Jacinta Nandi isn’t trying to be controversial. She’s just a mad bitch.
“So, I went on your blog the other day,” my friend Jayne told me recently. “Gawd, you get some negative comments.”
“Yeah, I know,” I agreed cheerfully.
“They must log on to the internet, just to go on to your blog and write their narky little comments.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Probably.”
“They’re really very narky, sometimes.”
“Hmmmmn,” I said. “I always think it’s the same person. Like, you know. An intelligent, articulate, fairly witty person. A fairly witty person. Sarcastic enough, if they have to be. And totally nice. But just not, you know, incredibly original. They’ve always got the same kind of tone. Intelligent, articulate, fairly witty, perfectly nice – but not that original.”
“Yeah,” said Jayne. “And narky. Totally narky.”
“Sometimes I think maybe I write them myself. Like Tyler Durden-style, you know?”
“I reckon it is someone you know,” said Jayne. “Someone you pissed off once.”
“It’s probably someone I slept with one time,” I said.
Jayne giggled at that. “At least it’s not your mum,” she said, comfortingly. “Imagine that! If it turned out it was your old lady, logging in once a week, to give you all this narky hatred. But you know what I always think, Jacinta? I always think: ‘I bet she loves it really.’ You’re such an attention whore, you are. You love it. You deliberately write the worst stuff you can think of, don’t you, you sit there and think up the most controversial, provocative, downright annoying stuff. And then you sit there, Monday morning, reading through those negative comments, chortling. I always imagine you chortling away.”
I grew serious for a moment. “Well,” I said. “Three weeks out of four and it’s pretty much like that, you know. I’ve got this masochistic streak, and I’ve got this mean, mischievous streak, and I get off on it, really. Especially when they say stuff like: ‘A decent percentage of the expat community read this shite!’ or ‘Why don’t you get a proper job for fuck’s sake?’ Then I kind of, like, feed off of it. I’m like: you hate me, but you still think loads of people read my blog and that I live off of this. What a compliment! But…”
Jayne crinkled her eyebrows at me all skeptically.
“Well,” I said, and I pronounced the word well as Essexly as possible. “Whenever I have PMS I just want to kill myself, basically. They’re all like: ‘This is about as funny as Jade Goody finding out she had vagina cancer and you are crap at punctuation and a shit mother and plus don’t you know White Russians are really easy to make you dickhead and are you even a native speaker and have you ever heard of commas? Like commas? You prick.’ And I’m like: ‘Oh, fuck. Hand me a razor. Preferably not a safety one.'”
“Aw,” Jayne said. “Come on. Come off it. You’re always winding them up. You love it. You always try and wind people up as much as possible.”
I looked at her blankly.
“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t, like, specifically try and wind people up as much as possible,” I said. “I really don’t try and be extra-provocative. I just, like, think that stuff. I genuinely, genuinely, genuinely think all that stuff. All those things I say? They’re just my thoughts. They’re just things I think.”
Jayne laughed and leaned forward to tap me on the forehead.
“It’s just as well you got that blog, Jacinta,” she said. “Your brain would most likely explode, otherwise.”
SO: In honour of my friend Jayne. Five totally uncontroversial and non-provocative statements that even my harshest, bitterest, narkiest critics won’t be able to fight me on. Everything I am about to say is pure fact, 100 percent neutral and totally objective:
1) Old people in Germany are all cunts
“Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you to do a blog on this for ages,” said Jayne. “They’re total cunts. Everyone over 50 is a total cunt. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
It is weird, when you come to Germany. Like, everyone in Britain walks around in total fear of everyone under 20, totally TOTALLY petrified that teenagers will put chewing gum in their hair and/or kill them. Then you move to Germany. All the kids are nice – even the Turks, who are meant to be, like, evil personified. Everyone is totally nice. The old people, though. Old people in this country do not have any fucking manners. They couldn’t have manners to save their lives. The nicest old people are homeless! The rest of them are total arseholes. WTF? It’s weird.
2) All German parents talk to their kids like they’re mentally disabled people they want to have sex with
Na, Schnecke?
3) German Werbetexter rhyme too much
They should all become poets instead.
4) Germany is gonna win the World Cup
And everyone who thinks Women’s football is boring and too slow is just a killjoy AND wrong.
5) And you know, sometimes when I look at trees, I kind of believe in God for a few seconds
In a C.S.Lewis kind of way. But I’d never mention it to Richard Dawkins, if I met him at a dinner party or something.
So, there you have it. You’d have to have a heart of stone and the intellect of a non-genetically engineered mouse to find anything worth bitching about here.
