It’s Not Me, It’s You

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I know I have countless habits that serve no purpose but I am powerless to avoid them, and it is true that I am frequently frustrated by a number of things that I should let go of (currently the fact that the spine of the foreign DVD I have ordered has text running in the opposite direction to all the others on the shelf, making it impossible to file it neatly). But I am constantly annoyed when I hear jokes that portray all sufferers of OCD as nothing more than glove-wearing weirdos who cannot leave a room without switching the lights on and off three times. Anyone who regularly attends live stand-up comedy will know this as ‘The Rain Man Effect’, whereby a comparison to the famous Dustin Hoffman film role is enough to explain away any odd quirk of behaviour and elicit gales of laughter from a room full of drunks.

Aside from my annoyance at the confusion of different conditions this represents, I believe compulsion, much like sexuality or preference for olives, is a question of sliding scale, where there are not simply sufferers or non-sufferers but degrees of suffering. There are those among us who are unable to stop washing their hands from one minute to the next and there are those who can go for weeks without washing their hands or wondering what makes up the rainbow of dirt underneath their fingernails, but there are far more people somewhere in the middle who wash their hands when appropriate and shudder slightly when they push the toilet door on exit and find that it is wet.

Similarly, I do not claim to be a hypochondriac, but nor can I deny that I haven’t on occasion lain awake at night fretting that the red mark on my arm is a hideous tropical disease picked up from the unwashed grapes in my fruit salad rather than the truth, the result of a drunken fall. But as I am keen to stress, the compulsion is but a facet of my perfectionism, an attribute far more associated with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder than OCD.

To give you an idea, this is the kind of self-deluding perfectionist I am: Leeds United fans of the early 1990s will be familiar with the chant ‘There’s only one Gary Speed.’ This would seem to be a valid enough point, except for the fact that in my 1994 Merlin sticker album there isn’t – there are two. One is where he should be, by his own name, but another one is obscuring the empty pane that represents the Brian Deane I never found. I couldn’t bear having failed to complete my album, so safe in the knowledge that anyone simply skimming through to check for gaps would not notice my deception I duplicated my Garys. I hereby apologise fully to all teenage sticker collectors for invalidating the joy of an honest completion, to all the staff at Merlin and mostly to my friend Lee, whom I told I had finished my sticker book simply because I was jealous that he had finished his … or had he really? I have my doubts!

The guilt I feel is genuine, but in truth it is not so much guilt at having deceived my friends, but a still burning ember of disappointment deep in my soul at my failure to complete the book honestly. Yes, I take my life that seriously. My fear of failure is so extreme that even when on my own I find it difficult to accept mistakes. Like most men who live alone, there are tell-tale signs in my décor and furniture that I am a bachelor. There is, for example, no settee in my living room. I experimented with one for a while, but found that with space relatively tight in a living-room/diner, the room taken up by the extra seat simply could not be justified when weighed up against the number of visitors I receive. It was duly replaced by a leather reclining massage chair and, with some rejigging, the extra space was put to good use and allowed for the purchase of a much bigger television and a drinks table.

The most obvious sign of my singledom is probably the dartboard which hangs on the back of the door (or when the dartboard is put away behind the table, the thousands of tiny dart holes covering the door, but for a small circle in the upper middle). There is something in the rhythmic back and forth of darts, the clearly defined boundaries and the rewards it offers for accuracy and repetition that I enjoy. My favourite pub game is, of course, snooker. Any game whose rules basically amount to finding a table covered in mess and slowly and methodically putting it all away out of sight is one with which I can empathise emphatically.

As much as I enjoy darts, I must confess to not being very good at it, hence the holes in the door. And the door frame. And even the skirting board. The reason I am not very good at darts, and the reason I am not very good at many things, is my stubborn refusal to accept my shortcomings. Each time I throw a dart and miss my intended target, instead of trying to work out what went wrong and correct my technique for long-term success, I get so pissed off with myself that the next two darts are bound to be even wider off the mark than the first.

Professional players have reacted with greater calm and maturity to missing vital darts in World Championship finals than I have on my own at 2am on a wet Tuesday night in my shitty little flat. It won’t be long before the dartboard annoys me so much that I react as any true man might when threatened – by breaking it and hiding it in the garage. In my garage exists a shrine to the person I promised I would become; a man who can paint great works of art, play squash to international standards, and write and compose his own guitar concertos. The history of his heartache is etched across a landscape of broken-stringed racquets and half-painted canvases with the word ‘BASTARD’ drunkenly scrawled across them in black paint.