Oh my god. It's......it's very Liz Jones.
Something funny about wor Lizzie - every photo she's in, she looks like she's been photoshopped in. Anyway, fancy a laugh?
I felt that they simply didn’t want to see a single, high-profile woman in a lovely home. They made assumptions that I was profligate because I went to Paris to attend fashion shows, not understanding that it was my job.
Now, let's see....
I had to hide that I have dogs and, at that time, two horses.
My first property, bought in 1983, was £35,000, in a slum clearance area in Brixton, South London. The interest rate was 15 per cent, the guarantor my dad, and I had to share the loan with a sister. I slowly worked my way up the property ladder.
Next, a teeny terraced cottage in Saffron Walden, Essex, for £90,000. Then, a one-bedroom former local authority flat in Old Street, East London for £93,000, way before it became fashionable.
So, three homes, all getting more expensive, and you got in at ground level on the great social housing sell-off of the 80s.
By 2006, I had bought a Georgian house on a beautiful square in Islington, North London, with a mortgage of £1 million. The gay couple I bought it from remarked, when I moved in, that I had amazing furniture: Matthew Hilton sofa, arm chair and ottoman, a Vispring bed. A Terence Woodgate sofa for the basement kitchen. Mid-century classics.
That house would be a damn sight more than 1 million today. And, aside from what does their sexuality have to do with anything, and what the fuck are they doing hanging around and passing judgement after the house is sold, why the fuck do you need a sofa in your fucking "basement kitchen"?
All the years of 14-hour days with never a break to even go to the loo, long-haul flights, all the stress of being a journalist and a glossy magazine editor seemed, finally, worth it. I had been single all my life but now, in my early 40s, I was happy to share the house with my brand new husband.
You chose all this. If you were such a fucking great editor, you'd go to the loo when you wanted. Do you think Anna Wintour asks permission to leave the room? Oh, and you were 48.
I made a huge mistake and bought a 50-acre farm in Somerset for £1.6 million: a home for my cats, and my newly rescued racehorse and pony.
I grew up in Essex, but this didn’t prepare me for living on the edge of Exmoor.
Yes, last time I was in Ilfracombe, I remember thinking "Bloody hell, it's just like Romford around here!".
I invited my sister and her young son to live with me. I did up a derelict barn for her. We fell out, and so I took out another £275,000 loan to buy her a cottage, and sold the farm to scrape together her deposit. I relocated to Yorkshire and bought a Swaledale mini-mansion for just under a million that I would eventually lose to HMRC. It came with a cottage, which housed my assistant/animal carer, so when I lost my home she did too.
I was working so hard, abroad for long stretches of time, paying for weeks in hotels before claiming it back, that I took my eye off the ball. I remember driving across the Pennines to the coast near Liverpool to interview the tenor Alfie Boe when my accountant called to tell me I owed HMRC £400,000 plus a backlog of VAT.
Just a point here - does she know how dangerous it is to take phone calls when driving? Twat.
I then rented a tiny cottage without heating, which I paid to install
Who are her landlords? The "I Saw You Coming" agency?
I would see lights on in windows, families cooking, fire lit, and feel insanely jealous. Why do they have a home, and I don’t? I finally chanced upon a vicarage for sale, not far from where I rent land and a yard for my surviving horse.
The thing is, ending up in a rental can happen to anyone: divorce, illness, redundancy, bad luck.
I have big plans for the vicarage — a new kitchen, a downstairs loo, a courtyard garden full of only white flowers, and ferns; when you rent, you think very hard before you plant anything
Or, you know, not having the money or credit.
Seriously - and yes I know there's a strong possibility this has been cooked up by a couple of hacks - you'd need a heart of stone not to laugh. TL/DR? Liz wastes money like a drunken sailor on shore leave and it's everyone else's fault.