Sorry, Liz, you’re wrong about sex in the country

Rachel Johnson

16 May 2009

Rachel Johnson says that Elizabeth Hurley is a wonderful pin-up for rural England, but has fallen for the entirely fictional belief that living there is a great aphrodisiac

Like all red-blooded members of the human race, there is nothing I like more than looking at pictures of Liz Hurley. So this month’s Tatler was a particular treat. There she was in wellies, accessorised by tulle and mousseline gowns in dusty baby-pink. The pictures ticked all the right boxes. Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, in ballgown and Wellingtons in the hen house at Chatsworth? Check! Muddy-hem-and-heaving-bodice costume dramas set in National Trust locations? Check! (The shoot was at Sezincote, Glos, a jewel of a mini stately modelled on a Rajasthan palace.)

Anyway, after I’d enjoyed the sight of Miss Hurley in her newly adopted habitat (she now lives on a 400-acre organic farm in the more Poshtershire end of the same county), and had a good look at the elegant stretch of withers our lovely filly was exposing in what was clearly the expensive shoot’s money-shot, I turned to the text.

And that’s when things went out of whack. Like the film Marley and Me, which in theory had everything going for it in the shape of three super-cute blond furry animals in the lead parts, Jennifer Aniston, Owen Wilson, and a golden retriever, something about the hi-concept fell flatter than Norfolk.

And no — I’ve thought about this a lot — it wasn’t the come-hither pose in the £10,455 Dior gown, hoicked high by the ha-ha. For we are by now used to the exhibitionism of celebrities who think that by dint of shelling out millions for a pile or an organic hobby farm, they are up there with the landed gentry or down with the horny-handed sons of toil. Indeed, there was a time when it was impossible to pick a magazine, any magazine, and not see some mouthwatering spread owned by some flat-capped former pop star or supermodel chewing on a straw. Indeed, the Vogue shoot of Madonna in jodhpurs and pearls in Ashcombe, Cecil Beaton’s former house, caused me such a outbreak of lifestyle envy that I felt like curling up in a ball and rocking gently till the images of manicured plenty in Dorset dissolved from my mind. So no, it wasn’t the latest display of exhibitionism in the whole rock-star-rural-lifestyle that has become just another staging post in the life journey of modern celebrity that gave me pause over the glossy pages.

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David Short

May 14th, 2009 9:26am Report this comment

Middle aged mums like Liz Hurley embarrass themselves, not to mention their children, when they go on about sex.

foxy farm hand

May 14th, 2009 11:59am Report this comment

How does she have time, running the farm too? I barely have time for a cup of tea and bed is definitely for sleeping!

Steve.W

May 17th, 2009 2:49pm Report this comment

Perhaps lots of sex in the countryside, though probably in a house in the countryside, is a way of taking your mind off the ever present smell of poo and all those flies. Occasionally I ride through the countryside on my motorbike, can't see the attraction, it's dull.

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