Jack Monroe #445 A criminal, liar, fraud, grifter and all round heartless asshole

[LadyGarden]

I'm struggling to believe that nobody on the Bird site has tagged @RoSPA with details of the knife/hammer trick plus freezing glass bottles of liquid and razor sharp tuna cans. I have never been so close to resigning from the Canal and going full metal (can) jacket over on Twitter. Luckily I vaue this place more than the hellsite so Jack can (pun) rest easy for the moment.

The following is spoilered as it is long, triggering and sweary. WARNED.

Spoiler: MH Breakdown

My dad (genuinely RIP unlike Viv) had a serious mental health breakdown many years ago. He went from a warm, funny and proud man to someone who stayed in bed for 4 weeks and had to be prompted to get up to go to the toilet. He didn't wash, shave. clean his teeth or get dressed in that 4 week period. My mum had to sit at his bedside literally spoon feeding him or he wouldn't have eaten or drunk anything of his own volition. This is a man who wouldn't previously be seen downstairs in a dressing gown - he was washed, shaved, hair combed and wearing a smart shirt and trousers every time he came downstairs.

After 4 weeks he was sectioned and spent 9 months as an inpatient. This was back in the day when electro convulsive shock therapy was routinely used for extreme cases of depression. Luckily for him (and us) it worked and, unlike McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he finally came home close to being the man he was before. Utterly traumatic and terrifying period for all of us; I was 12 at the time and the memory of his broken self still reduces me to tears.

He didn't cosplay as Tommy fucking Shelby or whoever was 'in fashion' at the time. He didn't go to fancy dress parties with his mates. He wasn't having a great laugh online about the flavours of Vienetta. He wasn't lapping up attention and guffawing at inappropriate comments about his physical attributes. He wasn't getting dressed up to go to awards dinners and posting selfies. He wasn't hanging spendy neon signs on the wall and concocting bullshit about destructive mice.

FUCK YOU, JACK. You make me fucking sick with the way you weaponise mental health problems. You've, very clearly, never experienced what my kind, decent father did, nor have your family had to see you be like an empty shell for months on end.

Cunt.

aaaand ... breathe

 

[Day3TShirt]

I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that Jack and her enablers (publishers, journos, Nigella, et al) are what’s wrong with this world. And this book surely must be the pinnacle of this particular societal mountain of shite. We must have crested the wave of bollocks with this absolute shitshow?
When you’re poor, if you’re poor, you’re likely not buggering about making egg rings out of tuna cans. If you can buy sandpaper you can buy egg rings off Amazon, no? And if you have eggs, you’re bunging them in a pan of boiling water or frying them to shove between two bits of bread so you can grab a quick meal because you’re just in from a knackering shift at a manual job, or you’re grabbing something to eat before your next job starts.
And are you buggering about with making courgette bread or finding ways to make genuinely cheap meals that just involve the basics and are quick to make, like using tins of condensed soup mixed with microwave rice to make a meal that fills you up because frankly, you’re hungry, don’t have time to ponce about in the supermarket looking for various ingredients and you defo don’t have time to spend following a recipe created by some twat in her over-stocked chalet bungalow kitchen that doesn’t work anyway?
And just because you’re poor, doesn’t mean you’re thick. You can work out how to mash potatoes without a masher or fashion something into a cloth or drain a pan of water without needing ideas from a book written by some over-privileged, time-rich, pov-playing, soppy bitch.
And don’t get me started on the FUCKING KNIFE TO OPEN A TIN!!’
This book should be pulped for the sake of humanity, or it will be studied in years to come and held up as an historical example of the very worst of the 2020s. I genuinely think it should be pulled from distribution it’s at best useless and at worst very dangerous.

ETA Apologies for the rant.

TLDR: Jack’s book doesn’t resonate with my experience of being poor. I don’t think she writes from experience and the book is disgraceful.

 

[traumatised sideboard]

I would like it to be known that I've got four egg rings. I haven't eaten an egg in nearly eight years, I just keep them as a symbol of wealth. Get fucked, peasants

 

[shugabug23]

Fraus, you did it! Colombo/ Magnum PI of the SistahSpace deep dive has Jackie in his sights. Starting Monday!!!! The week when we get Guardian.pdf AND Grifty Thrifty Kitchen! Deservedly, I present this gif to sum up the forthcoming chaos….

 

[DragonBoy]

I feel like we should change Grifty Kitchen's nickname to Jack Monroe and the Deathly Hacks.

My aunt is a GP and she warns us to never even wash tin cans for the recycling due to the amount of injuries caused by the sharp metal, let alone go at them with a mallet and knife.

Kudos to @Shimmering for the inspiration

 

[Marmalade Atkins]

 

[Marmalade Atkins]

 

[Livia Fantasy]

Jack Monroe: Her ingredients won’t cost you an arm and a leg, but the instructions will cost you a finger and a thumb.

 

[threetintender]

Sorry for the Viv merail and my total inability to spoiler.
About 700 years ago I had a partner who took the utter piss out of me for almost a decade. On one enormously expensive trip to London (paid for by me, like all the other times I paid, yada yada I KNOW) we went to see the Viv exhibition at the V&A. It was just….heavenly. Early on dickhead says ‘I don’t get it’. At that moment, frauen, I knew he was not for me. So that was the end of that. Fast forward some years and I met the present Mr 3TT. He asked me to marry him, I said yes please (trying not to bite his hand off) He asked if he could buy my wedding dress (not choose, but pay for) and that’s how I ended up as a bride dressed in Viv and also, for some bonus points but please don’t hate me, how come he has bought me something beautiful from Viv every birthday since. I have 4 dresses now and lots of other brilliant bits. What I fail to understand about JM is that she found all those perfectly fitting Vivs in a remarkably unusual charity shop and yet she still wore that fucking diabolical big suit to get an award recently and declared herself looking ‘banging’. No. No you didn’t. You want to wear your Viv, love.

 

[waffle maker]

It’s amazing that the thrifty kitchen book is so terrible that there is a murmur of division in the canal about whether it is real.

 

[Winthropp Tuesday]

Yep. This from TD.

 

[jenny2603]

That's not true Jack worked in Blackfoot! Leggy gave her a special chefs hat and a plastic bowl and spoon to play with.

 

[Polly Morphus]

I think Jack is about to find out the real meaning of the word "forensic". James has recently posted a series of posts picking apart the many dodgy doings of sistahspace, and is about to turn his attentions to Jack Monroe's grifting. Having read his previous posts I'm pretty sure that even Jack and her stans won't be able to head off the level of detail he's capable of. I'd imagine quite a bit of the basic info will be from grunking here, but it will be genuinely interesting to see what he makes of it.

 

[jenny2603]

The Viv tank thing is like that time Jack thought she'd received a text from Jeremy Corbyn because she doesn't know what a mailing list is. This time of year must be very challenging for her "wow all these shops keep offering me a personal discount of up to 50%".

 

[MancBee]

Sorry folks, look what I've got.

Never been used (tried once but nothing but a damned nuisance.) Bought as a joke, and sat in a drawer ever since.

 

[MaineCoonMama]

If you have egg rings but no eggs the rings can be set on fire and used as miniature hoops for your Matchbox cars.
One of my brothers did this and my mum kicked his arse from here to Kingdom Come.
The 70s were a great decade for useless kitchen implements like the onion holder the same brother used to used as a comb for his curly hair.
#goodtimes

 

[bizwizz89]

Oh my fecking god this is my aneurysm. My poor mum has terrible chronic PTSD from an abusive childhood (sorry for merail) and reacts terribly to loud noises, bangs etc and jumps at the sound of the bins going out. Jack has lifted this STRAIGHT off some sort of ‘psychology for Dummies’ book (bit like her shit ‘cooking’ books), and for some reason i’m so livid. You don’t get over it in a few months you absolute fucking flat muffin. My mum grew up in ACTUAL poverty in a prefab WITHOUT NEON SIGNS, no bathroom or kitchen etc and has grown up to be a nice person AND an excellent cook. Shut the fuck up, Jack, and stop it. Sorry for the long story.

 

[Marmalade Atkins]

Like the time Nigel slater kicked back at someone asking if there was an alternative to pineapple or something that was the main recipe ingredient… and he said no it’s a pineapple recipe

 

[streby]

Nah, she's implying autism.

Aww, did Content cure her autistic sensory issues? That's so heartwarming and impossible!

 

[usefullyuseless]

My attempt at a smol recap for the parts I witnessed

The canal got a sneak peek of Jack's upcoming book, Grifty Thrifty Kitchen. If you're tired of having fully functional hands you may be interested in her top tips such as:

- use a small sharp knife and a hammer to open tin cans
- put loose fitting baking trays over boiling pots to keep the hit in
- use a large sharp knife to strain said boiling pots

Who needs ten fingers anyway?

She reckons this will be the book that pays for her forever home but I reckon it will be pulped by mid February.

Jack handled the canal's mocking of her tips like the calm professional she is a didn't rage tweet in futile retaliation. Haha just kidding.