Young, Dumb, and Making a Bomb

As a writer who is struggling to figure out ways to gain attention, I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with the current influx of "writers" hired by national newspapers and magazines. It appears that if you are not young, blonde, ditzy, or the star of a woeful reality television show, you do not stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting published.

The ongoing Samantha Brick saga inspired me to delve further into my theory. Here is a reasonably attractive middle-aged woman (who totally lives in France, by the way) who is seemingly making a fortune by writing about how beautiful she is and how tough life is for the beautiful, comfortable, blonde expat in France. Her archive on the Daily Mail website reads like a teenage psychology student's wet dream: chubby as a child, haunted by her weight problems throughout life, until she settles down with a Frenchman and moves to France where she can revel in her beauty.Except she's not revelling in her beauty because, apparently, the world hates beautiful women. My friend was quick to rubbish the whole "I'm so beautiful" article by describing Samantha Brick as "looking like a dog's arsehole", and there precisely is the problem.

Ms Brick is not a stunningly beautiful woman. Angelina Jolie and Scarlett Johansson will be losing no sleep over her beautiful threat. Tulisa can remain calm: her dubious title of World's Sexiest Woman is safe. What Ms Brick is, however, is a somewhat average yet still attractive woman who is so arrogant and conceited that one wonders whether it is those very factors that conjure up feelings of hatred in her fellow women, rather than her blonde hair and doe eyes. The Daily Mail - and I'm sure Ms Brick herself (who lives in France) - are raking in the revenue from her many articles, so I fear we have not seen the end of her, or her dog arsehole looking face.

But I can handle the dreadful articles by Oh So Beautiful Samantha. A girl needs a giggle when she's stuck with either insomnia or writer's block. What I am finding harder to deal with is a current column running in London's Evening Standard newspaper. Every week, we are treated to the delightful offerings of Caggie Dunlop, 'star' of Made in Chelsea. Her column - the imaginatively titled Laid in Chelsea - is hilariously labelled as a sex advice column, in which the incredibly wise 23-year-old socialite imparts her vast knowledge with the no doubt exhausted readers of the Evening Standard.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all rely on Daddy's money to build a television show around ourselves, and then use that as a launch pad to deliver our humdrum writing? I could strangle my parents for having the audacity to give birth to and raise me South of the River, with Chelsea as my background scene. Think of how different my life would be if I'd have been raised a ten minute walk away - people might actually read the dross I publish on this blog!