Thursday, May 17, 2012

Brick and Mortars - why sometimes it's better just to shut up!

Samantha Brick is at it again. In her quest to become the Liz Jones of rural France, she's now aiming her big guns at her French neighbours. Apparently they took a dim view of her article in the Daily Mail recently bemoaning the fact that women everywhere hate her because she's 'beautiful'. Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder but suffice to say, my particular eye, when cast in her direction, does not behold a beauty, rather a middlingly attractive, slightly thick waisted middle aged woman with a husband (a French carpenter) who choses her clothes and makes her put on her make-up before breakfast.

In her latest article in the Wail, she, well, wails about how she now gets shunned at the school gates, elbowed out of the way in the queue at the post office and is generally ignored by the women of her village. Worse still, her neighbours are a bunch of immoral, adulterous harridans who would seduce your husband  in the blink of a perfectly made up eye without so much as a 'shove over, sista'. In the trou du cul of rural France? Come on Sam, they may have perfectly ironed housecoats but makeup? Not likely. And having seen photos of her controlling, overweight, balding husband with his70s porn star moustache, all I can say is, they're welcome to him.  Worse still, these same women won't go on girlie shopping trips with her or meet her after work for a cocktail or two. A cocktail? In rural France? It's not London, sweetie.

She goes on to say, Since I wrote a piece for this newspaper expressing how difficult life can be when you are beautiful, my popularity has plummeted to an all-time low in the rural village where I live. (No shit, Sherlock!) Yes, I have received hate mail from women around the world, but none of it as vicious as that from French women. Much of their condemnation is unprintable and I have been stunned at their choice of language.


Really? It seems the French dislike a professional self-publicist just as much as we do. What Ms Brick seems to find hard to comprehend is that sometimes it's just better to shut up. The adage 'there's no such thing as bad publicity' is nonsense, as the German 'Come Dine with Me' contestant found out when her own particular brand of self-publicity turned into a long campaign of internet abuse and hatred. She eventually killed herself.  Gerald Ratner would probably disagree too, and BP, and a whole host of other companies.If the only publicity you can achieve is worldwide opprobrium, then I'd be inclined to keep a low profile.

On the one hand, she may have a point. The website gleeden.com, set up so married people could find someone for a no-strings affair, has just over 1 million subscribers around the world. Over 500,000 of them are French. The idea of the cinq a sept, named for the time slot when the French apparently meet up with their lovers after work, is still alive and well. Where I lived in France, family trees were certainly a tangled old affair with men having fathered children with  a number of different partners and there was something of a revolving door of personal relationships. The problem as ever, with Samantha, is her delivery. There are ways of saying things and she, inevitably, doesn't use them. Instead, she produces a ridiculously shallow tirade, aimed at the women of her own community.

Whatever the realities, Samantha Brick would have been well advised to keep her own counsel. She made a fool of herself last month and she looks set to do it again this month.  To moan about your neighbours then berate them as 'hostile and predatory adulterers' will no doubt result in another round of incoming mortar fire directed Ms Brick's way.

Take coverrrrrrr!





9 comments:

the fly in the web said...

It didn't seem to resemble the villages in which I've lived....one hint of misbehaviour on the part of the local gentlemen and their wives would be administering a slap on the jaw with a slab of frozen fish from the Argel delivery service...and now having found the article, what is all this about weighing each other?
They'd need the weighbridge at the quarry considering most of the ladies I knew...

Sarah said...

The woman's a prat, let's face it.

Her article in the DM online was followed by hundreds of insulting and deriding comments. Her reputation as a journalist is in tatters with readers and yet she carries on regardless, stomping over her community with hob-nailed boots. She'll be hounded out if she continues or become so much of a pariah that she'll feel obliged to leave. Serve her right if she does.

Wylye Girl said...

Fly, where we lived, which isn't actually that far from Ms Brick, a plucked eyebrow was a rarity, never mind makeup. Although everyone in our village did seem to have been married to someone else in the village at some point, I only knew of one actual affair that was going on.

Sarah, half of me feels a bit sorry for her. I think she must be a deeply unhappy individual, either that or she's just incredibly stupid. A supposedly independent and emancipated woman who marries someone who is neither her intellectual nor physical equal, who tells her what to wear and how to look? I think she has problems. I have a friend a bit like her who seems hellbent on personal destruction. Sad really. But she's still a prat!

Perpetua said...

I must confess to having had to google Samantha Brick (I'm so out of touch) and rather wish I hadn't. This woman is a career journalist? I can't believe anyone can write such shallow drivel and get paid for it. Her village is definitely nothing like our little commune. :-)

Gail Is This Mutton? said...

She has the hide of a rhino and is totally unphased by all the negative comments that her facile pieces attract!

BacktoBodrum said...

Let's all be thankful that she didn't decide to move to our villages.

Steve said...

'hostile and predatory adulterers' - in some areas that would be considered a badge of honour.

VEG said...

You know, the more I hear about this chick, the more certain I am that this is a joke. She's some subtle avant garde comedienne playing a joke on us all. Because no one can be that....UP THEIR OWN ARSE. I mean they can't. Can they? She HAS to be joking. We just haven't got the joke yet.

Croixblanches said...

I have searched high and low on the internet, and I can't seem to track down one of those mirrors that Ms Brick obviously uses.
I haven't applied myself quite as assiduously to searching for predatory adulterers in my corner of France...but as most of the locals live in the Maison de Retraite, it probably just means I'll have to turn out for their next brocante and check the talent for myself...

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