[Ash*FAVE*hm]

Where is the love?

Tim - I don’t understand why everybody hates Aisleyne either. What has she actually done that’s made her so apparently unpopular?

So she does ghetto-speak. It has its comical aspects, but given that she comes from East London, where anyone who’s aged 8 or above speaks in exactly the same way (I know - I lived there for a decade), it’s hardly a big deal – if you’re going to hate her for talking like she’s black, you’re also going to hate quite a big swathe of London’s working-class urban population, white and black. It doesn’t mean Ainsleyne ‘wants to be a black girl’ – it means she’s a product of her culturally-mixed environment. I actually find Nikki’s constant piss-takes not only irritating but borderline offensive – just because you’re some little self-styled suburban princess doesn’t mean everyone else has had the same ‘privilege’.

So she overreacted in the Diary Room when she was told she was going into the other house. Meh. You can’t hate somebody for weeks on end for squealing too loudly and for slightly too long.

She cries a lot. Who wouldn't, stuck in there with that duplicitous shower?

She has a relatively short fuse – or had: she seems to have been working on it. This has occasionally meant telling people a few home truths. Again, I don’t really see what the problem is. Lea did turn on the waterworks to an exasperating degree; Nikki did grate on the nerves with her constant histrionics.

She befriended Pete – who, as someone has already pointed out, does seem to have prickteasy kinds of issues around women - and thus apparently broke up the love story of the century (yawn). Or so Nikki claims. This is the woman who got drunk every Thursday night, climbed into Pete’s bed, and behaved like nothing happened the next morning… until the next Thursday night.

Ainsleyne is articulate, funny, intelligent – in the context of the house she’s practically Einstein – and capable of some humility: she tried to make things allright between her and Nikki and did so privately rather than via a popularity-boosting public display.

She’s had a tough life. She’s a friend to her friends and an irritant to her enemies. I really don’t see what the problem is. I'd quite like her to win.