texts and pictures on his mobile phone.
It seems the former Arsenal captain learned nothing from David Beckham, famously busted for cheating with Rebecca Loos after she kept the saucy texts he sent her.
Henry and those Oxford undergraduates should realise that it's less public to have evidence of your wrongdoing tattooed on your face than in your phone or on the web.
And then, the class-act, from Mr 'I'm listening to my soon to be ex-wife and becoming a better person'.
But hey, we've all been there. My marriage hit the rocks when my wife found text messages between me and another woman. I am disgusted by my tardiness and realise my mistake.
I should've got myself a second SIM card. Tiny and easy to hide behind a credit card in my wallet, say I could've slipped it into my phone to check messages and texts whenever I was out of sight.
Hopefully this little tip will spare some of you the trouble I was too stupid to escape.
(Emphasis mine). That's Nirpal, forever wavering between 'I did the bad thing' and 'it's my bitch-wife's fault for finding out about my unfaithfulness, if she'd accepted my lies, we'd still be happily married'.
After a genuinely interesting article on the failures of Team Cameron in the Southall by-election for the Sunday Times on July the 22nd Nirpal is back on more familiar topics for his Evening Standard column mid-week:
Men and women can't just be 'friends', guys
Evening Standard (London); Jul 25, 2007;
THE movie The Walker, about the platonic friendship between a woman and her male chaperone, is released next month and has got female commentators buzzing about how male companions are the new Manolos.
It girl and shoe empress Tamara Mellon cites comedian David Walliams as her favourite platonic escort. But gallantly chaperoning ladies around town is no proof that a man is suave and urbane. It only shows that he's a sucker for being given the runaround. Apart from truly hopeless dopes, all men eventually realise that platonic relationships with women are bogus and degrading.
If you want a platonic relationship then that's what you have gay friends for, as established last month.
Until my early twenties, I thought befriending women was the way to get into their hearts and underwear. But getting trapped in that "friend" state is to be in a condition of sexless, abject exploitation.
Odd. A lot of other people, me included, have reported that they befriend women because they want to have women as friends. I must have been mad. Ladies, NORWICH!
I accompanied them to parties, bought them presents, paid them compliments and listened to their problems ad nauseam, only to watch them hook up with someone else who treated them like dirt in comparison.
...Before I had a chance to crush their spirits and break their souls!
If a man is serious about getting laid, he must never become friends with women; because women only become friends with men they will never fancy. But being pathologically in need of reassurance, they will have them hanging around in order to feel wanted and attractive.
So, by use of logic, Nirpal was never a friend to Liz.
Women love keeping male friends to make their partners
... Who they hate...
jealous and attentive. I wince when I remember being the idiot that my platonic girlfriends introduced to their boyfriends.
We'd make awkward stilted chitchat, while she stood aside to enjoy the frisson of envy and suspicion between us. If he's lucky, a woman might keep her man-pal on hand for revenge-sex (only to ditch him and go back to the one who cheated on her), or sperm donation when her body clock is ticking down.
Wow, Nirps had managed to go several sentences without a reference to Liz.
People should be honest and admit that platonic heterosexual relationships are totally bogus. It's a perverse dynamic of emotional intimacy and sexual distance that is humiliating for men. Some of these friendships do become sexualised but I suspect that when a woman says: "He grew on me" about a former friend, what she really means is "Someone more interesting never showed up." I've realised that it's best to lay my cards on the table. I'm not interested in just hanging out with women, and never have been.
It's no crime to want to have sex with them, and the ones I spend time with like me for wearing my heart on my sleeve. It adds a spark even if we never end up in bed. Women know what makes men tick, and will respect them for not getting sucked into the demeaning hell of friendship with them..
Does Nirpal not even suspect that the reason he has so few female friends might be completely unconnected to his cock?
Anyway, that's almost it for Nirpal. I did come across a short piece he wrote as a review of The Trouble With Asian Men which gives Nirps the chance to talk about his marriage again. It also shows that he is truly clueless when it comes to the relationships between the sexes:
The columnist Johann Hari called me an “unreconstructed misogynist”. But calling an Asian male a “misogynist” is the lamest cliché going. I was never violent, rarely raised my voice, and my wife’s income tripled during our marriage. I hardly held her back. I was a rubbish husband; but that’s no proof of misogyny.
I'm not sure why calling an Asian man a misogynist is lamer than calling a white man the same, but it does highlight that Nirpal doesn't actually know what a misogynist is, thinking it to be a man who beats up and oppresses his wife.
And what of Liz? Well, one Cliff Jones (no relation, we presume) writes to the Mail on the 27th asking her to go back to her husband because he finds her accounts of domestic misery more entertaining than her writing about fashion.
Most of her writing last month was about fashion, there's a good article from the 12th about the fashion industry still dragging it's feet about not using unhealthily thin models. It seems there was only one edition of her diary last month, in which she gives her perspective on Nirpal's confident assertion that they were back together:
Liz Jones's diary ; In which I find out he loves me more than I love him
The Mail on Sunday (London); Jul 29, 2007;
God, I wouldn't even type the above sentence if I wanted us to get back together again, would I? I have, over the course of the past few days, been manipulative, scheming, self-serving and downright badly behaved. I have wanted revenge, oh so desperately, and I think that now I have it. Let me fill you in.
After he stayed that night he phoned me and asked me out for dinner. I could tell he was in a bad mood just from the sound of his voice, and when he turned up, late, in the restaurant his face was like thunder. 'I listened to you all last night berating me for seeing other women, and I took it, but you were to blame, too.' I stood up. 'I am not going to sit here and be told off by you,' I told him, and all the waiters were staring at me.
'You got back in touch with me, not the other way round.' And I stormed out and got into my car. As I was driving off, he jumped in. 'Let's go to my flat,' he said, so we did. It was an awful comedown from our Georgian house: a basement bedsit with rubbish on the front step and a resident rat. His bed was unmade and his kitchen sink was filled with greasy water and millions of mugs. I suddenly felt sorry for him, and so when he suggested we snuggle under his Woolworths duvet to get warm, I agreed. We had sex, and he told me again and again how beautiful I am.
Oh Liz, Liz, Liz, shagging someone who wants to shift the blame for his unfaithfulness and making you miserable on to you. I'd ask where your self-respect was if you don't make it abundantly clear that you know what the word means as well as Nirpal understands the definition of 'misogyny'. And, just so we're clear, when you were having sex this time did he ask you: 'Who's the boss?' Did this question throw you? Did you initially not give him a reply? Did he entice it from you? Did you finally gasp 'You are,'?.
After sex, I got up to leave. I told him I had an early start in the morning. 'Can I call you tomorrow?' he said.
'This doesn't mean anything,' I said, gesturing at the bed while I did up my jodhpurs (I had gone to dinner straight from riding Lizzie). 'You're not even my boyfriend.' The next day, he called me again, and he came round, bringing dinner (he lost points for bringing new potatoes in a tin) and a bunch of white roses the size of a hippo. He had a huge grin on his face. We watched TV, and he told me he had daydreamed about this moment: cooking dinner in our kitchen, sitting on the sofa watching TV with me. The next morning, as I was leaving for work, all dressed up in a black Miu Miu suit and Prada white shirt, I asked him what he wanted to do. He was washing his face in the bath when he said, 'Well, I have to decide whether to blow off all these other women.' I said, 'Oh, I thought you said they were all boring, unattractive morons,' and he said, 'Well, this woman called Karen called me yesterday, and asked me out.' I went for him. I told him that he was mucking me about, that the decision about whether to get back together or not was up to me, not him, and that I had decided. He could bugger off and get out of my life. He had cheekily put my front door key on his key ring, and I took it off and told him not to be there when I got back. I was in a taxi much later when I got his voice mail.
'Lizzie, I'm really, really sorry, darling. I do want to make a go of us; I am not going to see other girls. I love you; I am going to change. I forgot how sexy you look in your black suit. I will carry on living outside the house, I will live in my hovel feeling sad and eating biscuits. Maybe I could use it as an office during the day to give you some space? The ball is totally in your court. I am really, really sorry I got us into this mess.' I couldn't decide whether to call him back or not.
When I got home, I sent him an email, saying we hadn't got back together, and that I needed time to think about it. I didn't tell him that I have already put my (our) house on the market, or that I am planning to move to Norfolk and never see anyone human ever again.
I have just received this email back: 'Don't leave me dangling, Fatty.' xx
More next month!
They bitch and fight, moan and carp and moan, bitch bitch bitch, moan moan moan, The Nirpal and Liz Jones Show!
So, singleton and ladies man Nirpal has been playing on his computer...
You have to be feisty to be a Facebook flirt
Evening Standard (London); Jul 4, 2007
I'VE JOINED the 4.3 million people poking and schmoozing each other on the social networking site, Facebook. It's proving an odd experience.
Since I put my profile on there, I've had a bunch of people trying to initiate dialogues. Some are in the media and have some professional reason for getting in touch. But of those who've contacted me for no apparent reason, it's been surprising to note that the overwhelming majority have been young women. Having a public reputation as a boorish, adulterous sleazebag, it seems, really stirs female curiosity.
Nirpal has spoken before on his deep-seated belief that women want men who will treat them like the dirty sluts they are.
I've replied to almost none of them. There is nothing sexy about a twentysomething pestering you online with a photo of herself sucking a beer bottle like it was a baby's dummy, offering the lame chat-up line: "Are you Nirpal Dhaliwal the writer, or just someone who shares his name?" Facebook shows that young women today have no idea of how to flirt. Their attempts to get my attention are wholly banal. "I've read all about you and your exwife," wrote one, "but don't worry, I'll never mention it with you".
"So why have you contacted me?" I replied. "To talk about the weather?" It would've been so much more attractive if she'd offered some caustic remark or pithy observation that sparked a spiky badinage. I love feisty women; but the women on Facebook are no modern Katharine Hepburns.
They look cute in their pictures, but are timid and boring beyond belief. Often I get a friendship request with no message, just a photo of her looking sweet and pretty. Do they expect me to respond to an approach as weak as that? I amuse myself with replies such as, "What the f*** do you want?"
Ahhh, what a way with words this master wordsmith has! Tell me more Nirpal, badinage me baby!
I've properly replied to only one, who wanted advice on becoming a writer. I gave her a few brief tips; but in reply, I got a tedious peroration on all her insecurities.
You'd think that anyone who knew who Nirpal was would also realise how shallow and self-absorbed he was.
Do women think that whining is the way to a man's heart? Right now, I'm seeing my ex-wife again and unpacking a lot of emotional baggage with her, so have even less interest in meeting these women.
Well, for a few weeks anyway.
After seven years together, I owed it to her to talk about our break- up, rather than simply disappear. Neither of us believes we have a future together, but we both agree I need to grow up which requires hearing some home truths. Swallowing my pride and listening to her tell me just how selfish I was deters me from inflicting myself on another woman.
Well, for a few weeks anyway.
But there is one delicious pleasure to be had on Facebook. I've had some old acquaintances poke me, wanting to buddy-up, none of whom I liked in the first place. Their advances drown in unresponsive silence. And it's so much more humiliating for them and exquisite for me to see their advances ignored rather than spurned..
Wow, Dorothy Parker must be simply livid that she'd dead and so can't meet this master of the withering put-down.
On the 11th of July Nirpal gives a piece comparing himself to P Diddy when it comes to fancying posh white girls, key sentences:
Upper-class English girls conduct themselves with such confidence and refinement that they blow boys from the lower orders away. I remember lying in bed with one and thinking I'd finally arrived, that I was somebody and not just trash destined for nothing. For her, I guess, I represented a rebellion and escape from her background. It was a disgraceful thought for me to have to think that sex with the white-skinned upper classes marked a sort of social triumph but it showed the power that race and class exert over people's imagination. It took me a while to realise that the controlled exterior those girls had cultivated at public school covered up a seething cauldron of hang-ups, and that they were as flawed and fallible as anyone.
You'd think he'd stop bringing Liz into his articles at some point.
On the 15th he takes The Observer's shilling and delivers a few hundred words on 'the alpha male', specifically Conrad Black and Alistair Campbell, the article is headlined Conrad, they're out to neuter us but, to be fair to him, Nirps doesn't specifically compare himself to either the embezzler or the liar in the text.
He returns to the subject of Facebook and his infidelity on the 18th of July.
High-tech life is a minefield for us love cheats
Evening Standard (London); Jul 18, 2007;
MODERN technology is no proof of human progress. Today's communications gadgetry only proves we members of Homo sapiens are the same retarded monkeys we've always been; except now we poke each other on Facebook rather than with sticks, and swap pictures via mobile phones rather than picking nits from one another's body hair.
The internet was supposed to enable our species to share meaningful ideas, but most people use it to watch porn and blow money on poker.
And lately, because of Facebook and MySpace, the web has become a forum for pointless self-promotion and networking, making it a cinch for institutions and employers to spy on you.
Some Oxford University students face being not being allowed to graduate and fined because officials cited photographs posted on Facebook of their drunken campus high jinks as evidence of disorderly conduct. Oxford students are supposed to be clever, but having uploaded pictures of themselves getting up to no good on a website with worldwide access, these dummies are now outraged that someone had the gall actually to use them against them.
"We believe the university's use of private photos from the Facebook site in disciplinary procedures is disgraceful," wailed one student union crybaby. It would have been better for him to advise other students to avoid trouble and not publicise what internet attention-seekers they are.
Because newspaper columnists are just shy and retiring types, just like Nirpal and his friend Julie Burchill, who positively fades into the background at all times.
But it's not just the net that's lulled people into dropping their guard; mobile phones are also becoming a store of information on our tawdry activities.
It appears Thierry Henry's transfer to Barcelona was as much to escape his irate wife as wanting to win the Champions League.
He faces having to fork out 10 million in alimony after she reportedly found compromising texts and pictures on his mobile phone.
It seems the former Arsenal captain learned nothing from David Beckham, famously busted for cheating with Rebecca Loos after she kept the saucy texts he sent her.
Henry and those Oxford undergraduates should realise that it's less public to have evidence of your wrongdoing tattooed on your face than in your phone or on the web.
And then, the class-act, from Mr 'I'm listening to my soon to be ex-wife and becoming a better person'.
But hey, we've all been there. My marriage hit the rocks when my wife found text messages between me and another woman. I am disgusted by my tardiness and realise my mistake.
I should've got myself a second SIM card. Tiny and easy to hide behind a credit card in my wallet, say I could've slipped it into my phone to check messages and texts whenever I was out of sight.
Hopefully this little tip will spare some of you the trouble I was too stupid to escape.
(Emphasis mine). That's Nirpal, forever wavering between 'I did the bad thing' and 'it's my bitch-wife's fault for finding out about my unfaithfulness, if she'd accepted my lies, we'd still be happily married'.
After a genuinely interesting article on the failures of Team Cameron in the Southall by-election for the Sunday Times on July the 22nd Nirpal is back on more familiar topics for his Evening Standard column mid-week:
Men and women can't just be 'friends', guys
Evening Standard (London); Jul 25, 2007;
THE movie The Walker, about the platonic friendship between a woman and her male chaperone, is released next month and has got female commentators buzzing about how male companions are the new Manolos.
It girl and shoe empress Tamara Mellon cites comedian David Walliams as her favourite platonic escort. But gallantly chaperoning ladies around town is no proof that a man is suave and urbane. It only shows that he's a sucker for being given the runaround. Apart from truly hopeless dopes, all men eventually realise that platonic relationships with women are bogus and degrading.
If you want a platonic relationship then that's what you have gay friends for, as established last month.
Until my early twenties, I thought befriending women was the way to get into their hearts and underwear. But getting trapped in that "friend" state is to be in a condition of sexless, abject exploitation.
Odd. A lot of other people, me included, have reported that they befriend women because they want to have women as friends. I must have been mad. Ladies, NORWICH!
I accompanied them to parties, bought them presents, paid them compliments and listened to their problems ad nauseam, only to watch them hook up with someone else who treated them like dirt in comparison.
...Before I had a chance to crush their spirits and break their souls!
If a man is serious about getting laid, he must never become friends with women; because women only become friends with men they will never fancy. But being pathologically in need of reassurance, they will have them hanging around in order to feel wanted and attractive.
So, by use of logic, Nirpal was never a friend to Liz.
Women love keeping male friends to make their partners
... Who they hate...
jealous and attentive. I wince when I remember being the idiot that my platonic girlfriends introduced to their boyfriends.
We'd make awkward stilted chitchat, while she stood aside to enjoy the frisson of envy and suspicion between us. If he's lucky, a woman might keep her man-pal on hand for revenge-sex (only to ditch him and go back to the one who cheated on her), or sperm donation when her body clock is ticking down.
Wow, Nirps had managed to go several sentences without a reference to Liz.
People should be honest and admit that platonic heterosexual relationships are totally bogus. It's a perverse dynamic of emotional intimacy and sexual distance that is humiliating for men. Some of these friendships do become sexualised but I suspect that when a woman says: "He grew on me" about a former friend, what she really means is "Someone more interesting never showed up." I've realised that it's best to lay my cards on the table. I'm not interested in just hanging out with women, and never have been.
It's no crime to want to have sex with them, and the ones I spend time with like me for wearing my heart on my sleeve. It adds a spark even if we never end up in bed. Women know what makes men tick, and will respect them for not getting sucked into the demeaning hell of friendship with them..
Does Nirpal not even suspect that the reason he has so few female friends might be completely unconnected to his cock?
Anyway, that's almost it for Nirpal. I did come across a short piece he wrote as a review of The Trouble With Asian Men which gives Nirps the chance to talk about his marriage again. It also shows that he is truly clueless when it comes to the relationships between the sexes:
The columnist Johann Hari called me an “unreconstructed misogynist”. But calling an Asian male a “misogynist” is the lamest cliché going. I was never violent, rarely raised my voice, and my wife’s income tripled during our marriage. I hardly held her back. I was a rubbish husband; but that’s no proof of misogyny.
I'm not sure why calling an Asian man a misogynist is lamer than calling a white man the same, but it does highlight that Nirpal doesn't actually know what a misogynist is, thinking it to be a man who beats up and oppresses his wife.
And what of Liz? Well, one Cliff Jones (no relation, we presume) writes to the Mail on the 27th asking her to go back to her husband because he finds her accounts of domestic misery more entertaining than her writing about fashion.
Most of her writing last month was about fashion, there's a good article from the 12th about the fashion industry still dragging it's feet about not using unhealthily thin models. It seems there was only one edition of her diary last month, in which she gives her perspective on Nirpal's confident assertion that they were back together:
Liz Jones's diary ; In which I find out he loves me more than I love him
The Mail on Sunday (London); Jul 29, 2007;
God, I wouldn't even type the above sentence if I wanted us to get back together again, would I? I have, over the course of the past few days, been manipulative, scheming, self-serving and downright badly behaved. I have wanted revenge, oh so desperately, and I think that now I have it. Let me fill you in.
After he stayed that night he phoned me and asked me out for dinner. I could tell he was in a bad mood just from the sound of his voice, and when he turned up, late, in the restaurant his face was like thunder. 'I listened to you all last night berating me for seeing other women, and I took it, but you were to blame, too.' I stood up. 'I am not going to sit here and be told off by you,' I told him, and all the waiters were staring at me.
'You got back in touch with me, not the other way round.' And I stormed out and got into my car. As I was driving off, he jumped in. 'Let's go to my flat,' he said, so we did. It was an awful comedown from our Georgian house: a basement bedsit with rubbish on the front step and a resident rat. His bed was unmade and his kitchen sink was filled with greasy water and millions of mugs. I suddenly felt sorry for him, and so when he suggested we snuggle under his Woolworths duvet to get warm, I agreed. We had sex, and he told me again and again how beautiful I am.
Oh Liz, Liz, Liz, shagging someone who wants to shift the blame for his unfaithfulness and making you miserable on to you. I'd ask where your self-respect was if you don't make it abundantly clear that you know what the word means as well as Nirpal understands the definition of 'misogyny'. And, just so we're clear, when you were having sex this time did he ask you: 'Who's the boss?' Did this question throw you? Did you initially not give him a reply? Did he entice it from you? Did you finally gasp 'You are,'?.
After sex, I got up to leave. I told him I had an early start in the morning. 'Can I call you tomorrow?' he said.
'This doesn't mean anything,' I said, gesturing at the bed while I did up my jodhpurs (I had gone to dinner straight from riding Lizzie). 'You're not even my boyfriend.' The next day, he called me again, and he came round, bringing dinner (he lost points for bringing new potatoes in a tin) and a bunch of white roses the size of a hippo. He had a huge grin on his face. We watched TV, and he told me he had daydreamed about this moment: cooking dinner in our kitchen, sitting on the sofa watching TV with me. The next morning, as I was leaving for work, all dressed up in a black Miu Miu suit and Prada white shirt, I asked him what he wanted to do. He was washing his face in the bath when he said, 'Well, I have to decide whether to blow off all these other women.' I said, 'Oh, I thought you said they were all boring, unattractive morons,' and he said, 'Well, this woman called Karen called me yesterday, and asked me out.' I went for him. I told him that he was mucking me about, that the decision about whether to get back together or not was up to me, not him, and that I had decided. He could bugger off and get out of my life. He had cheekily put my front door key on his key ring, and I took it off and told him not to be there when I got back. I was in a taxi much later when I got his voice mail.
'Lizzie, I'm really, really sorry, darling. I do want to make a go of us; I am not going to see other girls. I love you; I am going to change. I forgot how sexy you look in your black suit. I will carry on living outside the house, I will live in my hovel feeling sad and eating biscuits. Maybe I could use it as an office during the day to give you some space? The ball is totally in your court. I am really, really sorry I got us into this mess.' I couldn't decide whether to call him back or not.
When I got home, I sent him an email, saying we hadn't got back together, and that I needed time to think about it. I didn't tell him that I have already put my (our) house on the market, or that I am planning to move to Norfolk and never see anyone human ever again.
I have just received this email back: 'Don't leave me dangling, Fatty.' xx
More next month!
Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal
