Blah Blah Flowers

It may be a coincidence but the Evening Standard doesn't seem to have published anything by Nirpal Dhaliwal since it went free. One of the last things, so far, he wrote for them is this column, and I can't tell if he's joking or sincere...

Evening Standard: Honesty puts my ex-wife in a league of her own
-August 5, 2009

MY ex-wife, Liz Jones, has a new book out this week, The Exmoor Files: How I Lost a Husband and Found Rural Bliss. In it she gives her version of our marital break-up two years ago, which she documented in her newspaper columns, and her experience of moving to the country afterwards.

It was excruciating to have my dirty linen aired like that but I'd been an appallingly unfaithful husband and to some extent felt it was her prerogative to badmouth me in public. Like the mistakes I made in my marriage, it was an experience I never want to repeat.

I now look back on Liz's work and am awed by the phenomenon she created. She turned the genre of confessional journalism almost into an art form and made a name for herself in the process. Detailing the intimacies of her private and emotional life with brutal frankness, her columns had a pace, turn of phrase and expectancy that any novelist would be proud of.

Uncomfortable as it was to be her subject, I could never fault the quality of her writing.

Others disagree. Last Sunday, one magazine published a disdainful interview describing her as looking "a bit mad", implying that her writing stemmed from a mental disorder.

When we were married, I sometimes called Liz mad too. I now acknowledge that she is, in fact, a genius, a brilliantly effective writer who can provoke 130,000 comments to a newspaper with a single article about her anorexic relationship with food.

Some dismiss her work because much of it focuses on herself, but the same is true of many journalists, diarists, even novelists. And how many other writers have tapped the public nerve so powerfully and consistently? Though her columns concentrated on our marriage, they recorded a unique moment in the history of women as they finally flood through the cracks in glass ceilings in unprecedented numbers. Liz articulated the anxieties of a successful woman who out-earned her husband and sacrificed motherhood for her career yet still felt pressured to conform to idealised notions of beauty and achieve the mythical state of "having it all". Her success reflects the increasing feminisation of our culture, in which women's interests in relationships and domestic life compete equally for attention with male concerns.

On topics such as multiculturalism, female empowerment and the neuroses of consumer society, other columnists pontificate loftily without insight. Liz, however, took readers on a unique journey through the reality of these issues via the nitty-gritty of her mixed-race marriage to a less accomplished younger man me. Her columns were compulsive reading.

Other writers have boosted their careers by penning what poses as the highly confessional while omitting detail to spare themselves ridicule, such as the fact that a husband's affair was actually with another man, or publicising the trauma of giving birth to a sickly child without admitting that booze and fags were enjoyed throughout the pregnancy.

It is Liz's merciless honesty that put her in a league of her own and I readily acknowledge it, even when the honesty hurt me. Like that other great columnist, Julie Burchill, she provokes adoration and hatred for daring to unveil the darker side of the female psyche. Julie confessed she felt nothing for her first child, while Liz admitted that she feels superior to others simply for being thinner.

Like her readers, Liz's critics are overwhelmingly women. But however strange they think she is, they can't deny that she has pioneered new limits for journalism and has the sort of hold on the public imagination particularly of women that most writers can only dream of.

Of course, Nirpal does not mention that he lacks Liz's 'merciless honesty', that he not only called her 'mad' but also 'fatty' and that he still calls her for money.

Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

This article is classic Liz Jones, even though it's being written by someone else. There is just that indefinable something about her that, as the details of her sad life are laid out before us once again, just as we start to feel sorry for her there is some hateful detail that derails the whole process. She does it to herself, she does, and that's what really hurts... She has a clutch of emotional issues which, when turned inwards, help sustain her as an anorexic, low self-esteem and a feeling that she is unlovable. But they are also projected outwards into how she views everyone so that there's no real understanding or empathy when she hurts other people (such as calling her sister an 'alcoholic'). If the cliché for comedians is that they are crying inside then the cliché for Liz Jones is that she writes about beauty and beautiful things because inside she's aware of her own ugliness.

Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

I've been thinking for a while of doing a special Nirpal Dhaliwal Watch 'where are they now', just because Liz Jones is still writing crap in the Mail and I can't believe that her ex-husband that she got divorced from so that she no longer need be married to him has actually grown a braincell so must still be being stupid somewhere. Maybe.

Anyway, to tide you over, Liz Jones continues her quest to tell the world how she is no longer married to ex-husband Nirpal Dhaliwal who she is divorced and completely separated from with this article on people who discuss their failing marriages and slag off their partners online. It's worth it for her impressive lack of self-awareness especially when she says things like

...Yet I still wonder why someone is compelled to give so much of themselves to strangers in cyberspace.

(That's Nirpal Dhaliwal Watch, in case you forgot) Liz Jones has a point, why give so much of yourself to strangers in cyberspace where, if you write a column for a newspaper you can make them pay for the privilege?

I think that, instead of a site telling you how to arm yourself both in emotional and legal terms, there should be a site which makes sure you actually want to get married in the first place.

Or translated, 'I wish there was something that had stopped me marrying Nirpal as I'm incapable of evaluating evidence and have a history of judgement predicated towards self-harm because I believe I'm fundamentally worthless and need to be punished'.

how can posting heartbreaking messages like this bring anyone any peace?

And this is why I had to stop doing Nirpal Dhaliwal Watch.

Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

Parts One to Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen, Part Fifteen.

So, I've just watched the last episode of The Sopranos (I'm way behind on all my telly watching) and I'm in a bad mood, but also in the mood for a bit of self-deception and mistaken beliefs as to what makes someone a man in this modern age. But, sadly, there's not much to see there either. Liz'n'Nirps seem to be keeping largely schtum on their private lives and each other, turning out articles on current affairs or fashion. If the terms of the divorce include agreements not to refer to one another in print then we might be facing a sudden blackout on this column too.

There's not much to say on the state of Nirpal in September. Mostly articles about culture, one slamming Boris Johnson as a racist rather than a cheerful eccentric, but there is this on the 7th:

What divorce and Keira told me about England ; For one writer it took the new film of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement to reveal the deeper truth behind English reserve
Evening Standard (London); Sep 7, 2007;

RARELY have I seen a film that's so good it made me rethink my life. But watching Atonement, the film of Ian McEwan's novel, did exactly that. It is a great film about Englishness, that made me reflect on my relationships with the English and made me wonder whether I can truly be one of them.

I've tended to regard English reserve and understatement as a cold and aloof pose of superiority that implied a lack of human concern. Watching James McAvoy play Atonement's hero, Robbie Turner, I saw how this reserve is cultural and, in fact, a language of its own, full of emotional intensity and texture, that when expressed is all the more telling for having leaked through the cracks of self- control.

Readers of the novel will already know the plot but there is a real treat in store at the cinema if, like me, you come to it new. A victim of injustice, prised apart from the woman he loves, Robbie forced lumps into my throat as he stifled tears and measured his temper. His restraint displayed more rage, longing and despair than any character I can remember. He showed that the English are a people seething with passion but who express it in a way that others barely perceive.

Born in England, I am English. But I was raised by Indians in a neighbourhood where most of the people I knew were immigrants or their children. My education in English mores and mannerisms came mostly from TV and schoolteachers. Though I have native English friends and married an English woman, it is only now that I realise how I've misread them.

I was raised around tactile people whose emotional lives were writ large on their faces, who didn't consider, let alone censor their feelings before shooting their mouths off. In McEwan's novel, the only moment in which a character gives full vent to her emotions is when Robbie's working-class mother shrieks and thrashes the police car that is taking away her son for a crime he didn't commit: an exceptional expression of elemental feelings that cannot be withheld.

Re-reading that passage I smiled, remembering how it only took the discovery of a packet of cigarettes under my bed to send my mum into a similar fit. Anyone who thinks that Bollywood films are unfeasibly melodramatic doesn't know Indians and certainly not Punjabis.

My grandparents' generation of Punjabi Sikhs were earthy, peasant stock, and my parents inherited their operatic emotionality. Feelings ran riot in my family: laughter and raging arguments rang through the house in vast and equal measures. I'd be screamed at for minor misbehaviour, but also cuddled, petted and physically cherished. To this day, I hug and kiss my parents and siblings on saying hello and goodbye. My personality contains many ancestral traits, though now expressed in a cockney accent: I am gobby, sentimental, habitually foul-mouthed, and effusive.

For those from more expressive cultures, the English can seem like they exist behind a pane of glass impossible to grasp and connect with. My first real immersion in English life was at university, where I often felt alone and isolated. But much of it was due to my inability to appreciate the warmth that was extended to me, articulated in a muted form that was wholly foreign.

On first meeting, Indians will ask one another intimate questions about their family and marital status, their parents' occupations, and their own hopes and ambitions. The English, however, tiptoe into their relationships, and the seemingly anodyne conversations I heard the other students have about the weather, their schools and pets were in fact a subtle creation of rapport and a gauging of mutual compatibility that assessed social background and values. It was a code I couldn't read.

I regarded it as empty, platitudinous chitchat, and subsequently overlooked many people's good-natured efforts to befriend me.

The only other Asian on my degree course had been to public school. In my company he would be openly warm and expressive, but in a group he'd become restrained and impersonal, while I remained as fulsome as ever.

I thought he did this because he was embarrassed by me and wanted to disassociate himself; but he was simply engaging with the English in their language and making them at ease. My own tempestuous nature and instinctive over-familiarity often unsettled them.

They found it overbearing and intrusive, and I would regard their recoiling from my manner as a personal rejection.

My misunderstanding of Englishness even contributed to the failure of my marriage. I resented my wife for what I saw as detachment and indifference, when her concern was constantly expressed in words and gestures that were below my emotional radar.

For instance, when a close friend of mine died, I was bitter at the lack of emotion she displayed at the funeral. My friend had been black, as were most of the other mourners, and people I hardly knew took me in their arms and comforted me, while my wife stood aside seeming impassive. But she was the daughter of a former army captain, raised to display emotion with discrimination and formality. While I begrudged the absence of a hug from her, I had overlooked the enormous sentiment she had expressed by taking time and exercising her taste to select a beautiful wreath. It was a cultural symbol that had been lost on me.

My marriage failed my decree nisi has just come through and I'd thought I'd be making flippant jokes this week about how my divorce had marked another day of Indian independence.

But having seen Atonement, I have instead contemplated the theme of Englishness and how I've often woefully misjudged it.

I also know it is a subject that I am only just beginning to grasp. Now in my thirties, having experienced some of life's major issues love, death, divorce I've finally acquired the sobriety and evenness to appreciate the understated nuances of the English culture that, until now, have been almost invisible to me.

The essence of the English exists in their silences, in how they load quiet actions with extraordinary content.

McEwan captures this beautifully in a passage in which Robbie briefly meets Cecilia the love of his life after being separated for years. Unable to speak, he takes her hand just before parting. "The gesture had to carry all that had not been said," writes McEwan, "and she answered it with pressure from her own hand." The English are hard on themselves for not making more of an effort to understand other cultures; but it should also be stated just how poorly others understand them.

Meanwhile, Liz Jones writes:

MUST they subsidise motherhood as if it were dormant farmland?
The Mail on Sunday (London); Sep 16, 2007;

WHAT a strange week. First the Government pledges 120 for pregnant women to encourage them to eat more fruit and veg.

Next thing you know, David Cameron distances himself from a Tory Policy Group environmental report, which controversially suggests a ban on free supermarket car parks, saying his priority is to ensure families can still make ends meet.

I can keep quiet no longer.

I am going to say the unsayable.

There is no point fiddling while Rome (or London or Beijing) burns fossil fuels by suggesting we all boil less water in our kettles and switch off our plasma screens at source.

The only way to be really green is not to have children.

Of course, this is a terribly non- PC thing to bring up. Mothers are the last sacred cows in our society, untouchable, beyond reproach. When I was the editor of a woman's magazine, my then fashion director told me she was off on her second maternity leave in two years, to which I responded: 'Oh, that's annoying.' From the looks on the faces of the assembled (female) staff, you'd have thought I'd made a racist remark.

No one is allowed to complain when they are left to pick up the slack as every mum in the office hares out of the door at six on the dot, millions of plastic carrier bags in tow, hell-bent on creating a nappy mountain. No one is allowed to yawn while a new mum, who surely made this particular rod for her own back in the first place, complains about lack of sleep, or time, or affordable child care, or a big enough house.

And while I can understand the need to have one child, or even two, why on Earth have three, or four? No one is allowed to even raise an eyebrow at the Ruth Kellys and Nicola Horlicks of this world; au contraire, they are labelled Superwomen.

And don't try to tell me that men these days are more involved.

You only have to read Alastair Campbell's diaries to realise that children are mere dots on the horizon; good God, what woman, with Campbell's job and offspring, would find time to go swimming and train for a marathon? When I asked a friend of mine with three boys why she was trying for a fourth child, she responded indignantly: 'I just really want a girl.' Why on Earth does the Government subsidise motherhood as if it were dormant farmland, with lump sums of 250 at birth, free IVF, the right to an expensive home birth and help with child care, when in reality it is fuelling a society in which we all think we deserve everything, from a new car to an exotic holiday to an iPhone or a baby of the right sex, no matter the (environmental) cost?

Isn't parenthood just rampant consumerism? Like leaving the tap running while you floss, only a million times worse? A brood is the ultimate badge of goodness, used by everyone from the Blairs to the Camerons to the horrid, high-maintenance mum who lives not far from me, who is always posting 'Do not ring bell, baby sleeping!' signs on her front door, but then takes the wretched child to a fashion show where the decibels surpass rock-concert levels.

The idea that only parents make up the hard-working backbone of Britain, that the singletons of this world are frivolous and selfish, is nonsense.

I have just read Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson, a fascinating book that celebrates women who, having been forced to abandon expectations of becoming wives and mums due to the shortage dormant farmland of men after two world wars, became married to their careers in nursing and teaching instead, and were amazing, inspiring, dedicated.

I know that after 40 years of feminism, we are all supposed to toe the 'having-it-all' line, but I think too often a child is conceived as a status symbol, to prove that you can.

I have a friend who is a very powerful magazine editor, and she told me that when she hit her early 40s she earned more money than she could possibly spend, felt her life lacked meaning and so decided to have a child as 'something to do'. This is worse than catching a plane, surely? OW, I know I will be accused of sour grapes, and I'm the first to admit that while on the outside I might still wear Balenciaga jodhpurs and toe-rings, on the inside my womb is now lined with a doily.

I left motherhood too late not because I was trying to shatter the glass ceiling, but because I never met the right man.

I have ended up child-free not by design but by misfortune, so shouldn't I at least get the 120 towards cat food? Or a special designated parking space right by the door at Waitrose, with 'Barren, likely to die alone' daubed in white paint on the ground as my reward for not contributing to the predicted global population of 7.6 billion by 2020? Probably not, but I can dream.

So, where do we go from here?

Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

Parts One to Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve, Part Thirteen, Part Fourteen.

Things have slipped past me a bit, I was on holiday when the last NDW was due and haven't had much of a chance to catch up until now. So this is what your favourite pair of journos did in August and I'll try to bring things up to date later in the week. How's that for service?


I'd rather be a 'coconut' than cling to race
Evening Standard (London); Aug 1, 2007;

I'M BORED with multiculturalism. Your colour, the food you eat and the God you worship are considered to be your defining characteristics. But I think that someone's choice of pizza topping says more about them than their choice of religion. And for stating this, I'll be called a "coconut" brown on the outside and white on the inside by those who cling to their race for their identity rather than making any effort to develop a genuine personality.

A new BBC survey shows that a third of young Asians in Britain think you have to be a coconut and "act white" if you want to get ahead in this country. A lot of black people hold the same assumption, using terms like "selling out" and "Uncle Tom". It's an attitude based on ignorance and resentment, expressed in empty playground taunts. Rather than acknowledge that someone's achievements have required talent and hard work, they dismiss their success as a reward for sucking up to Whitey.

Except no one really knows what "acting white" means. Morris dancing, binge drinking and dancing like a clown to Abba at office parties? And how would "acting white" get you anywhere in any case? There are plenty of white-skinned deadbeats in this country whose colour hasn't given them any advantage over anyone.

In fact the coconut complex is the ethnic equivalent of the old colonial fear of "going native". I've known many people who've made an ostentatious display of their ethnicity wearing loud ethnic fabrics or changing their English names to African ones to build a persona that is no more than skin deep. It's the same kind of neurosis that compels chavs who've relocated to the Costa Del Sol to create a Chigwell-on-the-Med, replete with trashy boozers and fish- and-chip shops.

Given that your colour is a biological fact that you have no choice over, being proud of it is as stupid as being proud of having lungs or eyebrows. Yet many Asians and blacks still think that this is what defines them. They look down at those who share their pigmentation but don't live by their clichs. And they're encouraged to do so by cheesy white nerds who think that being ethnic equals being cool.

I've been called a coconut many times for dating white girls, for liking indie bands, even for eating cous cous. For daring to live a life that's a bit more interesting and varied than the norm, I've been accused of selling out and trying to be a white man.

Sure, wearing a burka or speaking raggamuffin street patois won't fast track you up the career ladder; but they don't prove how strong your identity is, either. They only reveal how little exposure you've had to others and show the world that you are a someone who really ought to get out more..

Try as I might I can't see anything in this article that's a dig at Ms Jones. Is this the end of an era? A week later and Nirpal is still choosing to attack other people...

Face it, fatty - you're just greedy and idle
Evening Standard (London); Aug 8, 2007;

WHY is it that the NHS is reportedly spending 1 million a week on fat-fighting pills for the overweight? Increasingly, doctors are prescribing expensive quickfix treatments that do nothing to change people's diets and lifestyles. But the truth, as Dr Hamish Meldrum, head of the British Medical Association, admitted last week, is that people are fat simply because they're greedy and lazy.

I was a fat kid who lost weight in my teens; in my twenties I put a lot of it back on. I shifted it again by the only method guaranteed to work: eating less and working out.

My exercise routines were so hard they often left me wanting to vomit. It was a hellish experience, but it worked.

Ever since I have had no sympathy for fat people whatsoever.

Are there any parts of society that Nirpal does have sympathy for? Parts that aren't middle-aged British Asian authors with the initials NSD?

I was fat for exactly the same reasons that every fat person is: because I ate like a pig and slobbed out on the couch when I should've been going for a jog.

Almost a fifth of Britons are obese. That figure is set to triple over the next 20 years, making Britain the indisputable Fat Man of Europe. And if we want to avoid that fate, the message should be clear: we must stop mollycoddling the overweight and pandering to their sensitivities and start telling them painful home truths instead.

If only fat people were told, on a daily basis, from a young age, they were fat. Why, that would surely put them straight!

Unlike racism and sexism, discrimination against fat people is entirely justifiable. It is one form of prejudice that is beneficial for those discriminated against and society as a whole.

Looking up 'prejudice' on Dictionary.com, I see the first definition is 'an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason', which pretty much fits Nirpal to a tee. I also like his clear separation of 'good prejudice' such as that against groups he's not a part of, and 'bad prejudice', such as that against groups he is, such as ethnic ones. Alright, so he puts sexism in there too, so it's nice to know that he's only concerned about himself 90% of the time rather than the full 100%.

If fat people faced obstacles in employment and other areas, they'd think twice before stuffing their faces. We would then have a trimmer, sexier society, and save billions currently wasted on stapling the stomachs and treating the heart complaints of the overweight.

I wonder how much money is spent on treating those who started smoking trying to stay skinny? There's also the assumption in there that only skinny is sexy which, of course, if Nirpal pulled his head out of his skinny arse for a second he'd see wasn't reflected in society. Still, he's spent years living with Liz Jones, it's not surprising he's picked up the fashion industries fucked up attitudes towards body size.

Fat people should be ashamed of themselves but our society stupidly celebrates their condition.

When? Where?

Mika has a top 10 hit with his song Big Girl (You Are Beautiful), and Dove's ad campaigns have famously featured busty, broadhipped models, proclaiming they represent "real women". Most of those women are not "real", they are merely fat albeit much prettier than most fat women.

Nirpal doesn't believe fat women aren't real. I'm not sure what basis he's using for this claim but it would be nice if one of the biggest champions of his writing, plus-sized Julie Burchill, was just a figment of someone's imagination. I also presume that Nirpal did not study history, that most societies except recent ones did not hold up the Kate Moss physique as the final word on beauty.

And don't start me on those Dove adverts, I suppose it's another sign of how fucked up the fashion industry is that those women are considered freakishly different, so as to be held up by Dove as being examples of 'real beauty', one of the more headachey advertising campaigns of the modern age. Where are the disabled women? The women with cleft palettes? Why haven't Dove told any Down's Syndrome girls they are beautiful? Argh! One fight at a time, let's focus on the bigot in the room for now.

Those ads help to normalise obesity in the public consciousness, and make it acceptable.

God forbid that we should try and live and love as one.

Despite all the junk excuses given for why people are fat their genes, or that they comfort eat because their mums never hugged them enough

Or when scientists explain natural biological processes...

the fact remains that they can all lose weight if they grit their teeth and take charge of their lives. Telling the same old lies about fat being a disease or the fault of the fast-food industry will only create a catastrophically overweight society. Fat people have to accept that they are the only ones to blame for the state they're in and just stop passing the buck.

The paper received a letter a few days later.

Disabled - and now demoralised
Evening Standard (London); Aug 10, 2007;

I WAS aghast to read Nirpal Dhaliwal's column (Face it fatty you're just greedy and idle, 8 August).

I was born with a dislocated hip.

For a long time I could lead an active life, but my hip suffered progressive deterioration and for about five years, until I had it replaced, I could barely walk 100 yards because the pain was unbearable. As a result I gained a significant amount of weight, despite eating healthily.

I am now rebuilding an exercise regime, including swimming half a mile four times a week, but would still fall well outside Dhaliwal's trim ideal. He may be correct in thinking some fat people could do more to help themselves, but could he consider the demoralising effect his comments might have on those larger members of the population physically unable to do the hard workouts he recommends?

How bloody dare you 'name and address supplied'? How dare you suggest that Nirpal thinks about anything he writes? Are you aware of the neurological trauma and overheating of the head that occurs if Nirpal tries to engage even one of his neurons? Have you seen the film 'Scanners'? Are you really willing to take responsibility for the consequences?

The following week Nirpal writes about how he was lazy at school until he came round to doing his exams he says:

Exams are the fairest way of measuring ability. The affluent might be able to pay for private tuition for their children but kids with a desire to do well if properly encouraged can make up for it with individual hard work. I went to a nuthouse of a state school but I breezed through my GCSEs because I did a ton of revision on my own.

There was no way I would have done so well if it all been coursework. My school was so anarchic that it was impossible to behave in class; the mob mentality meant that any pupil who was obviously bookish was despised. It was easier to join in the mayhem and revise crazily in the run-up to exams than to perform consistently throughout the year.

To be fair to him he was, as he admitted the previous week, a lazy fat kid.

Exams are an excellent preparation for adult life, which is full of stress and expectations to deliver results while under pressure.

Nirpal Dhaliwal is an author who took some six years to write a novel, supported in that time by his then-wife. It's important to keep these facts close to hand when reading his columns.

Come August the 22nd and Nirpal is telling us how he tried cocaine once and didn't like it, and why Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse are arseholes (nice try Nirps, but you can't win me over that easily).

I have one friend with a drug problem and never show him any sympathy. I'm honest and tell him how tedious he is, unlike his fawning girlfriends whose mollycoddling has helped keep him an addict. He respects me for being straight and holding a mirror up to him.

He doesn't appear to have made any effort to encourage his friend to kick the drugs habit, he just calls him a boring idiot every now and then.

Exodus from London? I just couldn't live anywhere else
Evening Standard (London); Aug 24, 2007;

THE UK is experiencing the biggest exodus of Britons for a hundred years. Some 385,000 people emigrated last year, many of them from London, with Australia, New Zealand and Spain topping the list of most popular destinations. Some doom-mongers regarded these figures as evidence that Britain has gone to the dogs and that people can't leave the country or the capital fast enough.

But if Australia's so much better, why do one million Australians five per cent of the population live outside of Australia? As many as 200,000 Australians expats opt for a life in London rather than in their own country.

Nowhere else on earth has the energy, creativity and sense of possibility that London has. Sure, very few people ever hit the big time in this city, but anyone with dreams of living an interesting life and making something of themselves will visit this town at some point in their lives, adding to the city's electric atmosphere.

Whether you want to write novels, sell samosas or become the hottest drag queen since Ru Paul, nowhere else offers you the scope and freedom to explore your personality and ambitions as London does.

Which estate did RuPaul come from? Which Old Compton Street bar was it kicked off the Gay Liberation movement? Did the Beatles come from Liverpool Street?

It is the most tolerant, open-minded and accepting city on earth.

Insert 'why does Nirpal live here then?' joke here.

Yes, I know New York is a great metropolis. But it's nowhere near as cosmopolitan as London. It's a city of ghettos, determined by class and race.

A black friend of my mine recalled being patronisingly congratulated by a New Yorker for holding hands with his white girlfriend on the subway.

Compared with London, in many ways the Big Apple is still Hicksville. The demographics and housing situation in the capital force rich, poor, black, brown and white to live cheekby-jowel. In east London, you find gay fashion-addicted hipster couples, burka- clad Bangladeshis and middle-aged media types living in the same streets. They might not be the How not to do best of friends; but watching people who look very different from you bringing home their shopping and taking their kids to school humanises them, and makes rabid bigotry absurd.

People lament the anonymity and loneliness of life in London, but that is precisely what makes this city unique. You can be whatever you want here no one cares. Free from the stifling prejudices of curtaintwitching busybodies, London is a city where you can try to become the person you always dreamed of being.

No one is too outrageous (trust me, I've tried pretty hard). Though born and raised here, I never feel like I truly know this city.

It moves with the times too fast for anyone to grasp. Its neighbourhoods change colour and culture every few years, absorbing people and influences from around the world. Londoners are probably the most globally aware people in the world.

I know that the property ladder, problems finding good schools and the stress of city life do drive rational people to forsake the capital. But I don't feel a shred of envy for their new lives. Nowhere else could keep me as interested in life as London does. And that's why you won't find me living anywhere else.

Damnit!

Life passes by but I'm in no hurry to join in
Evening Standard (London); Aug 29, 2007;

HAVING enjoyed such a glorious bank-holiday weekend, most Londoners will this week be moaning about being in the rat race again. But slower-paced people like me childless and working from home can see the modern obsession with busyness for what it is really is: the new religion for a godless society.

People whine about being too busy and nurse absurd illusions of how they'd paint watercolours, do t'ai chi or learn Persian if only they had more time. But the truth is, they deliberately pack every available hour to ensure they don't get a quiet moment.

Busyness is the new mark of self-worth. People publicise how active and stressed their jobs and children keep them in order to maintain the faade of having a meaningful life. The Protestant work ethic is so deep-rooted in our culture that even in an age of affluence and technological quickfixes, people are still compelled to live like hyperactive drones.

They might say they envy my time-rich existence but regular nine- to-fivers barely conceal their disapproval when I tell them I lie in each morning and work at a snail's pace while eating cereal dressed only in my underpants.

I can string a whole day out with a couple of basic chores such as buying milk and cleaning the toilet. When I tell people this, they look at me as if I've done something grossly immoral. The fact that I earn a living and pay my taxes doesn't matter; nor does the fact that much of their officebound time consists of surfing property sites and watching gonzo clips on YouTube. They are disgusted because I have committed the cardinal sin of our era: I do not worship busyness.

When travelling in the Third World, I was always amazed by the locals who could sit impassively during long bus and train journeys without a book, iPod or even a fidget. Now, living alone and without stimulus, I have the same ability to stare into space and literally watch life go by rather than fool myself with a hysterical pretence that I'm in charge of it. It's a lovely feeling, like snoozing with your eyes open.

I'm comfortable with myself and don't feel I'm missing out. People wilfully choose hectic family and professional lives in order to avoid their own company. Give them the time to think about it, and they would be driven mad by their existential emptiness. Children and careers give you too many responsibilities to contemplate big questions about the meaning of life.

I do miss working in an office, but not the sense of mission.

I only long for the gossip and flirtations that come with offices, the fundamental human interactions that are the most fun things in life. But busyness is strictly for the bees.

And yet earlier in the month Nirpal was claiming people were too lazy and fat. Now he's claiming that he does almost nothing and is on his own. He must obviously be living a life of monkish self-abnegation.

Towards the end of August there is that rare beast, a decent article from Nirpal about being an Asian indie music fan in the early Nineties.

I'm not sure whether my database is bust, or whether the only articles that Liz Jones wrote in August were on fashion. So, I'll finish with this article from the Western Daily Press:

Jilted Liz has scared off house sellers in the West
Western Daily Press 31 August 2007

She's the columnist who's left no stone unturned when it comes to revealing the secrets of her love life.

But now journalist Liz Jones has announced she may be moving to Bath to get away from it all.

Liz Jones has become a household name for her weekly column in The Mail on Sunday in which she talks frankly about her disastrous four year marriage to writer Nirpal Dhaliwal.

Before even reaching the sevenyear-itch milestone, the marriage fell into difficulties, with Dhaliwal said to have embarked on seven extra-marital affairs.

Jones has written explicitly about her husband's infidelity, labelling his mistresses 'cow whore bag trollops' or CWBTs for short, and said that last September he celebrated her birthday emailing another woman for a date.

The couple separated this year but not before she had put his name on her house deeds.

She has long talked in her column about moving to the country and revealed that Bath is one of the places that's high on her list. But she fears her honest approach led to her losing a house near the city as she made the vendors uncomfortable when being shown round.

"I have made offers on three properties - two romantic wrecks with parkland in Norfolk, and an immaculate William and Mary house near Bath - none of which has been successful (I think I was so enthusiastic walking round the house near Bath that the owners had second thoughts about selling)," she said.

"I am beginning to despair of finding somewhere perfect, ie, down its own lane, Georgian or thereabouts, with the original stable block, at least 10 acres, and nowhere near an airport or motorway."

Back in May Jones said she had finally decided to divorce Dhaliwal although her latest column said he has moved back in. But the on-off saga doesn't look near to being resolved with Jones saying she can't bear to sleep with him and hates having his clutter in the house.

She said: "I know it is an awful thing to admit but I find having sex with him quite boring; I actually watch Sex and the City over his shoulder' In her columns, which have become compulsive reading, Jones has revealed he has since signed the house back to her, been abusive by calling her an old hag - he is 14 years younger than her - and accused her of having a compulsion to tell everyone all their secrets.

Nirpal Dhaliwal has hit back with an article saying that following the break up, Jones got him dropped by both his agent and accountant.

Hopefully when I get round to the September review they'll be back to slagging each other off in that way we love so much.

Labels: fatism, journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

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!

Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

Oh this is fantastic! Nirpal claims he and Liz are stepping out again, Liz says they haven't even talked on the phone. A few more months of this and Nirps will probably start hallucinating that he's in The Fisher King.

Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

Nirpal Dhaliwal claims he and Liz Jones are dating again. More on this story as we get it...

Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

It’s back! Because you demanded it! Well, because one of you expressed a vague interest in it’s continuation…

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven, Part Twelve.

Yes, it's Nirpal Dhaliwal Watch! (incorporating Liz Jones ‘My Ex-Husband is a Bastard!’ Watch)

True to his word about not speaking openly about his impending divorce Nirpal has been quiet over the last few months, presumably spending time moving his stuff in to mates flats or finding himself a new place to live. There are a few digs and barbs in other article though.

For starters, we have Nirpal exploring his bisexual side…

G2: A fine bromance: There's a deep mutual attraction but sex just doesn't come into it . . . Nirpal Dhaliwal on why every straight man needs a gay best friend

The Guardian (London); Jun 11, 2007

Gays are a guy's best friend. Friendships between straight and gay men are increasingly common. Such celebrity couples include Little Britain stars David Walliams and Matt Lucas, and Alan Carr and Justin Lee Collins, presenters of Channel 4's The Friday Night Project.

I’ve watched The Friday Night Project. It should never be used in any argument about anything, ever, unless perhaps about how the promoters of eugenics might have once had a point.

The striking thing about these partnerships is their equality; Lucas and Carr are not camp jesters playing alongside a straight man. In both cases, the respective halves enjoy a natural rapport, wholly comfortable with each other's very different masculinity. The genuine affection these men share, and the ease with which they engage with each other, hints at a shift in the British male identity.

The latest edition of the Collins English Dictionary even contains the word "bromance" (n. Informal. A close but nonsexual relationship between two men. [c21: a blend of bro(ther) + romance]). Bromance only really refers to a gay-straight friendship. Close friendships between men of the same sexuality have never been an issue. It is the unconsummated intimacy of the bromance, its obvious but transcended sexual dimension, that makes it a relationship worthy of its own unique title.

At the age of 33, I have come to realise that I am a bromantic kind of guy. Most of my closest male friends are gay, and not by any design. I have made these friends through the general course of my life over the past few years - through work, going to yoga classes, and travelling.

In my early and mid-20s, I was good friends with an older, militant black lesbian. When we went out we would often end up in a joint full of gay guys, where I would invariably get hit on. I thought we went to these places because she felt more comfortable in them, but later I realised her plan was to queer up the uptight Asian boy and broaden his horizons. I will always be thankful to her for that.

I've snogged a few men, and enjoyed it. In each case, they were beautiful and charismatic. One was an American film director, who invited me to a festival in Turin where I hooked up with a fabulous, cabaret-singing New York drag queen. They were fun, warm and intimate experiences that thrilled my ego and made me feel gorgeous.

But they didn't turn me on. Even quite plain women can get me hot and bothered when I am making out with them, yet those studs had no such effect. I am pretty much straight, and those men proved it to me. Having tested my sexuality and been sure of what it is, I have no issues with homosexuality and can throw myself into a bromance with no misplaced hopes or fears.

A true bromance happens between men who know themselves, who are over their issues and just want to hang out with other intelligent and open men. There is a mutual attraction in a bromance (why else would people become close friends?), but the fact that there is no sex is liberating for both involved.

All male rivalry is basically sexual, and given that gay and straight men are not competing for the same people, friendships between them provide a space in which egos can be left aside. My friendships with straight men have often deteriorated because of rivalry, and from talking to my gay pals I know that gay men are just are competitive. Bromances offer men an opportunity to discuss sex without worrying about one-upmanship.

Sex dominates my bromantic dialogues. Like most men, we are obsessed with sex. Whatever else straight men talk about - cars, football, politics - is just a substitute to avoid the envy and dissatisfaction that arises should they honestly discuss their sex lives. I talk about women much more with gay men than I ever have with straight ones. And given that women speak far more openly with gay men - and that gay men actually listen to them - my gay pals provide many useful insights into the female mind.

We have deeper chats too. Straight men who discuss their emotions generally do so in banal psychobabble cliches. Hanging out with gay men, I talk about my relationships and feelings in a complex way with someone who understands the male condition. For my gay pals, a bromance allows their blokey, grounded side to come to the fore. In many ways, we are more ourselves with each other than with those who share our sexualities.

Bromances are the future for men in this country. We have a shared biology and a basic outlook, compared to which our choice of sexual partner is merely a detail

…But actually touching their cocks or anything? Ewwwww!

After an opinion piece on the latest Big Brother and the race row soon after it started, Nirpal set’s his sights on cougars, and is able to draw on exhaustive personal experience:

I've got a bit of a thing for older women
Evening Standard (London); Jun 20, 2007;

ON MONDAY, I met Vanessa Feltz.

Perfectly groomed and wearing a glamorous evening dress, and accompanied by her handsome 34-year-old partner, Ben, she was the epitome of what is now known as a "cougar" a successful older woman openly proud of her penchant for younger men.

We chatted about relationships, and she stated that she "loves sex".

For an older women who loves sex, a healthy, athletic younger man is the obvious companion.

Having been married until recently to an older woman

Really? I had no idea!

and having been involved with a few in the past, I know the feral attraction between them and younger men.

It's about sex, and not much else.

My lud, I refer the court to exhibit A: I gave her a manful bravura performance that night, and at the height of her passion, I asked her: 'Who's the boss?' The question threw her. Initially she wouldn't give me a reply, but I enticed it from her. 'You are,' she finally gasped. 'You are!'

And with the greater power and freedom that today's women enjoy, cougars are becoming an increasingly common phenomenon.

Cougars prove that female sexuality is just as one-dimensional and animal as the male sex drive.

They're not interested in younger men for their money, experience or intellect: they know full well that younger men have none of those.

Well, at least Nirpal is admitting that he has neither money, experience or intellect.

They relish their looks, virility and stamina. Having made their own money and carved out their own careers, and hence freed of any dependency on men, they can choose a man purely for pleasure.

In my experience, it's far easier to get into bed with a woman who's significantly older than it is with women my own age. Women in their twenties and thirties, unless they're drunk, often analyse a situation to death, wondering about a man's long-term suitability as a partner, so will keep a man waiting. But the cougar doesn't mess around. Being much older, she doesn't kid herself about what the future might hold, and gets down to business in no time. Every older woman I've hooked up with has slept with me on the first date.

The same is true for the men I've known who've had similar experiences.

But though she's easier to have sex with, once a man's involved with a cougar he'll find she has just as many hang-ups as younger women do. My relationships with older women have taught me that experience can never cure women of their neuroticism.

They are just as fraught and worried about their attractiveness and whether their partner loves them as any teenager, and, in addition, they have a paranoia that's all of their own about their age.

As soon as my wife fell in love with me, she was convinced our relationship would fail because of the age gap. Her pressure for reassurance alienated me far more than her age ever did.

Yes, Liz’s need for reassurance made him sleep with other women.

Nonetheless, I do love and admire cougars. They are the latest pioneers in the feminist revolution, nakedly proclaiming their unfettered sexuality. But when it comes to relationships, they pose the same laborious difficulties for us men as all the rest.

I’m beginning to suspect that Nirpal’s ideal partner would be a non-operative female-to-male transsexual, male in all respects except he doesn’t have a willy. Or perhaps a mute woman who lives with a gay man.

Meanwhile, over in Liz Jones’s diary, Nirpal is making desperate attempts at the start of May to win her back…

LIZ JONES'S DIARY ; In which I start to plan my new life

The Mail on Sunday (London); May 6, 2007;

He keeps saying, 'You'll miss me when I'm gone.' 'No I won't. And I honestly, honestly believe that you will be happier without me. You will be able to marry a nice Indian girl, and have children, and live a normal life.' 'You are already planning your life without me, aren't you?' he said sadly. 'Yes, I am. I can't wait, to be honest.' He still has not given me a date when he is to move out, or agreed to a divorce, or said anything at all about the email I sent him, telling him we would sell the house, split the difference, that he would not, under any circumstances, get custody of Sweetie, who he regards as his cat, and that could he please move out as soon as possible? Instead, he has been making an effort. He has been changing the cat litter every morning, emptying the dishwasher, folding the laundry and bringing me, on two occasions, a mug of coffee with two biscuits in bed. It is amazing, isn't it, that once you start detaching, and telling him to move out, saying that you no longer love him (I actually told him this to his face), he suddenly realises what he is about to lose and backtracks rapidly?

But, you know what? I am not about to give in, or take pity on him, or think, 'Oh dear, I will never get another man; I will spend the rest of my life sitting with a plate of pasta in front of Frasier.' I am actually rather looking forward to not being criticised every day ('What's that then?' he is fond of saying as he squeezes my muffin. 'You don't get that on Nicole Richie'), to padding down to the kitchen in the morning and not finding a mess, to not living in fear of reading his text messages or opening his email and finding the latest missive from FWD, when my heart will lurch and I will question myself, wonder where I went wrong, over and over again. I am looking forward to not having to sit through yet another meal in a restaurant in silence because we have nothing left to say to each other.
No. In fact, in secret, I have indeed started to plan my new life. I am going to get a horse (a rescue horse, obviously) and I am going to move me and the cats and the goldfish to the countryside. I am fed up of trying to live a perfect life, and endlessly wiping the smears off the cat flap, and dressing up in ridiculous ChloE platforms and putting my face on just to shop for more products in Space NK.
I want to let my roots grow out, and not worry about Brazilian wax regrowth, and about getting an appointment to have my eyelashes dyed. I want to give up, in a way.
I want to live in the middle of nowhere and never see a soul. I have tried having it all but it isn't all it's cracked up to be. I have spent the past seven years anxious and alone and always trying to be someone I am not. It has to stop.

And so, on Sunday, I got in my car (I told my husband I was going to see my mum; I know, I feel incredibly guilty and I am sure he didn't believe me), and drove to deepest Hertfordshire to see a former racehorse that had been abused and had fallen on hard times. She is called Lizzie and she is seven years old. I have been gazing at her photograph on the internet for what feels like months. For the first time in years I am excited, and am doing something he doesn't know about, and that isn't about me or about men or about shopping in Prada or getting my windows cleaned, it is about something else. I think I have been trying so hard to be something I am not, which is stylish and sexy and well travelled and interesting and part of a couple, that I forgot what makes me happy. I was willing to give it a go but it didn't work. I got out of my car, walked up to the field and I saw her. She raised her head, and it was love at first sight.

In what is surely life imitating one of those painfully unfunny farces, Liz ‘n’ Nirps still have a holiday to Africa to endure.

Liz Jones's diary ; (1) Africa, part one (2) 'I'm going to regret being horrible to you when you love me so much,' he says. 'I'll never find someone who loves me as much as you do'

Daily Mail (London); May 20, 2007

It takes 26 hours to get to the island off Mozambique. After a ten-hour flight, another two-hour trip on a tiny plane and then a two-hour speedboat ride, we arrive on the beach looking as though we have been shipwrecked; my hair resembles Bridget Jones's when she arrives for her mini-break. We are shown to our lodge, one of only ten on the island. It is inches from the Indian Ocean, with muslin nets around the huge bed, hammocks, a huge slab of marble in the shower. It is so beautiful, and so far from the life we have left behind. We have dinner, and walk in the shallows, looking up at an inky sky speckled with millions of stars, before falling into bed exhausted, the only sound the pounding of the waves. It could be perfect.

Except that he is almost silent.

The next day, he gets up at 6am to do yoga, and I go for breakfast on my own. He then swims and showers and smokes cigarettes and is finally ready to join me at about 6pm. We go to dinner. He looks miserable. As we walk past the bar, he says he is going to have a drink and a cigarette because he needs 'some space'. I stumble to my room, feeling my way in the dark, because he keeps the torch. When he finally gets back he says, 'I want a divorce.' I sit up in bed. 'But why are you saying that now? Why didn't you agree to leave when I asked you?' 'I can't stand it here, it feels so oppressive.' 'Will you leave tomorrow?' 'Yes.' The next morning, I wake up and he is staring at me.

'Have you told the office to book you a flight?' 'No,' he says, 'I will do that now.' He wanders off, and I go to sit by the sea with my book. He waddles over. 'Have you booked it?' I ask him. 'Yes, I can leave tomorrow.' I then ask him why he has chosen the first couple of days of our two-week holiday to tell me he is leaving, and he puts his head in his hands and says that he hadn't planned it. 'I do love you, you know,' he says. 'But I will never write another book while I know I have you to look after me. Every time you do something nice or take me back I think you must be so desperate that I behave even more badly.' 'But I do it because I want you to be happy. Which is why I asked you to leave. We bring out the worst in each other.' We sit talking for hours, lunch comes and goes and the sun disappears into the ocean.
'This is how we fell in love,' he says. 'In Jamaica, just talking and gazing at the ocean. Can I stay for the rest of the two weeks, and we can talk like this?' I had quite come round to the fact he would be able to get back early to be with the cats, relieving our cat sitter of her duties, and so I say, 'No, you will have time to sort yourself out, and find somewhere else to live. I want you to leave on the 19th and post your keys through the letter box. And please, when you empty your chest of drawers, I want you to close them carefully because you know how Sweetie loves an open drawer, and you might squash her and kill her.' He nods. 'I am so going to regret being horrible to you when you love me so much,' he says, starting to cry. 'I will never find someone who loves me as much as you do,' and he grasps my hands in his.

I wrestle them free. 'I still want you to go,' I tell him.

'I am such a sucker for a pretty face,' he says, and I stiffen. 'What do you mean? Recently?' 'Yes,' he says. 'Have you slept with anyone since September, when I found out you were back in contact with Daphne?' He nods. 'In Mumbai, last month, at the literary festival.' 'Who was it?' I stammer, feeling the nausea rising in my mouth.
There is salt on my face but I can't tell if it is from the sea spray, or because I am crying too.

Back from holiday and life goes on:

LIZ JONES'S DIARY In which I email the cow-trollop-baggage ; I had some good news last week and automatically reached in my bag to phone him. Then I realised I don't have any one to tell things to any more

The Mail on Sunday (London); Jun 3, 2007;

I spent the rest of the two weeks on the island off the coast of East Africa in shock. I couldn't quite believe he had gone, that it was all, finally, over. I expected him to call me but the only text I got was a terse, 'The cats are fine.' I kept going over everything he had told me. I had asked him why he behaved so oddly and childishly on holiday, and he had said, 'Because as soon as we go somewhere you clam up. Look at when I was in the bar talking to Stacey, you didn't say a word.' The reason I never say anything in social situations is because I can't hear what anyone is saying, especially if it is someone I don't know well, or they aren't right next to me. My friend Kerry knows this and will translate as we go along.

That my husband failed to notice this after seven years just about sums up our miscommunication, doesn't it?

I would like to say I was all happy and relieved, and spent the time frolicking in the surf and shagging diving instructors, but instead I felt deflated, and incredibly rejected. I felt frustrated at not being able to be proactive while he was in my house packing his horrible boy things, and so I did two things. I contacted my solicitor and asked her to write to him telling him I was divorcing him on the grounds of adultery and giving him a deadline to move out. And I found out the email address of the woman he slept with at the Mumbai literary festival and wrote to her. I told her that my husband had said she came on to him, despite knowing he was married, and had sex without a condom. I know it was all my husband's fault, but I do believe women who sleep with married men are nothing better than trollops. (I have since found out she has a boyfriend, and therefore is a cheating whore-baggage-cow-type person.) I couldn't wait to get home, and when I unlocked the front door, and was able to do a quick head count of the pussies, and saw our joint credit card cut up on the table (there was no note, not even an 'I am so sorry' after seven years), I felt incredibly relieved, but I couldn't help but feel it had all been for nothing. That I had tried so hard, and been (on the whole) so nice and supportive and patient, and still I had the word 'reject' stamped on my forehead. My cleaner rang me and told me he had done some strange things before he left. 'Like what?' I asked her. 'He took your car to be valeted and changed the bed.'
Blimey, that's a first. And at that moment a small part of me thought that he might have changed his mind, that he wanted me to forgive him again. But I can't.

I don't know why he felt he had to tell me he had slept with a cow-trollop-baggage, but at least the image I keep playing in my head of him kissing someone young and slim prevents me from phoning him and asking him to come back. It is weird to be on your own, but the oddest thing is that I don't actually miss him, he had become so strange and distant. I had some good news last week (a business deal thing), and I automatically reached in my bag to phone him and then I realised I don't have anyone to tell things to any more. I heard from a mutual 'friend' that he had moved to a bedsit in Shoreditch, that his mum was sure it was for the best (and I thought she liked me!), and that he was wondering when he would meet someone new(!).

And, despite everything, I felt sad and jealous and bitter and angry. He must miss the cats, mustn't he? I have nothing to do for the next six million weekends. All my girlfriends are married or have live-in boyfriends. I lost so many friends because they couldn't stand my husband and now I am too proud to go begging their forgiveness.
Things, I suppose, can only get better.

That’s the spirit! Although Liz could do with reminding herself of that, a week later, when she finds herself feeling lonely.

In which I find out why we never had sex

The Mail on Sunday (London); Jun 10, 2007; LIZ JONES; p. 82

Hmm, well. I have felt better. In the two weeks since I flew home, alone, from my hugely expensive holiday and returned to an empty house (bar the fur babies, of course) I haven't heard one word from him. Not a phone call, not an email or even a text message. After seven years together I find it odd that he can cut me off like this, without so much as a backward glance.

Doesn't he at least want to know how I am? I am doing that awful, sad thing of always being prepared: I waft around my immaculate house in a floaty top and skinny jeans, makeup on, feet oiled, candles lit.

Whenever I hear a car outside I peek out the window oh, that I wasn't a minimalist and had some curtains. Whenever I get home I feverishly dial 1571, and I can usually be found sitting on the sofa in the kitchen nursing my mobile phone. I don't know why I am feeling so bereft, because I don't want him back; it is as though I am grieving for the life we could have had.

The only thing that is keeping me sane and preventing me from phoning him, is remembering all the times he hurt me. The time, when we were both going to New York (me to work, him to secretly meet FWD), and I asked if we would see each other, and he replied, 'Probably not.' The time I phoned him from an earthquake zone and he mumbled in an irritated voice, 'What is it?' as if I was about to ask him to buy Fairy Liquid. The time, returning from the Kitab literary festival, he blamed his bad mood on my being boring when I had phoned him from the Oscars, when in fact he had just had unprotected sex with a young, slim, Indian dirty-cow-trollop- baggage.
And then two things happened. I bumped into one of his yoga friends when I was outside Space N K, and he told me my ex-husband had said it was strange but on his first day of 'freedom' (you'd think I'd made him work down a mine) he had been thinking what it would be like to become a dad. I felt as though someone had kicked me in the stomach as I pictured the file labelled 'adoption' in my desk drawer, and the time my gynaecologist told me, as I came round from the anaesthetic, that I could still have children my husband was late coming to collect me, and didn't even buy me a single daffodil or ask for the lab results.

Yesterday, bored and lonely, I started tidying up the desktop on my laptop and I found a file that my (then) husband had emailed to himself, and downloaded on to my computer when we arrived in Africa. His plan, I now remember, was to work on his second 'novel' each afternoon. In all the excitement I'd forgotten about it. So I opened it. My heart was beating and as I read it tears poured on to the keyboard. So, this is what he really thinks of me I have to manage the tension between us, not let it get out of hand. Right now, I have nowhere else to live. I could calm her down, and make things better. I could reach out and touch her. I could press my body against hers, wrap her in my arms, kiss her neck and breathe slowly against her skin.
It works every time. But I won't do that. And I know how much it hurts her that I won't. Knowing this gives me the closest thing I have to happiness. So much warmth has passed between us, yet only the spite can move me now. I haven't had sex with my wife in months. I don't see the point. I lost interest in her a long time back. If we ever, rarely, have sex I close my eyes and think of someone else often a friend of hers. She has some cute friends. I'd have sex with them, no problem.

So, after that extract from Nirpal’s ‘tricky’ second novel we’re pretty much up-to-date. I’ll see you next time for more of Nirpal’s passive-aggressive snark and Liz’s living out her princess fantasies with her new horse.

Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

The Adipositivity Project aims to promote size acceptance, not by listing the merits of big people, or detailing examples of excellence (these things are easily seen all around us), but rather, through a visual display of fat physicality. The sort that's normally unseen. The hope is to widen definitions of physical beauty. Literally.

I'm torn whether to continue Nirpal Dhaliwal watch now he and Liz Jones have split up. I'm way behind in my keeping up anyway, but in the meantime another outing for that photo of Liz Jones with a horse and the news that she will now refer to Nirps as 'the Fat Sportswear-Clad Nobody'.

Labels: fat, journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

Liz Jones dumps Nirpal Dhaliwal for a horse. Has Dhaliwal turned her off bipeds for life? Emotional rubberneckers want to know...

Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten, Part Eleven.

God look at all that. It all started last August with Nirpal telling us how men rock and how the cock is king. Oh look, it's last Sunday's newspaper, let's just have a quick read... < rustle > What's this?

Woe is me & Ms Jones ; Chronicle of a divorce foretold ++ Their marriage was played out in their newspaper columns. Now comes the split.

She is Liz Jones, the uptight, neurotic former editor of Marie Claire, whose fame is down to her ober-confessional musings about her younger, feckless, selfish, serially unfaithful husband.

He is Nirpal Dhaliwal, 11 years her junior, a man who even on their wedding day - a £20,000 gig at Babington House paid for by the bride - preferred to get drunk with his mates. Together, they are Britain's most talked-about media couple, locked in mutual loathing as their diatribes against each other both enthral and repulse the readers of their columns. It is an arrangement that has been financially beneficial to both.

Are they really 'Britain's most talked-about media couple'? God that's the most depressing thing I've heard since the news that 'Peter Andre was recovering'.

Now, though, this fairy tale is at an end. After seven years together the pair have finally split. She has booted him out of the marital home, and served him with divorce papers. The reason? His adultery, of course.

"Yes, he has been pretty shit," Ms Jones, 44,

Heh, do you remember the first episode of Absolutely Fabulous when Patsy was distraught because a newspaper printed her real age?

said this week. "We are going through with the divorce. I think my readers will be relieved. The little fur babies - no, he's not going to take them with him, they voted to stay with Mummy.

Oh God.

He was a very good cat- monitor, let's just say that."

I think there's a typo here as I'm fairly sure Liz constantly complained about him either nearly sitting on the cats or not feeding them.

This is a typically Jonesesque reference to the mercifully childless couple's cats, the one aspect of their life together that they both seemed to enjoy.

Mr Dhaliwal was unusually reluctant to discuss the break-up. "Nice try, but I won't be changing my mind," he said. "I'd rather not do an interview right now, it's just a bit too soon." His column in the Evening Standard revealed they broke up while on holiday earlier this month.

He wrote a couple of years ago about how the couple were reunited after one of his numerous extramarital forays. "My wife threw me out after discovering I've been cheating on her. On the night we got back together, I made strong, passionate love to her. I needed to keep a sense of self and not allow her to mire me in guilt. At the height of passion, I asked her, 'Who's the boss?' The question threw her. Initially, she wouldn't give me a reply, but I enticed it from her. 'You are,' she finally gasped. 'You are!' "

The couple met in 2000 when Ms Jones was editor of Marie Claire and married three years later. But if ever there were two people with more spectacularly different views on sex, relationships and household chores, they have yet to be found.

He was so unhappy that his weight ballooned to 17 stone, yet supposed her friends must be jealous because she had such a handsome spouse. She hated having to pay for everything, that he could never keep anything tidy, and never bought her a present.

Ms Jones wrote about all this in columns for three newspapers. She also managed a book. He was out of work at first, but was given his break to respond to her constant carpings with a newspaper column and also became a novelist.

So what was the fascination? Oliver James, a psychologist and author of Britain on the Couch, said the couple's columns revealed a type of "demented control-freakery" in both of them. He argued: "It is a form of exhibitionism and we all read it because we are interested in the ups and downs of any relationship, particularly the downs."

Following the comments of Tory MP Patrick Mercer at the start of March about the Army and soldiers from ethnic minorities Nirpal got a few commissions, such as this one from the Guardian. However, the spate of teenagers being killed in March allows him to share abgout the time he took a knife into school because he was sure a bully was going to go after him. Then we get to the 21st of March, and a familiar theme re-emerges...

Why busy women drive each other crazy
Evening Standard (London); Mar 21, 2007; NIRPAL DHALIWAL; p. 12

A TEACHER friend of mine recently joined a school where he was the only male member of staff.

Being gay, he was automatically designated the role of shoulder to cry on, as each woman took him aside to bitch about the others and whine about their lives in general.

He was unnerved by how much they complained about being busy and overworked. He did the same job as them, but wasn't nearly as stressed as they were. The complaint of busyness was just a charade, a frenetic pantomime, as the women competed with each other to seem more committed and indispensable than their colleagues. Women compete with each other over everything. Bearing in mind their insane constant politicking, it's difficult to take them seriously when they opine about their fraught modern lives.

A new book, CrazyBusy by Dr Edward Hallowell, tells us how we're all fatally overworked. Lo and behold, women have shot off the mark to say he doesn't appreciate the importance of being busy. As Anne McElvoy remarked in this paper yesterday, "I feel particularly irked by being told by a man that excess activity is Not Good For Me and that I would do better to sit down and contemplate the finer things in life".

Women actually equally two women as far as I can tell, one of whom wrote for two seperate papers. So obviously most of the sisterhood had a problem with their post in March. As far as I can tell this book is about how ALL of us are overworked, everyone on every point of the gender spectrum, I suppose it could be argued that because it's only two journalists that have written about this book and women at that that Nirpal is justified in concentrating on one sex and how they fulfil the criteria of this book.

No man will ever appreciate the turbocharged nature of female existence. Men don't whip each other into frenzied anxieties about our weight, outfits, choice of partner (or the lack of one), homes and tastes in decor, holidays, children (and their schools, clothes, activities etc), and so on and so on.

So, this would rather suggest that Nirpal doesn't believe that men are ever busy and that's because they don't do trivial things like bring up kids or the washing up. This makes amusing reading when you consider Liz's complaints about how little he does around the house. Maybe he thinks sloth is the man's greatest virtue?

Men compete with each other, but only in cases where we know we have a chance of a clear and outright victory: a specific goal at work, say, or the seduction of a particular woman.

Some women might feel seduced by not having to do all the work perhaps, while her husband sits on the sofa. Oh well, it's easy to be wise after the event.

Like a fantasy figure in a martial arts movie who parries thousands of arrows directed at him, modern women are in a constant fight to fend off the ceaseless volleys of barbed criticisms that may come their way.

My wife can be described as crazybusy. She strives to ensure that our beautiful house is immaculate and that its interior is up-to-speed with fashion; her wardrobe is never out of date; and she stocks the cupboards with exquisite trendy foodstuffs.

But to maintain this pristine glossy-magazine lifestyle, she must work like an ox on amphetamines.

She complains of being overworked, but won't admit that this is the price she pays to live beyond the reproach of other women.

When my wife, a former anorexic, says that she doesn't care what other women think of her, I don't believe her. She did, after all, starve herself to meet a female standard of perfection. Today's women do live at an exhausting pace, but it's only because they continuously flog each other to do so.

Yep, according to Dr Nirpal, if any woman feels tired it's the fault of other women. But then we seem to have a month of radio silence, except for:

WHY MEN AND WOMEN HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON ( EXCEPT SEX) ; A BRAZENLY PROVOCATIVE BLAST THAT WILL ENRAGE BOTH SEXES
Daily Mail (London); Apr 17, 2007; NIRPAL DHALIWAL; p. 26

'Enrage'? This all reads like the greatest hits of Nirpal Dhaliwal, men just want sex and, unless they're a straight-talking guy like Nirpal they'll put up with completely unreasonable demands from women (such as not behaving like an arsehole) to get it, women want men to be arseholes and treat them badly and any woman who says otherwise is lying, Nirpal is great in bed and a lot younger than his wife, all the old favourites.

HAVING an afternoon drink with a friend last Sunday, we found ourselves sitting beside a trendy twentysomething couple whose conversation we could overhear all too clearly. Actually, it was just a monologue by the young woman, who spelled out each of the banal uninteresting problems and worries that plagued her life.

All of her mind-numbing anxieties - about work, her friends, what to buy someone for their birthday - were articulated in excruciating detail over the next two hours in a grating, whining voice.

God, aren't women annoying with their 'empathy' and 'actually giving a shit for what other people think and feel'?

Her companion gazed empathetically into her face from across the table, listening intently as he stroked her hand to comfort her. He was paying her the sort of devoted, patient attention that only a man in desperate want of sex can manage.

Hah! The faggot!

Any other guy would surely have found her blathering unbearable. From the tension in his jaw and the way his eyes narrowed as his hand slid ever upwards along her bare arm, it was obvious there was only one thing on his mind.

And he was prepared to listen to two hours of her garbage in the hope that he would get it.

Does anyone else think this is actually describing how Nirpal and Liz met?

In their idiotic way the couple exemplified a fundamental truth about men and women. We exist in two different time zones. Men want to be happy right now, today, preferably in the company of a beautiful woman. Tomorrow can wait.

Women, on the other hand, are constantly concerned with the future, and with their prospects financially, emotionally and sexually.

Yet this man was quite clearly sublimating the desire for sex that Nirpal assumed he had to some future point in time, because he was sitting there listening

While this girl prattled on about her vague hopes and worries for the future,

Or does maleness contain an elastic concept of 'now' that is centred on 'today', while femaleness exists up to an uncertain point in time in the far future?

her boyfriend was anchored by his carnal desires into the immediate here and now.

They exemplified what I've come to realise over the years: that men and women have almost nothing in common, other than the desire for sex and, if they have any children, a shared concern for their wellbeing. Besides that, we have very little interest in each other.

I haven't read the rest of this article yet, so I'm just going to go and check... yep, he does actually manage to get through the article without using the metaphor of the praying mantis.

The reason, I believe, is that we are fundamentally selfish beings, only really interested in ourselves.

Nirpal, you're supposed to be looking into the abyss, not a mirror.

Some people claim to be lovingly entwined with their partners. They're deluded or lying. I'm in my mid-30s and have met no such couple.

And you've met everyone have you? When did you meet my parents? Or my aunts and uncles? Or my married cousins? Or the myriad of Patrick's relations?

I've known couples of all races and ages, some of them in arranged marriages - all of them simmering with tension and dissonance.

Yep, that's usual. When my Mum calls upstairs that dinner's ready and she get's no response there's a bit of simmering going on there, it doesn't mean that she feels the need to denounce her marriage as a sham when Dad comes down to the dinner table.

I've never met a couple I've envied. I don't feel sad admitting this.

Why should you? It's a good thing not to be envious.

I feel liberated.

You better not be coming to Pride this year.

I no longer cling to the myth that relationships create happiness, and I don't feel guilty or alone when feeling dissatisfied in my marriage.

Oh, so you are married then? Well, I suppose the paperwork can't get done in a few weeks.

Everyone else feels this, whether they admit it or not.

Men and women speak two different tongues. We can barely even get to know each other, let alone make each other happy.

OK, the next sentence doesn't follow on from the last, so either Nirpal had a mini-stroke in the writing of this article or my source has lost some text.

It held the booking receipt for the country house she'd gone out on her own and hired for the wedding.

Though I hadn't been informed of this, I wasn't upset. I had, after all, proposed to her.

Women generally drive the direction of relationships, partly because most men are happy just to be laissez-faire, but also because women are natural control freaks, simply because they have an inbuilt paranoia that their lives are going to go horribly awry.

For example, no intelligent man spontaneously asks a woman to marry him.

She will let him know well in advance via hints, leading questions and outright nagging that she wants to get hitched.

She might squeal with mock surprise when he offers that ring, but she'll have been nudging him to do it for months if not years.

One man I know proposed on one knee to his long-term girlfriend in their room at a country house hotel.

Even as he began his spiel, she began shaking her head violently.

In the end, she had to tell him this was not the kind of place she'd always imagined would be the setting for her proposal. Only a windswept hillside would do. She, you see, had been planning for this moment in her mind for years.

Now I come to think of it, I think my Mum did something similar, turning my Dad down a couple of times because he didn't ask properly. Though it wasn't an issue of there not being any 'windswept hillsides' in South London.

Similarly, men become fathers having never really thought about it. In my experience, they are often swayed by the desires of their partners. Very few women get pregnant by accident; they generally know exactly what they're doing. The fathers I know have admitted to being crestfallen when a girlfriend first told them she was pregnant. It was a shock end to their independence they'd never properly contemplated. But they feigned jubilation and made the usual offers of support.

It generally takes the arrival of an unplanned child for a man to start scrupulously practising safe sex.

One of the ironies of this gulf between the mindset and aspirations of the sexes is that a woman's cloying need for certainty often drives men to be unfaithful.

Here we go again, it's Liz's fault that Nirpal couldn't keep his dick in his pants, and it's her issues that need sorting out, not that he should be required to be monogamous.

The oppressive intimacy they force onto a relationship - always wanting reassurance, and always wanting to know what he is thinking and feeling - has the effect of making him seek a cheap ego boost elsewhere.

Men cheat to re-establish their sense of independence, to carve themselves a brief space with someone else that doesn't involve their partner.

You have to wonder why, if he was that concerned about his precious independence, he didn't divorce her?

My own adulteries - which occurred a couple of years ago on a long trip abroad

And, depending on whether you believe her, more recently, as detailed in your soon-to-be-ex-wife's column IN THE VERY NEWSPAPER YOU'RE WRITING THIS FOR!

- were driven by the need to escape the overbearing intimacy of married life.

Why the fuck did you get married in the first place? Why didn't you divorce your wife yourself to get this freedom that you claim you were denied?

Women will hate me for doing this and not being coy when admitting it. But I know very few men who've been faithful to their partner. The only men I've discussed sex honestly with who've never strayed are both gay.

I'm not the greatest husband material going,

And the winner of the award for greatest understatement of the year is...

but it hasn't cured my wife's compulsion to seek permanence with me. AFTER she uncovered my misbehaviour we separated briefly, but got back together

...and after I sexed her with my amazing penis...

and decided to make a fresh start in a new house. I had nothing to contribute to the deposit and my wife arranged the mortgage, yet she insisted that I sign the deeds.

I didn't feel remotely entitled to it and explicitly told her many times.

But signing was her precondition for continuing our relationship. I guess she felt it would be a clear sign of commitment from me, and also put me in debt to her morally.

I, naturally, did not analyse this event in terms of a long-term emotional power struggle the way a woman would. I simply noted that my infidelities had resulted in making me the co-owner of a fourstorey Georgian town house.

Figure that out.

The only reason I can give for why my wife hangs onto me is sex.

If you read her columns Nirpal you'd realise it's not that at all. It was her neurotic fear that if she got rid of you she'd never find another man to be with and would die old and alone.

She fancies me. That's it. Within the emotional turmoil of the female mind is the primal force of sex.

Though they waffle about their need for empathy and sensitivity, women are actually far more libidinous than men.

So, does this contradict the example of the man and the woman you were talking about at the start, or does that mean that women can sublimate their desires even more than men?

God created sex for them. He gave them a body that is one big erogenous zone, and a taste for myriad erotic nuances. Male sexuality is blunt and lumpen: no man is aroused by the thought of warm breath against his neck.

But a woman's body is made for sex. The female orgasm makes the male climax seem a pathetic nonevent by comparison, and is proof that women enjoy sex far more than men do.

'So I did rape that woman yr honour, but I would only say that due to biology she got a hell of a lot more out of it than I did, so I think it should be considered an act of charity on my part, perhaps worthy of a medal and a statue in one of the National Parks.'

In my early and mid-20s, I had a series of liaisons with older women (one of which developed into the marriage I'm in now). I was then penniless, and had no status and nothing noteworthy to say.

No comment.

Yet accomplished and intelligent women in their 30s and 40s happily took me to bed. I knew then that women, like men, are driven by narrow, selfish agendas, be it the desire for security, money, or a healthy young body.

It's amazing how Nirpal manages to make 'looking attractive' appear to be some sort of crime.

Having sex with those women, I'd watch them lose themselves in the animal intensity of it, becoming oblivious to my presence.

Again, no comment, though I dare say it wasn't just restricted to their moment of climax.

I was nothing. They said they liked me because I was 'sweet' and 'funny', but those qualities would have been meaningless if I wasn't up to scratch in the sack.

I recently had a frank chat with a female friend, and she admitted that women address a man's qualities as though they are scanning his CV with a view to employing him.

Above all, they want a man who turns them on. Failing that they settle (in descending order) for a man's money, his ability to entertain them, and his willingness to do the dishes.

Damn evil conniving women and their desire for someone with which they would have some compatibility!

Her words confirmed my belief that men and women are incapable of a genuine spiritual union.

Hang on, a few paragraphs ago you wanted your freedom, now you want a 'genuine spiritual union'?

We're too dissimilar even to understand each other, let alone combine in harmony, so we just grasp what we can from our relationships.

That's why, when a woman does meet a man who flips her lid sexually, she isn't going to let him go. Men and women are held together by biology, not by love.

Love isn't powerful enough to overcome the tremendous contradictions between us. Genetics isn't a recipe for happiness - but then our genes don't exist to make us happy. They exist to keep us alive.

So yes, I believe men and women do exist in different times zones in emotional terms. We find mutual satisfaction in sex, but that aside we must remain strangers.

Wow, well all that has quite exhausted me and robbed me of much of the will to live. I'll try and get round to watch Liz has been up to in the last few months some time in the next few days...

Labels: journalists, Liz Jones, Nirpal Dhaliwal