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!