NOCD

I like to think of myself as pretty organised. Others might say 'control freak' but, for several reasons, I prefer 'pretty organised'. I make my bed nine mornings out of ten. I do the washing up before I go to sleep if I can. I regularly take my eye make-up off in the evenings. I pay my bills on time. I usually write thank you letters before my self-imposed deadline. I find out ticket onsale dates and get good seats by phoning at 9am. I think ahead; I am a natural planner. I have an impressive range of stationery for every eventuality, including a box of those brass fasteners you put through pieces of paper to allow them to spin around in opposite directions. I have different laundry products for whites, colours, wools and delicates. I am punctual. Things are mostly shipshape.

But behind the tidy facade lies a darker story. I have items on my Things To Do List that haven't moved for years. Currently holding the top spot is 'Have guitar lessons', which has been there since the 1990s. Slightly newer additions that show little sign of shifting are 'Buy stainless steel screws for bathroom shower rack'; 'Give wedding present to Al & Lucy' (married in 2004, gift purchased and wrapped in 2005, still ungiven); and 'I still owe four hours of computer lessons to Dad', dating back several years to when I borrowed some money from them for, I believe, a holiday, and agreed to repay him in iTunes and digital photography uploading tuition. Eek.

But I'm proud to announce that today I was able to cross off something that had been clinging to the list for a very long time: I went to the dry cleaner's. I took my mum's silk scarf that I borrowed for Olivia's Footballers' Wives hen night in 2004. And a cocktail dress that's been sitting in the bottom of my laundry basket since 2006. And the bridesmaid outfit that I wore to Lucy and Jake's wedding in 2003. It's not pleasant, but it must be conceded that if I was a true obsessive compulsive, these things would not have been allowed to fester quite so long. Admit it: I'm not as freakishly organised as I may have seemed. I am, in fact, Normal. Remember I told you.

In other news: I bought another new hairbrush to make up for the rubbish over-priced one I purchased two weeks ago - and then when I was drying my hair after the gym, the new one became stuck. It's one of those round drying brushes and I was trying to do some clever under-spinning thing to make my hair look really shapely and gorgeous, but it backfired and a fair-sized clump of hair became entangled in the cheap bristles, really close to the scalp. I tried to pull it out. I tried to wiggle it out. But quickly it became clear that cutting it out was a very real possibility. Equally clear was the fact that such actions would involve the removal of a mug-sized patch of hair from the right hand side of my head, exactly at the point that the hair meets my face, above my right ear. Inconspicuous it would not be.

I broke out into a nervous sweat, took three deep breaths and realised that I would have to break the problem down into manageable chunks. I pulled out a tiny initial segment, resisting the urge to yelp in agony. Gradually, I was able to free up strand after strand, until only one stubborn tangle remained, double-wound around the brush shaft, now dry, matted and inflexible. I was running late and became ruthless, pulling hard which stretched the skin away from my scalp giving me the appearance of a bizarre Star Trek character. Sexy. Eventually I managed to free myself completely from the instrument of torture, and dried the rest of my hair using traditional, vertical brush strokes. Vidal Sassoon, your crown is safe.

Home Sweet Home

Apologies for the long delay in writing but it has all been rather busy and as the amount of material has piled up for me to recount, the momentum to sit and start typing has diminished proportionally.

Miraculously, though, I am here at last, bruised and battered but alive and, crucially, relocated. No longer a 30-year-old parent-dweller, I have successfully moved into my own flat and am pleased to report that it is even more satisfying and fun than I had hoped.

Here’s how it happened:

On Friday, Mr L’Atelier was so wonderful that disguising his identity no longer seems right or necessary. He is Paul. And he is amazing. Although we did start the day with my first strop in his presence when he missed the train he was meant to catch and, having waited on my own for half an hour at Clapham Junction, I joined him on a later service with a face like a smacked arse. Fortunately, he managed to distract me with a holiday brochure and we were soon back to our sickeningly giggly selves, eating our bacon rolls with merriment.

After an hour, we arrived in Wokingham, collected a gargantuan white van and drove to Oxfordshire for one of the most surreal incidents in my life. For reasons that it would not be interesting to divulge, the sofa that I owned when I lived with my ex, Henry, in 2001, was now in storage in Oxfordshire. It was my belief that we would meet the sofa guardian, drive to the storage facility, extract the sofa and be on our way. Instead, we ended up unpacking most of a sizeable metal container which was crying out to be the setting for a murder scene in a tacky drama series. Having moved about forty of someone else’s boxes, we eventually located the sofa frame and cushions – but not the covers. Our helper kindly offered to lend me ‘a couple of throws’ for the next few weeks while the sofa’s actual furnishings were identified but, appealing though this offer was, I had a minor sense of humour failure and continued to scour the container for the elusive fabric. Luckily I discovered the covers bunched up in a plastic bag before a real tantrum kicked in and we restacked the container and enjoyed an unexpected lunch of our host’s homemade baps filled with trout fillet and mayonnaise, made on the seat of his minibus and eaten while surveying the countryside in front of us. It was all rather unlikely.

Even though Friday had been earmarked as the primary ‘moving day’, we didn’t get back to London until after 4pm and then didn’t fill the van for another hour or so. Poor Paul continued his fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants induction into my life by negotiating with my dad on the best way to stack my boxes in the back of the van, and was photographed for the family album as we struggled to carry a chair down the stairs. His unwavering chirpiness was incredible. We finally set off for the new flat at around dinner time, miraculously had the whole load upstairs by 9pm and were eating in a renowned local curry house by 9.45pm. Nothing had ever been so smooth – and no move has ever been more harmonious. Paul and I had continued to be unbearably happy even as we sweated our way up the stairs with all my millions of possessions – and he staggered me by claiming to find me attractive even when my skin was blotchy, my hair was stuck to my forehead, my eyeliner had slipped down to my cheeks and my T-shirt was soaked through. It must be love.

After our dinner out, a still-jetlagged Paul reclined gracefully on my bed while I had my inaugural bath in my bath in my flat. I lovingly cleaned it with Cif, lovingly showered it down with my amazing new shower, lovingly filled it with my lovely water, clambered in, reclined and relaxed. For about a minute. Suddenly there was a pounding and a yelping at the door. I was naked. Paul was half asleep but eventually made it to the letterbox where we were informed in no uncertain terms that there was a leak into the flat below. I leapt out of the bath, wrapped my brand new John Lewis ‘Hotel’ towel around my person, noticing that it smelt unexpectedly of menthol, and we hastily unscrewed the front panel of my stupid bath to look at my stupid draining system where, sure enough, my stupid overflow pipe was cracked. Not the best introduction to new neighbours. I wrote them a grovelling apology note and delivered it in my pyjamas.

Saturday was more house-moving fun but this time with the added excitement of an argument with the moronic staff in Comet. We’d reserved a fridge online to collect that afternoon – but of course, when we arrived, they didn’t have it in stock. Not only did they not have it in stock, they didn’t have a single white under-counter fridge in the entire ‘Superstore’. I was not impressed and lightly reprimanded the assistant who had taken nearly 30 minutes to tell us that he couldn’t be of any assistance to us or, I’d wager, any other human being were he given the next millennium to try. We left feeling mildly grumpy but pleased that we hadn't given such a useless establishment any of my hard-borrowed cash, and returned to the flat. After unloading the remainder of my stuff, we hotfooted it back to Wokingham to return the van before the 6pm deadline, had a Kronenburg on the train back to London and, while Paul picked up the Thai takeaway, I cobbled together a romantic candlelit set-up in my sitting room without any candles or cutlery.

Sunday morning I awoke and realised that the Sky man would have difficulty affixing the Sky dish to my flat given that merely walking down the short hallway required agility akin to that found in an Olympic gymnast. Jumping among the gaps between the piles of boxes like a frisky mountain goat, I eventually cleared a path through the debris – which was lucky because the Sky man had the fitness levels of an atrophied corpse and arrived panting like a Labrador in a furnace: stepping over a shoebox would have given him a heart attack so leaping between piles of middle class possessions would probably not have been high on his agenda. I had to open the window for him because his weirdly short arms were inadequate, and within twenty seconds, he’d decided he couldn’t do the job and was out of there. The afternoon was all about my choir rehearsal and the evening’s concert, which went unusually well and was followed by a pub gathering where Paul continued to surprise by mingling merrily with my extended family and choir friends and I was giggly and giddy and proud and generally over-excited.

Monday I was hungover and fractionally embarrassed having declared undying things to Paul over a midnight feast at Balans in Soho after the pub the night before – I beat a retreat to the flat and painted the bathroom ceiling to compensate. The evening was quiet and lovely as we enjoyed some microwaved soup with cutlery Paul had brought from his flat, accompanied by a crusty loaf and a bottle of Sauvignon blanc. Yesterday was frantic at work but the momentous occurrence was that, for better or worse, my builder has gone, job done. Now all I have to do is paint a hundred miles of skirting board and then I can get on with unpacking. I returned home a little tipsy after book club and spent about ten minutes standing agog in my bathroom, in love with the delicious wall colour and my new light fitting. Then I gambolled into the kitchen and giggled in delight as my dishwasher actually opens and shuts and I have a freezer and an oven hood with a light on it. It’s all too exciting.

I have always laughed in wonder at those people who leave the plastic covers on their sofas – but I have plastic sheets down on my carpet and a thin plastic film is covering the laminate cupboard doors in my kitchen and I am not in any hurry to take it off. The thought of my kitchen getting scratched or my carpet getting stained fills me with an emetic horror and I've realised that there is a very real temptation to leave the dust sheets down indefinitely. Obviously my desire to peel the film off my kitchen will win out eventually but there's no doubt that, as far as the creamy carpet goes, shoes will have to be left at the door like at an Indian temple. Red wine drinkers will be provided with a child's safety cup from which to sup. And fans of easily splattered foodstuffs in the bolognaise or salsa genre may as well forget their invitation to the housewarming immediately cos it ain’t going to happen. From now on, I’m going to have to exist on a diet of white wine, clear spirits and hooverable food such as biscuits and crisps. Who’d have thought that a new carpet could be such fun?

Cabin Fever Can Strike On Dry Land - Shock Report

There are several phases of boredom. The first is a mild, almost pleasant awareness that there's nothing to do - a vaguely confusing sensation of being lost which can be satisfying in its difference from the norm. The next few stages involve gradually increasing amounts of irritation which can often be solved by finding a minor distraction: a phonecall with a friend or a repeat of Mary Poppins on the TV. But over the course of the past week, when 90% of my time was spent at home, on my own, with only brief forays outside the house for the occasional tutoring spell or supermarket trip, I began to go out of my mind.

By 2pm yesterday, I'd reached previously unscaled peaks: an echelon of ennui identifiable by a newfound tendency to speak in a strange, crazed voice and giggle maniacally after almost every sentence. With no money to spend, and laziness sadly inherent in both of us, Simon and I were struggling to find something to fill our Sunday afternoon. We'd read the papers, lain around doing nothing for the larger portion of Saturday, and had had more than enough of the television. It is testament to quite how bored we both were that my suggestion of sorting out the books in my bedroom was such an appealing prospect for both of us.

With an enthusiasm that smacked of desperation, we trotted up two flights of stairs and threw ourselves into the task. Item 1: separate fiction from non-fiction. Item 2: sort fiction into read and unread. Unasked, Simon then subdivided fiction further into Normal Height and Smaller-Than-Average, and stacked the read fiction next to the wall, with my unread books at the front for easy access. No more will I be lost for a new tome - all the volumes are facing me, ready to go, taunting me with their uncreased spines and (in many cases) decade-old unenjoyed status.

Meanwhile, on the other side of my room, taking up six shelves and the carpet beneath, is my new non-fiction library, divided into reference, poetry and plays, self-help, modern psychology and philosophy, travel, history, politics, biography and autobiography, a shamefully extensive how-to-write-best-selling-novels section, cookery and a small 'Misc.' zone containing two books on being left-handed and an Ordnance Survey map of the Dorset coast.

The whole experience was largely satisfying - even for Simon whose latent (and not unattractive) OCD kicked in to previously unwitnessed levels. I was able to weed out dozens of books that I felt were unworthy to feature in my collection - and to accommodate my new fiction layout I was encouraged to discard several weighty stacks of old Smash Hits! magazines from the 1980s and 1990s, an emotional but unarguably sensible suggestion. To the untrained eye, my room probably looks no different, but to me, the difference is manifest.

Tolstoy wrote that boredom is 'the desire for desires'. If he's to be believed, I was bored because I wanted nothing - and thus, as soon as I realised that I desired an organised bookshelf, I was no longer bored. I'd have to argue with Leo though, for although I was truly, through-and-through bored yesterday, that didn't mean I had no desires. I desired a staggering amount. I desired a flat-stomach and thin thighs; I desired a million pounds. And I desired a miniature pony as a pet. But I didn't do a kickboxing video, write a commercially-driven novel or register my desire for a small horse with breeders online. I had desires - it was just easier to stay bored than pursue them. Perhaps boredom is the desire for desires that are more desirable than sitting still. And if that's the case, my future looks worryingly sedentary.