Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones wrote that a man she had lunch with years earlier accidentally sent her a drunken voice message while travelling home on a train.
In a column headlined "He drunk-texted me and sent me a voice recording by mistake... Why can't these men cope with me?", Jones recounted meeting the younger man for lunch at the Rudding Park country house hotel and spa. She said he paid for the meal, told her he had driven from near Cambridge and changed in the hotel car park, and that they never met again, partly because of the distance and because he was “too young.”
Jones wrote that the man subsequently sent a photo of his garden, but she was put off by the gazebo. Several months after the lunch, while he was on holiday with male friends in New York, he sent her a screenshot showing he was a few yards from the apartment block used as Carrie Bradshaw’s residence on the television series Sex and the City. Jones said she had replied tersely at the time.
She described the most recent contact as happening on a Thursday night when the man was returning from London. According to Jones, his phone sent her a voice recording by mistake, which was transcribed as: "Are we stopping? This service is stopping. You should be fine, safe, yes." He followed with a text apologising and explaining that he had been speaking to two female passengers and that the phone had accidentally transcribed a voice note as he was trying to reassure them.
Jones used the incident to revisit their brief connection and to reflect on the way such accidental communications can reopen contact years after a meeting. The column presents the events in a personal, first-person account typical of Jones’s commentary pieces in the Daily Mail, which frequently blend anecdote and social observation.
The piece does not indicate whether the two have resumed contact beyond the apology message, nor does it provide additional comment from the man. Jones’s column did not include further verification of the man’s identity or responses beyond the messages she describes.
Jones has been a regular contributor to the paper for many years, and her columns often draw on private interactions and encounters to illustrate broader themes about relationships and contemporary social behaviour. The account follows a pattern of short, diaristic narratives that readers have seen in previous columns, filed under her personal commentary in the newspaper.