Jack Monroe #297 I'm not a natural tax payer.

[katycat]

oh dear g-d, she's going all cod italiano

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I can't believe that this is the thing that brings me out of lurkdom, but I am a Venice- loving Frau, and this has me and . Jack thinks Per Rialto is a place in Venice. This will be because she has seen it written on numerous signs on the 2 main walking routes either side of the Grand Canal. The clue's in the arrow, Jack. Rialto is the place. Per means 'for', as in, follow this arrow for Rialto. Along with all the other tourist sheep who never venture off the beaten track......

 

[Brian Butterfield]

You’re back too! Hang on a minute…. You mysteriously disappeared conveniently when Jack did and now you are back when she is?

OMG @MancBee is Jack’s OH

 

[Sideboard Bob]

I think her hair’s nice too, I was trying to find an example, but instead found this picture of a lifelong Liverpool FC fan.

 

[MancBee]

I’ve never been to Venice let alone been whisked off for a mini break. Should I crowdfund it?

Yes absolutely.

Now FUCK OFF.


It's good to be back...

 

[hereforthereceipts]

Hi, wonderful people. Jumping in lurker style to thank you all for some laughs in the past week or so. I was in a dark place, no light in either of my eyes, howling, throwing chairs, etc, so getting giddy about a sentient pumble was a helpful distraction. Thank you for the tireless work. You must be exhausted.

And thank you for adding to my Canadian vocabulary. Been calling everything “claggy” for weeks now and I’ll hit the spot one day. But I’ve recently figured out toasties are just sealed toasted sandwiches (aka grilled cheese), so I’m simultaneously less impressed with you all. But before you go after this non-binary class traitor for not thanking you enough (unclear which class I’m betraying), know that for every criticism of toastie makers I have, I believe there are thousands of other North Americans silently thanking you for helping them laugh about very British things this week. That is a huge achievement, cabal. People who wouldn’t have laughed about pumble this week are laughing, because of you all .

(If unclear, I’m channeling a smoke-blowing squig. You cabal are just all right and made me chuckle when I was climbing the walls. Also DMs are open if anyone can forensically track me down online and send me a $130 CAD Breville toastie maker. I’d buy it myself, but I’m not a natural spender and feeling too autistic to find my credit card today.)

 

[traumatised sideboard]

Thankyou x @NP but I think I'd prefer the equivalent in cash. Have you considered donating to my spite orangery fund?

I am fully over Housing Jack. For the last seven years I've been living independently in social housing. Some of the flats I viewed before my current one were in a fucking atrocious state. The first one the tenant had multiple cats (a violation of the tenancy agreement) and she'd eventually been evicted. She hadn't bothered with litter trays for the cats, she'd just been chucking cat litter all over the floors. I set one foot inside the front door, looked left into the bathroom which was black with filth, choked on the smell and immediately backed out. I later found out that a young woman had taken the flat even though the housing association had attempted to deep clean the property three times and it still smelled awful. The second one had a shared wall which was bowing with an enormous crack running diagonally across the whole wall from top to bottom. Multiple people were attending the viewing and all of them were asking questions with intentions of accepting the tenancy.

I don't even live in a rough area but I've seen an unconscious bloke being dragged down the stairs by his mate near the kids play area in the middle of the day because he'd shot up too much heroin. I've had to call the police on one of my neighbours (thankfully evicted now) who tried to chop a woman's neck with gardening shears. Meanwhile Jack is in a beautiful detached house with enough space to house £££ of Cotswold furniture, a garden and neighbours with orangeries, swimming pools and magical fruit and veg-dispensing bins and a landlady who'll let her rent cheques bounce multiple months in a row. She is so far removed from the people she's trying to represent it's untrue.

Sorry, that turned into a bit of a scathing essay. TLDR: Jack's a cunt and I hope she gets punted into a canal and her stupid pig hat gets ruined so she can't convert it into a house deposit.

 

[Veronicaaa]

Look what she's had the nerve to 'like'.

 

[MooBelle]

Parade-wise there were two incidents. The call operator passing out parade she didn’t attend due to having to wear a skirt.i think we triangulated that the call operators do have types of uniform so this could be true.
Then, playing dress up in a fireman jacket with her own dark jeans on at an actual parade/fun day at the LGBT stall. Interestingly, Fack headed up the Sarfend Fire nd rescue LGBT group on joining the fire service, yet started the column “scummy mummy” in the paper and talked about dating men, then “came out” in the column.

I love it when the OGs have receipts x
fwiw I consider myself an OG of these threads but my receipt collecting goes way further back.

For any lurkers or newbies.... Jack applied for the RAF like her big brother Yannis. She was turned down because she failed the fitness test.
She then applied for the Fire service. She was also turned down because her fitness wasn't up to scratch. She then applied for 'civilian ' roles in the Fire Service and failed. Big Dave or Daddy H (however you wish to refer to him) then walked her through the entrance test a second time and miraculously she passed. At aged 17 with almost no exams and zero experience she landed a cushy job as a call handler at Essex headquarters for the Fire brigade. Jack has stated this was £27k a year. For a 17 year old.
Any pictures of Jack in a firefighter uniform is from 'charity' days like Pride. She was never a firefighter.
She also stated (and wrote an article about) how she was part of the investigation into the Grenfell disaster.
This is not true and insulting to anybody actually involved in the horror of Grenfell.

 

[maytoseptember]

I had to look up A Girl Called Jack on Amazon because I wasn’t sure if it was still in print. It is - so why has Book 2 vanished from existence?

Anyway, I then decided to scan through the one star reviews and they are a HOOT.

This is my favourite though:

 

[DisgruntledGoat]

I can’t see that ‘he’ tweet, I wonder if they were asked to remove it!! Or it’s a private account some of you are following (her only friend, with a dog haha)

Gelato, Venice and Boyfriends, oh my!

Pahahahaha deleted and retweeted without the pronoun:

Only real life friend done fucked up. The truth’s out, anyway.

 

[I’MBUSY!]

How brave to get on a plane to Venice in the middle of a “deliriously painful” ear and lymph node infection, and risking a rupture. So so brave.

 

[Griftymcgriftface]

Yes absolutely.

Now FUCK OFF.


It's good to be back...

You’re back too! Hang on a minute…. You mysteriously disappeared conveniently when Jack did and now you are back when she is?

 

[moldwarp]

BTW, after reading the Vanity Fair article (what a great read!) I've been thinking about these compulsive liars.

One thing that strikes me is that many people believe Jack & co exaggerate, rather than lie - we often see talk of "a grain of truth". The more I read, the less I believe it. Elisabeth Finch's stories seem to have been totally invented, and I think Jack's are much the same. I always wonder how much they believe their own shit. Sadly they seem unable to ever acknowledge that they are total fantasists...

I love it when articles like this surface. So intriguing and so deeply fucked up.

I think Jack's origin story has a grain of truth, which is that she struggled after having her son. I personally believe the struggle was predominantly of the mental rather than the poverty-stricken variety.

But that, I believe, is where Jack and The Truth part company. My own speculative belief is that she fell out badly with her family due to quitting the fire service, and had some kind of tantrum where she insisted she would do it all herself and didn't need their help. That is where we get all the stuff about sleeping on the floor, sex work, unscrewing lightbulbs and SB only have one piece of bread and jam like Oliver Twist. Help was always available for her but she chose not to take it because she was aggressively playing the victim. Her going public and posing as a destitute single mum in the papers was all part of this aggressive, play-the-victim-to-make-my-family-feel-super-guilty plan - in my view. I base my speculation and opinions on my own experiences of what narcs are like. Of course once the story was out in the papers, it must have been terrible for her family as the implication amongst their friends and neighbours would have been that they disowned Jack and left her in poverty - which I absolutely do not believe to have been the case. Ditto goes for SB's dad.

I then think that Jack got the recipes gig off the back of that and wasn't expecting it as she never wanted to be a food writer but a political writer. I also suspect that she didn't realise the extent to which she would become a poster child for poverty. But the gig got going and she got offers, media jobs and relationships out of it, so she's just kept the facade going. In my speculative opinion. I don't think, personally, that she expected for it to go as far as it has and I think she'd just as happily leave it behind and embrace her genuine tory-lite middle class spendy hyper-consumer mean girl self, but she can't now. And so, here she is. And here are we.

 

[FrannyGallops]

If you zoom in enough on Jack’s sunglasses from the Venice pic, I think you can actually see a reflection of her mythical OH…

Seriously though, I don’t know if it’s the angle or not, but there’s no other person reflected. There is something that looks like a possible remote in her hand though but I could be in conspiracy theory territory there.

 

[moldwarp]

Poor Marcus Rashford can attest to thisView attachment 1237557

Marcus Rashford: ‘I immediately started thinking about what happens next’

When the Manchester United and England forward used this year’s break in football to address the national child hunger crisis, few would have guessed it would lead to a government showdown. But the U-turn he forced meant millions of meals for struggling families over the summer and was the first...

www.gq-magazine.co.uk

If anyone wants a reread ^

Yeah, much journalist, Jack, wOw.

Honestly can you imagine getting to interview one of the country’s best footballers, who is also a poverty survivor, campaigner and person of colour, and STILL managing to implicitly privilege your own white middle class experience over his. Imagine her interviewing someone like Malala Yousafzai.

“Malala describes being shot by Taleban for her campaigning for education for girls. I quietly, softly, gently tell her about how I was forced to miss my own passing out parade that didn’t exist because my superiors would not allow traaaazers on a bird. Malala’s mouth twists as she struggles to hold back tears of empathy. Well, Harold said he thought she was actually trying not to laugh, but I told him to PISS OFF. I was just about to ask Malala if she wanted to buy two copies of Bootstrap Cook, but suddenly and inexplicably, SHE LEFT.”

 

[Dogmuck]

Why you cry
Ex is in Rye

 

[moldwarp]

I had to look up A Girl Called Jack on Amazon because I wasn’t sure if it was still in print. It is - so why has Book 2 vanished from existence?

Anyway, I then decided to scan through the one star reviews and they are a HOOT. View attachment 1234593View attachment 1234595

This is my favourite though:

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This reinforces my belief that none of JM’s squigs and flying monkeys have ever cooked a single one of her recipes. I also don’t think that JM’s primary purpose in publishing recipes is to enable people to produce nice food. It is performative poverty porn pure and simple. I go back to the first recipe I ever saw of hers in the Guardian website, which was cheesy pea pasta (cook the pasta and mix with grated cheese and mushy peas. That was it. That was the recipe.). I remember thinking at the time surely no Guardian reader is going to cook that? And how many WC people or people in severe poverty actually read the Guardian? I don’t think the editor was under any illusion that the typical guardian reader was going to cook that recipe. The purpose was for MC Guardian readers to get a sneaky peak about how the “other half” lives and enjoy some povertybporn whilst also having their middle class guilt assuaged by the smug feeling that Jack was someone who could do the hard work of helping others whilst they themselves could get on with their privileged lives and never have to fear any, ya know, real social change or class revolution. That was basically her purpose. It still is. Marxists have a word for the type of role a Jack Monroe fills for the bourgeoisie, I can’t recall what it is but it ain’t complementary. Basically there to create the illusion that class injustice is being addressed whilst actually making it worse. Worst thing of all is Jack seems perfectly content to play that role.

 

[Five hundred dogs]

Just got this email .

 

[Switchstreetz]

This is such a brilliant thread

 

[colouredlines]

I love facts and try to avoid too much speculation, but I would bet money on OH being a fairly dull bald/balding man.

My evidence for this is that Jack tends to adopt her partners' personalities as her own (Foodie Jack in the Allegra period, Veggie Jack during LJC's time), and the only thing that has really changed about her recently is a love of hats. Past a certain age, men with a full head of hair tend to go hatless. Therefore, the Onion Police should be looking for a meat-eating bald man with no obvious personality traits...



ETA: to add, on a detective note, Jack put a poll on Twitter about what to cook for a special sexy meal on 8th Jan. This could have been the start of it all...