The 'Love Island' Week That Was

Listen, this is just a list of things that happened this week on Love Island and some Twitter memes. Don’t overthink it.

Hear me out: I understand that Ovie is a 6'7" mega-athlete with the face and bone structure of a male model. He looks good in two of the hardest-to-pull-off male fashion sub-genres, hats and loud shirts. He has perfect teeth. He, again, is six-foot-seven. He's long and lean like a sexy novelty pencil. Physically, and as an example of peak machismo, he is simply untouchable. But he's a fucking nerd. The little "message!" ad-lib he does when someone's got a text. The little dances to himself when he's brushing his teeth in the morning. Those infinite, perfect woahs. That date with Francesca, where, if he wasn't a six-foot-seven model with the body of a god, he would have absolutely struck out.

Take Ovie's personality and put it in literally any other male body on the planet, and you'd forge in fire a kid who likes math-rock and renaissance fairs. Experiments with not wearing shoes for a bit. Flinches when you make a fist near him. I love the man – I want very desperately to go to Rowan's with him, spend some time on Sonic Basketball then dance together while double-fisting slush until, tenderly, platonically, we hug – but he's a nerd who got very lucky that he came out in the body of a mythical prince. If he and Amber don't gaze into each other's eyes and realise they are perfect for each other soon I will fucking storm the place.

Have I gone wrong, or has Maura gone wrong? One of us, I'm afraid, has gone wrong.

Me: I cannot decide which of the paths – socio- or psycho- – Curtis is, but it’s definitely one of them (See: the single tear he cried when Amy left. See: the way he pronounces curt, precise little t sounds. See: "young lady". See: "Cheers to… this." See: cha-cha-cha. See: the palpable air about him that he is capable of performing a murder without even blinking once).

Maura: Maura has been in there so long, lost so much context from the wider world, three frenzied weeks of not shagging a thing, that she's looking at Curtis with genuine longing and he's not looking back. Not once, but twice – twice – Maura has been caught on camera saying something off-handedly about Curtis, distantly flopping in the sun: "Gad… he looks unreal." She sat on a beanbag chair and let him say the words, "You've been a naughty student" to her without getting a can of mace out. She sat with Tommy and Molly-Mae and said, "Wouldn’t he look better with my legs wrapped round his head?" and even Tommy, his best mate and his biggest sun worshipper, was like: err? She whipped him with a cat’s tail and got off with him harder than anyone’s been got off with in history. And he’s still like: "I'd like to crack on with Francesca, please." He’s still like: "You're an intriguing young… lady."

Can the producers give Maura a day off, please? Just let her step out and get some air and have a word with herself. She’s a gorgeous, undulating, bolt of sexual charisma with the body and face of a model. Curtis is a dancer called Curtis. This cannot be allowed to go on.

Quite liked Marvin towards the end because his near-pathological anti-game was just a little preview of what you would be like in there, isn’t it, or me. We forget when we watch Love Island that we are essentially watching shagging as an Olympic sport, and that these people are professionals, and that the casual way with which they go through the motions of grafting, bounce off rejection, dust off and chirpse again, the hungry way they assess new meat: that is natural, a gift, impossible to emulate. You, a normal person, can’t do any of that, same way as you can’t play badminton at an Olympic level, or shooting or pole vaulting, or any of those sports that you watch and think, distantly, you could probably make a good go at.

Marvin was our control experiment, and he flamed out, his wings melting on the sun of Amber, and isn't it good he did that – embarrassed himself, massively, on television, in that way – just to nix those distant little hopes you have of going on Love Island next year and bossing it. You think you’d do well on Love Island, don’t you, you idiot! You wouldn’t! You’d be Marvin, constantly ignored inside the womb of a gigantic beanbag! You'd lose followers on Instagram while you’re in there! You fool! You fool!

The world's greatest and most choreographed ballet cannot compare to the simple joy, the artful and intricate motion, the perfect dance that is: seven lads exploding with emotion. When Tom self-pied himself and the lads were so filled with glee that they had to express it physically, rolling on the bed, arching their arms towards and away from him, laughs exploding in their throats before they even made it out of their mouths: perfection, a renaissance painting made flesh. When Maura got off with Curtis like she was trying to resuscitate him by reaching her tongue down out through his body to his dick: they swerved, they slid, they pap–pap–papped along the bench like they’d had their eyes opened for the very first time.

Love Island, as we know, is less a game of love, and more simply a game of lifelong friendship, and watching boys in glee is the purest expression of that. More, please. Please.

The producers seem to have picked Maura to receive a disproportionate number of texts this year, and I think it's simply because they like her approach to reading things out loud, which is "bellow them so loudly and so Irishly that a war threatens to start". I would simply love to have gone to school with her and watched her read out lines of Shakespeare in English Lit ("TA BE…… OR NOT. TA BE. AND DAT’S A QUESTION, IS IT?"). In fact, when this whole nonsense finishes I want an ITV spin-off show of exactly that. Maura Higgins Reads. Make it happen, cowards.

Would go for a pint with Chris and ask him about hair products: this endorsement of mine dooms him to never getting shagged in the villa, not even once. Francesca seems like a nice girl and it’s a shame she’s leaving the villa in a fucking ambulance after starting romantic beef with Maura. Are you out of your mind, Francesca? Are you stupid? Are you stupid? Are you stupid? Over Curtis? Are you stupid?

@joelgolby