to think that 'Mid-life Ex-wife' is a very depressing column?

[grumpysquash]

Published each week in the Sat Guardian (and online) by 'Stella Gray'. This lady is 50 and dating after a divorce. The guys she meets appear to be dreadful and rude and she has incredibly low self esteem. This week it was written to suggest that once the date saw her thighs (through her clothes), he clearly wasn't interested any more. And a couple of weeks ago she slept with a slightly younger guy (42) who afterwards (the same night) broke up with her by text saying that he felt in a different generation to her.
For some reason, I compulsively read it each week. But I want to cry sometimes. Surely dating at 50 isn't as bad as that (someone please tell me a nice story)? I have lots of friends who are over 50, lovely, engaging, funny and sexy. That is more usual, right????

Link;

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Class_Male/Time_to_Go

I like Tim Dowling but am pretty meh about the rest of the current lot. I agree Lucy Mangan was good.
The Guardian must pay well for its weekly column though as its the only source of income he ever mentions them getting apart from his hobby band playing and the time his wife had a part time short lived job in a book shop.
I think to write every week about general stuff in your life you have to either have an interesting life or be a very good writer and few people are up to this, particularly if they don't want to alienate everyone in their lives. They'd be better scrapping most of them and doing columns on topics, or just making the paper smaller and cheaper.

I liked Lucy Mangan; her husband sounded like an arse though.
The Guardian is now a bit of a joke newspaper; it's website is full of click-bait, 'peak Guardian' right on po-faced cobblers too. It's a shame Nancy Banks-Smith doesn't contribute much now, that's due to her age I suppose.

I liked Toryboy. I think one problem with many Guardian writers is that they only associate with people with similar views to themselves.

I like Oliver Burkeman though his recent articles are a bit thin, he seems to be running out of things to say.

Tim Lott is smug and dull and the new Guardian magazine agony aunts are just pointless. And Stuart Heritage... Oh God.

However, I am reminded whenever I visit my father and flick through his Times that the other newspapers are MUCH WORSE.

I wonder if Stella Grey is also the guardian's Invisible Woman columnist. The writing styles are very similar.

Despair a bit of the WE Guardian/Observer - Man with A Pram beyond dreadful, Tim Dowling seems a nice man but a bit of a one trick pony in this column and I now can't read it anymore (used to like it now just dull) and creepy, needy stalker Stella Grey is not like anyone who should be OLD. To top it off Mariella Frostrup has a whole page of tedium and her own repeated experiences and I cant remember which one Barbara Ellen is in but it's trite nonsense
However I do really like Marina Hyde in the daily - she is everything the others are not
And breathe

if she goes on holiday to SW france then def

\agree re ex military - I bet her H was one and she can't resist

Tim Downing mystifies me- or rather why anyone finds anything in his column interesting. Lucy Mangan too- utterly humdrum life and utterly humdrum observations on it.

Dowling has published 4 books but none of them look like anything anyone would want to read.

I don't like Eva Wiseman in The Observer either -another one who gets a whole page to say nothing at all.

2rebecca: "The Guardian must pay well for its weekly column though as its the only source of income he ever mentions them getting apart from his hobby band playing and the time his wife had a part time short lived job in a book shop."

I'm fairly sure his wife has quite a high-powered job. And he does a lot of journalism for the Guardian and elsewhere, not just the column.

I find his column very funny. Anyone who thinks it's just about humdrum stuff - well, yes, that's the point. It's amusing on the subject of the dull day-to-day stuff that plagues most of us.

UncertainSmile - I remember the columns Chris Morris did under the name Richard Geefe. They were brilliant, but I think the reason India Knight was so upset (and I am not a fan of IK) is that she thought the columns were satirising her friend Ruth Picardie, who had recently died of cancer. The Chris Morris column was called Time to Go and in one, Geefe announces his plan to kill himself.

I know why India Knight was upset, it doesn't change my opinion of her.

Well, yes, but it's a legitimate reason to be upset, surely?

I don't think so, no. It was none of her business, really. Despite what they think, the likes of hacks like IK do not have a monopoly on newspaper columns. Plenty of things upset me, but I don't have the luxury of moaning about it in the papers.

I would argue that Chris Morris has contributed so much pleasure to the nation than the dreadful likes of IK/Allison Pearson/Barbara Ellen, and the rest of their ilk. They contribute nothing but shite self-regarding bollocks, a complete waste of newsprint.

Agree with everyone else about ML/EW - it's awful. Having cancelled my subscription to the Guardian (after 35-years) when they ditched Lucy Mangan - who is just fantastic - I now look online each Saturday to read Tim Dowling, and look for Nancy Banks-Smith's monthly column on the Archers (A Month in Ambridge) as that usually contains the best writing in the paper.
Tim Lott gets right up my nose and is a smug chauvinist, and the dreadful columns by Cerys Matthews and Pamela Stephenson (whose advice, week after week, boils down to 'see a therapist'..!) are beyond irritating.
Interesting rumour about Sali Hughes though... I liked Diary of a Separation.

Well, UncertainSmile, you've identified three columnists that I can't stand either (India Knight, Allison Pearson and Barbara Ellen) so we're on the same side there. I do see IK's point about Richard Geefe, though - I think she and Ruth Picardie were best friends, so having a column satirising her column so soon after she died seems insensitive and even cruel. I think she had a right to object.

Also agree with Seamstress about Tim Lott, Cerys Matthews and Pamela Stephenson, though in Stephenson's defence, she seems to have been allotted a tiny word count, so doesn't have room to say much more than "see a therapist".

Agree Pamela thing is shite

Pamela's all right. Mariella is a pompous windbag.

At least Pamela has got some kind of qualification, I don't understand how Mariella got the gig. Her advice is crap.

Yesterday, due to a glitch in the communication matrix both dh and I bought all the ingredients for a certain dish. I said to dh that Tim Dowling would get an entire column out of that.

Never mind, maybe Yotam Ottolenghi will have an obscure Middle eastern type recipe for beef and limes.

I only get the Guardian on a Saturday when I get it free at Waitrose.

(I am working class, honestly)

Mariella's advice is crap, she's utterly self obsessed and her writing style appears to come from, to quote one of my favourite Grauniad comments ever, the Ed Balls School of Windbag Rhetoric. I don't even read her any more, it's like being run over slowly. I just read the letter and the comments.

I have come late to this thread and haven't read it all.

But I love Stella Grey's column. It's the first thing I read when I get the paper (followed by Tim Dowling).

But I really want to give her some relationship advice. I think she gives out far too much to the awful men she dates. And there are a fair few threads in relationships on online dating where women seem to have had similar issues.

I really want her to find a nice man and settle down, but i think often she blows it herself - with lack of confidence, or overdoing the texting between dates, or not taking No for an answer.

I think she deliberately picks idiots to date to have column material. Either that or she is a drama llama with terrible taste in men to boot.

This.

Also I like Oliver burkeman' stuff too

I enjoy Lucy Mangan.

I'm now going to go read all of Diary of a Separation.