Having been relentlessly bullied when I was young for being flat chested it is one of the things that gets my goat. I was held on the ground while the boys tried to find my breasts.I just don't effing believe her.

I mean in no way was it good to not have a bosom.

I have to admit that I wasn't quite at the serious dating stage in the Eighties... I was born in 1978. I do remember a lot of dating going on around me though, and there doesn't seem to be any shortage of people born in that decade!

It amuses me seeing Liz fake-blaming the fashion of that era for her misery. If people did avoid going out with her, it was probably because she was a howling pain in the arse.

Anyway, I don't believe one word she comes out with - I firmly believe she's being paid silly money to wind everyone up as much as possible.

Having a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp and hair like a fright wig probably didn't help much either.

Lizbot's era is the 70s,she is old enough to be your mother. She pretends to have been young in the 80s.

In the 80s I was starting out for the second time - newly separated in '82 and already into my 30s but not by a lot!

I wore clashing colours, harem pants and Indian cotton tunics with scarves round my hips and metallic sandals. Migraine-inducing colour schemes were my speciality.

I had no shortage of dates, ranging from an art student ten years younger to a solicitor 15 years older, with all sorts of in-between stages. I'm sure the problem with LJ was LJ, not what she wore.

Why on earth does the Mail keep using the same old photographs of Liz and her family over and over again?

Bellagio, you are a braver soul than I!!!


What an absolutely horrid thing to say about breasts. And I'm sure that everyone else in the 80s who managed to get dates were wearing clothing just as horrendous (or fabulous as I think - I love 80s jumpers!). I'm pretty certain the reason that she didn't get a lay is down to her bitter personality.


Fizzycat, you sound like my kind of person

She's also denied in her oh so accurate Diary , that she she's dating Adam And.The book mentions him, and he she 'fell in love' with him. There's a reworking of the 'I followed him around in his dance troupe' story.
Cathrin, those family photos are probably the only ones she's found, probably searching through her mother's belongings. I'm glad the online image of poor Mrs Jones has been taken down. I'm sure it was as a response to the many complaints people made to social services as well as the DM/ PCC.

If you stop reading The Book for pleasure - or even accuracy and coherence - and concentrate instead on spotting the lies, mistakes and contradictions, it's a lot more enjoyable. F'rinstance, she claims that while at Brentwood County High School, a boy told her he'd take her to see the film of Quadrophenia. Which was released in mid-September 1979, when she was 21.

Maybe she was kept back a few years but didn't want to admit that in The Book. When I read her articles I never think of her as someone who has been out of school a long time.

Are you delirious,Bellagio? reading her book for pleasure ?

So funny,is she trying to knock some years off again? or was she just so thick she took her O levels five times?

She is doing it for research purposes. At least it saves us the job,so I am grateful for these snippets.

Priceless! Didn't we spot a similar time-travelling glitch in another of her articles not long ago...something else she'd claimed to do/see/buy/listen to several years before it existed? Possibly the one about Davy Jones?

I can't wait for someone to start an entire website dedicated to the contradictions, factual impossibilities, and changing details of LJ's writing.... At the very least, an Amazon review listing all the bits that are factually impossible or conflict directly with versions of the same story in the Mail....

But hey, it doesn't matter if it's made up, does it? That's what the Liz fans are always telling us, although they all seem strangely silent when it's a memoir and can't be defended in this way. I guess that leaves them with "She loves animals, that's good enough for me, you're all just jealous."

Yes, the sainted brother Nick gave her the first Monkees album when she was five. No small trick considering she was five from September 1963 to September 1964 and said album wasn't released until January 1967 in the UK.

BTW, I'm a 'he'.

The ten greatest lies of Liz Jones:

Getting mail on a Monday in response to an article published the previous day...

Being given an album 28 months before it was released, or even recorded...

Hearing the cries of mother seals as they searched for their cubs after a cull in Canada (in the original version, that's what she was told)...

Pretty much everything about how Nic came to be living in the barn conversion instead of Sue...

The Rock Star...

The admirer (well there's a lie for a start) who forced his way into her kitchen one Sunday (original version: he stood in the porch)...

Performing in The Match Girls as Mrs P: there are at least three mutually incompatible versions...

Her true age (for many years)...

The trip to the island of Vamazi: at least four different versions...

Being asked to go with a boy to see the Quadrophenia film at least three years before it was released...

There's both versions of the Sunday admirer tale:

The Diary, March 13th 2010:

I tried to carry on as normal, but then something else happened. It was the week running up to Valentine’s Day, and on Wednesday a flower van arrived with a huge bunch of red roses. There was no note. I don’t actually appreciate flowers: I have to unwrap them, trim the stems, find a vase and, in a few days’ time, take them to the compost heap and wash the vase; at the moment, I don’t have time.

On Friday, I received a recorded delivery envelope. Inside was a card, a note that said I had found my soul mate, and an e-mail address. There was no postal address or name. I thought nothing of it.

Sunday was glorious – one of those spring days that make you feel almost glad to be alive. By mid morning, I was sitting in my kitchen reading, the collies playing on the cobbles. They started barking, and I saw that a car had pulled up on my drive. I stood by the kitchen door, and watched as a man emerged from the car. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Did you like the flowers?’ My heart sank.

‘Um, yes, thank you. Do I know you?’

‘In a past life.’

He came and stood in my porch, and I retreated half behind the door. ‘I don’t really like people turning up without calling first,’ I said, as politely as I could.

‘But I have driven here from Nottingham. Why didn’t you e-mail me?’ he said.

I then said I don’t have time to phone my own mother and could he please leave. He stood his ground. I pulled out my BlackBerry, and pretended to speak to someone. ‘OK, Mike, you can be here in a minute?’

‘That was my neighbour,’ I said. ‘Now, will you please leave?’

I was really shaken as I watched him pull away. I made a note of his registration number and called the police. They said they would increase their patrols.

However, by May 3rd the basic details had changed considerably:

I was recently the object of a stalker’s rather warped ‘admiration’.

He would send me cards and flowers and letters too long to read. He knew my address, which puzzled me rather. He said we had known each other in a previous life, and that he was my ‘soulmate’.

And then, on a Sunday morning, this man turned up at my house. I would have been less annoyed if I’d not been wearing pyjamas. He pushed his way into my kitchen; I called a friend, who rushed round. ‘Please leave!’ she said, and then he got a bit nasty.

Finally, my stalker got into his car and left. I phoned the police (why bother with the new stalker helpline, just call 999) and a nice young man came round.

So... porch or kitchen ? Pretend to call a male friend or actually call a female friend ? Did the police attend, or not ? Or... did it happen at all ?

The seal thing:

April 2007: "I ask the animal welfare observers accompanying me, who have witnessed such scenes many times before, to tell me which aspect of the slaughter they find most distressing.

One tells me how she has witnessed pups being dragged by hooks across the ice, and once saw a pup take 45 minutes to die after being clubbed on the head.

"She was on the ice, just gurgling and crying, and there was nothing we could do to intervene."

Another described how, when the hunt begins, the female seals all try to keep an eye on their babies until fear drives them into the water.

Once the boats have gone, they all come back onto the ice, calling for their pups.

They waddle up to the huge, steaming pile of offal that is left to rot on the ice (seal blubber is virtually worthless), and they actually sort gently through the bodies, trying to find their babies.

"The sound the mothers make is so terrible, so plaintive, it haunts you for ever," she said."

December 2008: "As each pup was killed and skinned, often while still moving, the fishermen tossed the bodies into a pile. At the end of the day, after the boats had gone, I saw the mothers creep back on to the ice, clamber over the corpses and frantically call for their babies. It is a sound I never want to hear again."

No, she didn't see or hear anything of the sort. Jones has taken the words, and hugely unpleasant experience, of someone else, and claimed it for her own, purely for effect.

don't forget the saga of the plastic pearls Bellagio! (my personal favourite)

The plastic pearls re-re-re hash is my favourite, too

Of course! That's one of the best examples, how could we all forget such a classic?!

Yes indeed. Version one, 21st November 2009, trying to live on benefits:

"The most humiliating incident of the entire week happened when I went to a pawn shop in Islington, having decided I would part company with a string of pearls given to me by my dad when I turned 18.

The nice Indian man inside told me business was booming. I extracted my velvet-lined case from my designer handbag which, having cost £1,000, I was beginning to resent, like an ex-wife hanging around my neck demanding alimony.

He took the necklace away. I felt a lump in my throat. He came back. 'These pearls are not real,' he said. 'They are plastic, maybe worth a pound.'"

Version 2, July 22nd 2012:

"On my 18th birthday, my dad made a huge fuss about giving me a pearl necklace. Then, in my 30s, when ‘going out’ with Mad Trevor, he of the TCP for aftershave, he ate so many M&S ready meals I had to pawn said necklace. ‘It is worthless,’ the man said in the pawn shop. ‘They’re not real pearls. They’re plastic.’"

Let us not forget the diamond stud earrings. Not quite in the same league as the plastic beads in LJ's gushingly grateful outlook on presents, but close.

This is fun - I'll put my thinking cap on and see what else I can remember nice work, Bellagio.

from the Nigella article, 23 June -

"Take my situation. I am ‘dating’ a man who used to be successful and famous.
We had lunch on the Suffolk coast once, and the waitress started blushing and gushing. My boyfriend started to smirk, until the waitress said: ‘Are you really Liz Jones? Wait till I tell my mum I’ve met you .  .  .’
Cue an afternoon of moody silence. Cue, later, infidelity: just as nasty as throttling, only more cowardly. Men smack us round the face and humiliate us in myriad ways."


from the dreary, 21 August 2008 -

"We went down to the bar, but because of Michael we sat on the terrace, overlooking the sea. He didn’t help matters because a) he stole the bread sticks, and b) he tried to mount the labrador (in both cases Michael, not the RS). The waitress came over. ‘Oh my god!’ she said. The Rock Star shifted in his seat. ‘Are you Liz Jones?’ He had the good grace to laugh. He ordered me a glass of champagne; he had, can you believe it, a Schweppes bitter lemon."