It’s Not Me, It’s You!: Impossible perfectionist, 27, seeks very very very tidy woman. Jon Richardson

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СКАЧАТЬ Eggheads are the ringleaders of this club. You’d be more likely to find them sharing a packet of pork scratchings at your local real-ale pub than on the red carpet at a movie premiere, and that’s suits me just fine.

       * I cut recipes out of magazines (and bake them)

      Weekend magazines are filled with what are, in reality, middle-class lifestyle pornographic photographs rather than recipes. It’s not that any of us really believe that we will one day spend our weekends making oxtail soup from scratch and serving it in hearty bowls on wooden boards with home-made bread fresh from the Aga, but for the two hours we spend leafing through someone’s discarded pull-out supplements in the pub on a Sunday afternoon. I do; I have to hold on to the dream.

       * Wearing an apron

      Not even a novelty apron, at that. Middle-aged husbands tending to barbecues in the summer can wear novelty aprons – that is all.

      Whether you are a lot like me, a more extreme version of me, or scarcely recognisable as the same species as me, I hope that you will discover in yourself something of the obsessive. I truly do think we all have something deep down inside us that annoys us irrationally and that this sometimes unexplainable response is part of what makes us human.

      Perhaps without thinking, you will take a toilet roll off its holder when visiting a friend’s house, and replace it the other way around to ensure that the roll unravels forwards rather than down the back against the wall. Perhaps you subconsciously clean the rim of your wine glass with your napkin in a restaurant or have an overwhelming urge to straighten paintings that rest crooked. The part of you that makes your legs tingle with the urge to get up and correct a poorly hanged piece of art is the same as the part of me that makes me keep all the items on my desk parallel with one another. It is a belief in the right way of things even if you cannot always explain why it seems so right.

      Some authors travel through time with their readers, others take them to far off shores. In the quest on which you are about to accompany me – to find my Significantly Tidy Other – I will basically lock you in an enclosed space with a lunatic.

      Large, deep, metaphysical questions will come bubbling up to the surface, like why, if my execution of everything has been so perfect, have I not been in a relationship for such a long time? Is the problem really with everyone else, or is there something wrong with me? Is there someone out there who could make all this better, and if I found them would I ruin it by expecting too much of them?

      I suppose the ultimate question I am asking is: who is responsible for our own happiness, is it ourselves, or the person we are constantly looking for? Is my happiness really down to me … Or is it you?

      It is probably worth asking at this point, who exactly is my perfect woman? Attractive? Yes. Intelligent. Of course. Blah blah blah … All of these things together? Absolutely not! What on earth would a woman like that be doing with a man such as myself? Cheating on him, that’s what.

      Just the thought of this makes me feel stressed and uncomfortable, and whenever I feel stressed and uncomfortable, there is only one remedy: I have to sit down and write a ‘To do’ list. So I turn to tomorrow’s date and start scheduling …

      SATURDAY

      11.39

       CLOSE EVERY DOOR

      I definitely remember dropping a bin bag half filled with rubbish into my wheelie bin on the way to my car. I remember putting my suitcase in the boot, beside my emergency box and climbing into the driver’s seat. I turned the key in the ignition – I remember that because the radio came on and they were talking about rap music so I turned it straight off – and then I pulled out of my driveway and on to the road. After driving about two hundred metres I signalled left – though nobody was behind me – and pulled over to the side of the road, stopped and applied my handbrake. This is where I have been for around three minutes now. It has started.

       Did you lock the door?

      The trouble is that while I’m thinking about whether I locked the door, I’m also thinking about Gemma.

      I cannot stop thinking about her, which is a problem. I am certain that she would absolutely hate it if she knew what I was doing now and I do not want her to end up hating me. I just don’t know how you explain this kind of thing to someone who could never understand living this way.

      It is an unfortunate fact that you have to have once loved someone to even begin to be truly capable of hating them. People often say that they hate certain comedians but they don’t really – they just don’t like their jokes or else are jealous of their success. I don’t mind someone saying they hate me when I know they don’t know who I am, but I can’t bear someone who once loved me pretending that they don’t hate me when I know they do.

       But … did you lock the door?

      Why does this always have to happen? It isn’t just when I drive – I can be on foot or even with other people. One of my lowest points was asking a taxi driver to return to my house halfway along our journey to the train station so that I could be sure I had locked the door. I can still hear the surprise in his voice now: ‘Go back, mate? Really?’ I told him I had forgotten my passport so that he wouldn’t think I was weird, but I felt bad anyway. Having to invent a fictional short-haul trip to France to cover the fact I had so little luggage with me was no mean feat either. Step forward the fictitious ‘sick relative’, no more questions asked. Besides, he was glad of the extra fare, I am sure.

      My fear comes from years of living alone, with no one but me to take responsibility for my mistakes. If I don’t do something, it doesn’t get done – it is as simple as that. I absolutely refuse to go back this time though, no way. Things have changed. Each day I retrace my steps a number times, to check whether or not doors and windows have been locked, fridges closed, lights turned off, and each time I do so I find that I’ve always done what I thought I hadn’t. I have to accept that I am a worrier and I do not forget to do things like locking the door – that is what other people do, people who aren’t trying as hard as I am. But then again perhaps I have lulled myself into a false sense of security this time. Perhaps this time the door really is unlocked and I will be making a mistake if I don’t go back. It would be worse to have stopped and decided to carry on than not to have considered the possibility at all. Once my neighbour knocked on my door to tell me that I had left my car window down, so I am unreliable. Admittedly it was years ago now and nothing bad happened as a result, but still it sows seeds of doubt in my mind – you only have to fail once to be a failure. If I wait here any longer I will have wasted as much time as I would have by going back to check whether the door was locked after all. I have to make a decision.

       I think you left it open, because you rushed down the driveway to put the bin bag in the wheelie bin and forgot to go back and lock the door.

      Now, that seems plausible; I absolutely could have done that. A few net curtains twitch around me to remind me that I am disturbing the order of things, as if the houses themselves are winking at me in sly warning, like a Cockney down a dark alley, though in truth it is simply the inquisitiveness of the people behind who have nothing better to worry about than whether a stranger is in their midst.

      I have lived in Swindon for five years now, and to me it is something of a Goldilocks town, in that it is just the right size for what I need. If it were any bigger, decision-making would be rendered utterly impossible by having too many options for which shop/restaurant/ post office to use. Equally, any smaller and it would make impossible the chances of disappearing into a shapeless crowd when out and about.

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