Anna Isaac

What a week: infected wisdom teeth and Samantha Brick. She has a lot in common with my dentist; she doesn’t care how much she hurts me.

There I was revising my way to a healthy 2:2, necking painkillers post-op trying to pretend my teeth don’t exist. Then I see SamBrick has been at it again. She switched on my Brick-response mode of deep sadness and rage at humanity. God Samantha, what you do to me.

She’d have you believe she’s an idiot, and that’s the biggest problem. She is wrong, obnoxious and, if I had my way, she’d be kept in Guantanamo, to be periodically brought out to destroy the mental capacity of the inmates with her repartee. But she’d probably end up siding with the prisoners anyway.

SamBrick is a judgement sent down upon us from the almighty god of bullshit morality, and possibly the Daily Mail. We’re splitting hairs: they’re the same thing. Her recent article ‘Sorry, some women ARE too ugly for TV’ saw her jump onto the Gill vs. Beard bandwagon with vulgar alacrity. Let’s look:

‘While there is no denying that Ms (um, you mean professor) Beard is supremely intelligent…’

Well good start Sam, sensible tack here, you probably can’t beat Mary in the grey-matter war.  Sadly this was then followed by, ‘there is absolutely no chance of her becoming a successful broadcaster in prime-time slots on flagship channels.’

Whoopsie-poo Sam! She already has many times over.

Call me naïve or stupid (many of you will), but it took me a while to appreciate that every sentence of her article on Prof Beard or in the one about being too fit for her friends was more than just annoying. Each has been crafted to sinister perfection in order to provoke. It’s vile, but how often do people do it this well?

This is the awful problem with Ms Brick: that she is good at what she does (I only call her Ms ‘cos I know it would get on her ‘I’m so above feminism’ tits). I can’t stop reading her articles, I can’t stop getting outraged. And short of giving up the internet for life, I can’t avoid seeing her smug image.

What really disturbs me is that my post-Brick and post-dentist behaviour is exactly the same: I beg for a quick extraction to end the pain. Neither will free me from my suffering. So has she won? Are we beaten? Should we give up, as from here on in we either read her writing or end up writing about it? If so, there aren’t enough painkillers in the world for my teeth or her pen.

NO! We must slay the Brick Beast! Or rather time will do it for us; she’s damn annoying, there is no question. Clever too, but she isn’t original. There is only so much to say about being attractive, or un, and very few people can be impressively irritating for long.  And teeth-wise, I’ll just use a vegetable knife and a pair of pliers.

Or maybe the pain is that deep down I just want to be her? After all she’d make the perfect Tab columnist. That’s what she’d say after reading this anyway.