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LIZ JONES: Men in suits vs angry grannies (I know who my money's on)

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BBC Radio 4 presenter Sarah Montague is apparently putting off listeners because she laughs too often and too loudly

Sarah Montague, the intelligent, pragmatic presenter of Radio 4’s Today programme, is apparently putting listeners off because she laughs too often and too loudly.

I’ll wager it’s men who have called in to complain: they hate a woman even talking to them in the morning, let alone someone who dares to bray.

I have never been abused, but I have to admit most days I hate men.

They chip, chip, chip away at my self-esteem, talking to me in a way they would never dare talk to a posh man.

Even when I am paying a man’s salary, he can barely contain his enragement.

Take the builder who recently described me  as ‘a very wilful lady’; or my posh estate agent, who said: ‘Liz, what you need to understand is the housing market is sluggish  .  .  .’

He would never have said that to a middle-aged man paying him £50,000. Never in a million years.

I can hear Stuart Hall’s braying laugh, as he fell about in hysterics at the antics on It’s A Knockout, to this day. ]

He and Eddie Waring were like Abbott and Costello, unfunny and ugly and seemingly harmless. But, yet again, another man close to, if not actually in, the grave has been exposed as a serial abuser.

The key question is not why men can’t be trusted (my husband once assured me, when the David Beckham scandal broke, that any man, on his own in a hotel with a mini-bar, will cheat on his wife if he gets the chance. 

And even my late father, a war hero and a gentleman, once went to see a film starring Linda Lovelace in a dingy cinema on Piccadilly). 

No, the real issue is why Hall’s victims did not report his crimes at the time.

A woman¿s hormones are designed, first of all, to make us tolerant of a male, no matter his shortcomings, so we can get married and become pregnant

Heads of HR should always be 50-plus women according to Liz Jones, while every board should have one, knitting furiously in the corner

My theory is that this is all due to women’s hormones, and centuries of conditioning. It’s an ingrained belief that a middle-aged white man in a suit knows more than we do.

I would say the one good thing to come out of the banking crisis is that it has been patently revealed that, no, they don’t.

    More from Liz Jones Column...   I was sexually abused by boys at the age of nine (...try blaming the internet for THAT) 25/05/13   LIZ JONES: Clegg's right for once (just ask the tot snoring in the dog bowl) 12/05/13   Liz Jones: Pay an extra 80p - and you'll buy much more than a pair of jeans 27/04/13   Liz Jones: In which I call him a cab 24/04/13   LIZ JONES: Think death is cruel? Then try 'not dying' like my mother 21/04/13   Liz Jones's diary: In which there’s a family crisis 17/04/13   LIZ JONES: It's not Botox that stops me smiling - it's patronising men 13/04/13   Liz Jones's diary: In which I tackle my debts 09/04/13   VIEW FULL ARCHIVE A woman’s hormones are designed, first of all, to make us tolerant of a male, no matter his shortcomings, so we can get married and become pregnant.

Secondly, they are designed to make us nurture. Without these hormones, the task of home-making would be too tedious.

I think the reason I never wanted children, flirted with a man or put up with one for long was that my hormones were scrambled by anorexia from the age of 11.

But the conditioning was there, meaning that in Fleet Street, where I’ve toiled away for 30 years, I never stood up to men, even when I knew better. They were always paid more than me, and did much less work.

Week in, week out, I would secure interviews with celebrities for one paper I worked for, while the exec in charge of me only secured one, in all those years – and he cancelled at the last minute.

Only when women reach the menopause do they become intolerant of men, short-tempered, powerful.

I think the solution to all this abuse in the workplace by men in authority lies not in the children’s mothers, who are still in thrall to their hormones and husbands, but in their grannies and ancient spinster aunts, a much underrated type of woman.

Heads of HR should always be 50-plus women, while every board should have one, knitting furiously in the corner.

It’s all about us stepping up to look after younger women – not just helping them up the career ladder, but helping them stand up to the suits.

  Author of the Famous Five Enid Blyton

According to a new Enid Blyton exhibition in Newcastle, the Famous Five’s Timmy was a collie. I never realised this at the time.

I was a slow, leaden child and also thought that when the text referred to Julian’s calf, he had somehow acquired a baby cow. Now that I own several border collies, it all makes sense.

Timmy never went on the lead – mine sit down, affronted, if you dare to leash them – and always bit passing crooks on the ankle. Male walkers either run past my house in the Dales, or hop as if on hot coals as Grace Kelly nips their socks.

I don’t blame her: their dress sense is criminal. But I can’t understand why Timmy didn’t once bite the Five’s bicycle tyres – mine find bike tyres irresistible.

Maybe it was because in the 1950s no one wore fluoro lycra and helmets – a nylon fright-fest. Anyone would think the cyclists passing my place were pedalling up the Eiger.

Whatever happened to wool, and corduroy, and wicker baskets instead of rucksacks? And why power drinks in a bright bottle with a hose? Can’t they find their own mouths?

Boy Scouts sit on the wall by my waterfall, affronted and scared when Mini Puppy licks their sandwiches.

‘Germs!’ they shout, holding food aloft, which of course only makes collies climb. Children were made of sterner stuff 50 years ago.




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