Читать книгу It’s Not Me, It’s You!: Impossible perfectionist, 27, seeks very very very tidy woman - Jon Richardson - Страница 4

My name is Jon Richardson. I am an extreme perfectionist and I live on my own in the Wiltshire town of Swindon. I make my living as a stand-up comedian, travelling the country and talking about my life with what I intend to be hilarious consequences. In February 2010 I was asked by the Guardian newspaper’s Weekend supplement to write an article on romance for their Valentine’s Day special. I wrote the only article I felt able to write, namely my thoughts on the other side of the dating coin from the point of view of someone who is not in a relationship, has not been in one for some time, and feels more than a little trepidation at the thought of ever being in another one. Here is what I wrote and what was printed on 13 February.

NOT LOOKING FOR MISS IMMACULATE PERFECTION WITH A GSOH …

My last girlfriend was a loser. Literally. A wonderful and beautiful person, but prone to losing things: keys, money, credit cards, mobile phones. Each time she lost something, she would get upset and come to me for help and reassurance.

I, on the other hand, am a keeper. Not in the American sense that women throw themselves at me. Rather that if you were to ask me to lay my hands on a receipt for a pair of shoes I bought in 1997, I would be angry if it took me more than 90 seconds to locate it. Over to the filing cabinet I would stroll, R for Receipts, S for Shoes, and work through chronologically.

Had our relationship taken place in a sitcom, this juxtaposition would have led to hilarious consequences, as we laughed and joked about what a couple of cards we were and what kind of mixed- up world could ever have brought us together. Instead, we argued frequently over what she saw as something she was powerless to change, and I saw as a correctable weakness in her character.

In general I would say I find it difficult to accept other people’s shortcomings. I am not an unfair person but I do think more effort is the solution to most problems. Not losing things is simply a matter of trying harder to remember where you put them, isn’t it? Popular music is no help here:

If you love something,

Let it go, If it comes back it’s yours,

That’s how you kno-o-ow

Nonsense, Christina Aguilera! I say, ‘If you love it, file it away under “Things I love”. If it’s required at a later date, you’ll know exactly where it i-i-i-is.’

Wanting things my own way is not something I like about myself. From my love of right angles to my stubborn, black and white views on complex issues, I recognise I can be a very difficult person to be around. I also cannot fail to recognise many symptoms of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. I have countless habits that I know serve no purpose but am powerless to avoid. I arrange my coins into ascending size in my pockets, for example, and nothing gives me more comfort than the knowledge that my forks, knives and spoons are all in the correct place, tessellating magnificently in their drawer.

I like to think that we’re all on a scale where these tendencies are concerned. I am sure many people find it difficult to settle down to watch a DVD with a cobweb hanging behind the TV. But what if the cobweb isn’t behind the TV – or even in the same room – but lurking nauseatingly in the room next door? Could you still relax and enjoy the film? As a child I remember marvelling at how neatly my dad’s sponge used to fit into the sponge-nook in his Ford Escort, but I don’t know whether this was an early warning of who I would become or the reason for it.

If I were to have a catchphrase (and I like to think I don’t), it would be, ‘Fun must be sacrificed for efficiency.’ It’s harder to try all the time, it’s harder to be monogamous than to sleep with whoever you want and it’s harder to be disappointed by failure than it is to laugh and move on. That said, I have definitely crossed a line.

I no longer attempt new things because I am too afraid of failing. In my garage there exists a shrine to the person I promised I would become: scores of broken musical instruments, squash rackets and computers carefully boxed up to prevent them from hurting me any longer. I enjoy meals out, but limit my menu choices to things I’ve eaten before to reduce the risk of wasting money on a meal I don’t enjoy.

For me there is no pleasure to be had in an experience unless I complete it perfectly first time. I’m not just talking about golf here, or bowling, but simply eating a biscuit, which can be done the right way or the wrong way in my world (depending obviously on the biscuit in question). But there is another part of me that wonders why, if my way is so right, it has brought me to live alone, far from family and friends, in Swindon.

Swindon, which is somewhere between Bristol and London, is a town that is synonymous with comedy, not that anything famously funny has happened here, but people seem to laugh when you say that you live in Swindon. Like Slough, it simply inspires the pity that is such a constituent part of British humour. ‘His life is clearly shit, this is going to be brilliant!’

I moved here when I dropped out of university, stepped off the treadmill and took control of my future. I wanted somewhere I could be anonymous, where there was nothing to distract me from what I wanted to achieve. Unless I developed a sudden fascination with round abouts, Swindon seemed the perfect place to reinvent myself. At no point in my teens did I think, ‘I can only hope that by my late twenties I will have my own place, close to a big Asda and with equally handy transport links to Cirencester or Wootton Bassett.’ Yet here I am.

I should point out here that there are many positives to be had from taking life as seriously as I do. For example, I don’t remember the last time I fell over. Even in the recent snow and ice I stayed upright, although less by stealthy catlike grace than by steadfastly refusing to leave my house. I would rather stay at home than take a tumble on my way to Morrisons and be laughed at by passers-by. Falling is a good example of something that can be seen in one of two ways: either it is an unavoidable consequence of our get-up-and-go lifestyles, or it is an inability to perform such a rudimentary task that it cannot be tolerated. Needless to say, I subscribe to the latter ideology.

When it comes to the simple pleasures in life, half an hour with a glass of beer and an episode of You’ve Been Framed! is hard to beat. Occasionally I have to rewind and watch the same clip over and over again (I’m talking about you, girl falling into boating lake). I laugh uncontrollably but it’s not the suffering of another human being I enjoy, it’s the relief. ‘It could have been me!’ I think, as I watch pensioners grappling unsuccessfully with pogo sticks and dogs running into glass doors. I treat each show as a training manual for life, crossing off pastimes that represent an unnecessary risk: flying remote-controlled aircraft in misty fields, spinning round in the garden with an upturned rake on my chin, carrying a carefully iced birthday cake. Falls end in pain and humiliation; falling over, falling from grace. Even, in my experience, falling in love.

My last relationship ended in 2003 (it seems the final thing my girlfriend lost was her desire to put up with my constant nitpicking) and I decided to take a break for a while. There is no reason, I thought, why people can’t be completely happy on their own. Initially I revelled in returning home to find that everything was exactly where I had left it; that there was as much milk as there had been when I last used some and that I could watch whatever I wanted on TV. The novelty has now definitely worn off and the grass on the other side of the fence is a sickly, HD green.

I haven’t woken up with a cup of tea by the bed for seven years. It seems such a small thing (and those of you reading this who are in relationships will probably be thinking that at least when you make a cup of tea yourself it doesn’t taste like crap) but it’s one of a thousand things I miss about having someone around to take care of you. I have spent my entire adult life getting things the way I want them and all I want now is someone to give it all up for.

When you look into the eyes of the person you love, it is easy to forget that there is anything else in the world besides the river of emotion flowing between you. Why, then, do you want to push them out of the window five minutes later for putting a wet teaspoon into the sugar? Have they not been told a thousand times that the sight of the brown clusters this forms makes you feel sick? Of course they have … so they must be doing it because they hate you! You hate them, too. How could you have been so blind earlier? Then, as you are getting up to charge headlong in their direction, they laugh – and you remember why you love them – and the whole exhausting cycle begins anew.

But if true love is hard, then one-night stands hold little appeal for a perfectionist like myself. In my head I have a carefully ranked list, with things I do well at the top, and things I do badly at the bottom. About two-thirds of the way down, between making trifle and rewiring a plug, is ‘showing a woman the night of her life between the sheets’. I would no sooner go clubbing and pick up a woman for sex than I would run on to the pitch at Old Trafford and start showing off my keepyuppy skills.

My friends can’t believe how long I have gone without having sex. I see it rather like going to the cinema: of course it’s fun and if we all had our own way we would do it as often as possible, but if we don’t get round to going, it’s probably just because there were far more important things to do.

In the last few years I have met women who have made me think that it might be time to end my self-imposed isolation. From those whom I have been out with a few times, to strangers who have walked past me on a train, a brief encounter will set my mind racing about what the future could be like for us and remind me of all the things I currently miss out on. Believe me, holidays abroad, lazy Sundays and trips to Monkey Forest are all much less fun alone.

Things never get far before I find some reason to knock down the idealised vision I have created. If they are attractive, I wonder whether I am being superficial. If they are funny, I wonder whether they are funnier than me. Perhaps they will call or text too frequently and I will feel harassed, or they won’t text or call at all and I will become convinced they despise me. It could be something as small as a ‘Hope your OK’ text, which will send me spiralling into apocalyptic visions of a life without apostrophes or question marks.

On the other hand, do I want someone like myself? An equally quarrelsome perfectionist, only with breasts and less body hair? Absolutely not, it would drive me insane. According to the American author and philosopher Sam Keen, ‘We come to love not by finding the perfect person, but by seeing an imperfect person perfectly.’

Great, you would think, I can finally stop looking for Mr or Miss Right and just work on convincing myself that Mr or Miss Not Bad But Smells Funny And Has An Oddly Small Mouth is actually perfect.

This is far more difficult than it sounds.

In the early stages of a relationship, what I call ‘the lying stage’, two people will display only that side of their character that is attractive to a prospective partner. ‘You love Dostoevsky, too? Wow! Well, aren’t we just two peas in a long-winded, Russian pod?’

A bond will subsequently form based upon the fictitious life that these two invented personalities could share. Friends and family will be informed that the search for ‘the one’ is off. We can all get to this point easily enough, but the real challenge comes as the stresses of compromise become too much and the real person begins to manifest itself.

He wants to wash up as they cook, before residue has a chance to dry out and stick, whereas she wants to leave it to soak and do it after The Simpsons. She wants to go on holiday to a place where they can do and see things of interest; he wants to go somewhere he can drink by a pool. She wants to paint the bedroom red and he wants to get SkyPlus. She wants to have a baby and he still wants to get SkyPlus.

In comedy cliché terms, this is known as the point when two people finally feel comfortable enough to break wind in one another’s company. Curiously, this is seen as a good thing. For me, it signals the beginning of the end. From the peak of potential perfection you descend down through ‘going to the toilet with the door open’, past ‘perfunctory sex’ and into ‘cold, dead stares across the breakfast table’. I could quite happily get through a 40-year marriage without ever suspecting that my partner went to the toilet at all.

As I read this back to myself (the last line especially), my conclusion is, ‘Wow. That guy really needs a girlfriend!’ Surely no relationship could be as difficult as living with my own perfectionism? If I met the woman of my dreams, would I mind her organising our CDs by genre and not alphabetically? Could I let her keep the knives to the left of the forks in our shared cutlery drawer? Of course, I’m not a fool. But that’s not what is really being surrendered in a relationship. What you give to someone, when you give him or her your heart, is control over your happiness. Their moods and reactions can dictate absolutely whether you skip out of bed in the morning or are afraid to go home after work. There is no middle ground; the joy is in the surrender.

I know that no one is happy all the time, but I have learned that unhappiness can be an awful lot easier to deal with if you know you are responsible for it, and therefore responsible for changing it. It’s in my nature to focus on the negative details so that they can be fixed. The problem is that I sometimes forget to enjoy life in the meantime and just go looking for the next thing to improve upon. As much as I want that cup of tea in the morning, and all that goes with it (security and a sense of contentment, not just sugar and some toast), I am scared that my desire to make someone perfectly happy would be an impossible pursuit and the cause of much unhappiness.

I can’t shake off my feeling that the only inevitable result of a long-term relationship is that you will see somebody else’s weaknesses and they will see yours. Eventually you will lose respect for one another and either break up or find yourselves locked into a loveless future. Am I right? Of course not! Can I change? I sincerely hope so because, as it stands, it is clearly me who is the loser, desperately looking for a keeper.

* * *

Friends warned me against being so honest in my writing, but since my life is not one of tremendous interest or victory over incredible hardship, honesty is just about all I have to offer. Too much detail not withstanding, the response to the article was fantastic and I received a number of letters and emails from people who had read it and wanted to tell me that they felt the same way as I did and suffered similarly with a desire not to be alone, unfortunately coupled with an intolerance of others. I also received a number of very kind, somewhat romantic offers from women who told me that they would be happy to step into the breach, as it were, and end my relationship drought. It would have been cynical of me to say the least to have written an article with the sole intention of using it to secure sexual conquests and, if anything, I felt almost annoyed that anyone reading the article would misinterpret my tale of being trapped in my solitude as a call to my arms. Through the various responses I gained confidence in the knowledge that I was not alone in what I was feeling and was pleased to note that I may have helped others who feel the same way. It seems the world is full of people who do not, in spite of what we see in sitcom and in film, go on multiple dates with people they meet in bars and coffee shops and who do not seem to know exactly what it is they are looking for, let alone how and where to find it. I therefore decided to write in more detail about what I see as the truth about relationships and how my brain works, and the result of that work is the book you hold in your hands.

If you are reading these words then let me thank you for not only finding the book but also making room for it in your life. I am loathe to spend too much time so early in our relationship telling you what you are not about to read, since that game could easily go on for ever, but there are a couple of things I would like to point out at the outset.

The first thing is that this book is not an autobiography. I make no apologies for the fact that I will not be writing about where I went to school, who my best friend was when I was five years old or when I first ate a kumquat (though the omission of the latter owes more to the fact that I’m still not entirely sure what a kumquat is, much less whether or not I have ingested one).

Where a childhood memory helps explain something of how I became the man I am today, it has been included, but this is not the tale of how a child from the cold wastelands of t’north of t’England worked his way up the ladder from being the guy in the kitchen who puts the little salads on the side of baguettes to fulfilling his dream of becoming a full-time stand-up comic. That is not a story I intend to write until I am sat at a scruffy old desk in a battered little potting shed somewhere in the Lake District with a dog curled up at my feet, confident that the most interesting parts of my life have been lived and any of the people I might upset or insult are not around any more. The year of publication of this book will be my twenty-eighth on the planet, so I do not consider for one second that I have had a bio worth graphing about, automatically or otherwise.

Rather than being a chronological journey across my years, it is the tale of another journey – the most important journey on which I find myself – my quest for perfection. Perfection is what drives me in everything I do; be it finding the perfect partner, living the perfect day or simply constructing and consuming the perfect sandwich.

When speaking of the perfect day, people tend to imagine one spectacular event, the beauty of which overshadows any minor shortcoming which might have occurred up to that point – walking along a beach at sunset, drinking red wine on a shagpile rug by the glowing embers of a fire in a French chateau or, for a lucky few, making love at dawn on the top of Mount Everest. As special as those individual events may be, that’s not what I’m talking about at all; that’s not how perfect days work in my book. The perfect day is not a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, it is something that can happen every day if you’re willing to put in the effort. A perfect day exists independently from the tasks that need to be completed on that day and concerns only how efficiently they have been carried out. It begins well before the perfect cup of tea, it starts the moment you open your eyes – or, for the real hardcore, the moment you finish your ‘To Do’ list the night before, rewriting if necessary to eliminate spelling mistakes and ensure even word spacing and neat handwriting. So fragile is it, that it can be undone by so little as a stubbed toe or an odd sock. A perfect day is one without mistakes and they are to be utterly cherished.

I do not subscribe to the view that mistakes are a part of life; they are not. This is not to say that more cannot be learned from a mistake than anything else; that is true, but that is not an excuse for making them. Mistakes are caused, in the main, by a failure to plan properly, try hard enough or pay enough attention to detail. If you are willing to take personal responsibility for each failure, however small, then you can strive to eliminate errors altogether. I am of the belief that the ‘point of life’ is not a question, but a noun; an actual point-scoring system that rewards perfect execution of a task on a measurable scale:

    *   Made someone smile? Gain two life points.

    *   Made someone cry? Lose five life points.

    *   Dropped a spoon? Lose one life point.

    *   Cheated on your wife and children by sleeping with the ex-partner of an ex-teammate because you are a multi-millionaire Premier League footballer and you are arrogant enough to think you can get away with anything? Lose a million life points.

And so on.

It gives me satisfaction to think that not only is there such a thing as right and wrong in this world, but there is a way of measuring exactly how right and wrong something might be. People would like to think that the decisions we make in our lives are ephemeral and impossible to quantify but they aren’t really. Most of the things we do that will hurt other people are known to us before we carry them out, and rather than discover afterwards that there were hidden consequences to our actions, in truth we simply make a value judgement on whether or not what we stand to gain by upsetting someone else justifies the decision for ourselves.

The ultimate goal of my point-scoring system is, of course, to allow someone to become the Ultimate Human on Earth. I do not believe in a god, but I would like to think somebody somewhere is keeping score for us. New players are constantly being added to the worldwide league, international transfers are being made each and every day, regardless of whether the window is open or closed and, as is always the case in life as well as sport, the up-and-coming talent seems to lack some of the grit and honesty of the generation that came before it.

After each day’s play I go to bed at night, acutely aware of whether or not I won the day, took a battering away from home or whether the world and I ground out a well-fought draw. The commentator in my head goes on trotting out his clichés like sheep jumping over a fence to send me off to sleep, or keeping me awake if further match analysis is needed.

Whatever the benefits of living my life this way – and I hope that as you read on you will discover that there are many – it is not an instant recipe for happiness. I am definitely guilty of spending so much of my time trying to do things in what I deem to be the correct manner that I can sometimes forget entirely to enjoy them. While some people may eat a biscuit in a certain idiosyncratic way for fun, I do it because I believe it to be the correct way of doing so and deviation constitutes failure. I don’t need to tell you which the best part of a Jaffa Cake or a Jammy Dodger is, do I? Why create another disappointing memory by leaving yourself with the worst bit at the end?

It is a source of some frustration for me that Cadbury’s have been collecting data on the many ways people choose to eat their Creme Eggs for years now and yet stubbornly refuse to publish their results. We need to take public ownership of the company and force them to release their facts and figures so that we can find out once and for all what the correct answer is, for there must be one. What if I have been doing it wrong all this time?

My weirdness aside, if I am to find any friends, particularly a girlfriend, she will almost certainly have to be a human. My previous track record tends to suggest that of all the species that exist on the planet, it has so far been exclusively humans to whom I find myself sexually attracted. This is a good thing legally if nothing else.

The unfortunate coincidence is that humans are also top of my list of creatures I would most like to see wiped off the face of the planet. Sometimes cats are well placed just behind them, and wasps certainly never manage to get out of the danger zone, but neither of these last two can be reasoned with and so are equally worthy of my fear, but not so much of my hatred. I fear all that which cannot be talked out of causing harm – drunks and children also fall into this category.

Most animals that do harm have not evolved a thought process capable of rationalising their actions or else they only act in self-defence. Humans, on the other hand, have conscious thought and therefore their malicious acts score double points. I do not subscribe to the view that we have been placed here by some kind of higher being; I do not believe we are special enough to warrant that kind of attention. We are simply a thing, that lives in a place, and one day something will happen to that place (either because of us or in spite of us, some kind of cosmic event beyond our comprehension let alone ability to influence) and we won’t be here any more. Our gods will go with us when we leave.

If I might submit my entry here for the award for most turgid and illogical metaphor in literature: In the giant nightclub that is the universe, the clock will sooner or later reach ten-to-two and the bouncers of time will pick us up off the ground and fling us through the doors of existence onto the pavement of history, and we will be missed no more than a tapeworm is missed by its host.

The world will move on regardless and then in millions of years something else will live here and perhaps it will dig us up from the ground and marvel at how small our brains were and try to piece together the story of how we moved and where we lived and how we died. But maybe they won’t. That’s what I believe anyway, but for a man who can barely get through the day without losing his temper at something so small as to be invisible to most people – as you will discover later – perhaps speculating on such spiritual matters is a waste of time.

Whatever the chain of events that has put us, in our current form, on this planet at this time, I feel far more privileged to exist when I consider the millions of years of evolution and cosmic shift that has made our lives possible than by the thought that we were manufactured, and our world made for us, by a man in the sky.

Life created by a supreme being is but a toy, a plaything for levels of existence far beyond our own, but life that exists on a knife edge, life that is a gift from our many ancestors who braved their surroundings and adapted so that we might one day master them – that is a gift to be cherished.

The person sat opposite you on the bus is not much more than a mayfly in the great scheme of things, given a brief window in the eternity of time to live and to love, to taste strawberries and to ride bicycles and experience cold sores and stomach upsets, to have baths that had too much cold water in them and to hate the taste of oysters and not understand poetry. There is so much for each of us to get done and so little time to do it in that we can’t possibly do it without help, so we should make space for one another, clear a path to allow those of us through who need a helping hand.

A smile at a stranger on the bus can be all it takes to propel someone who is tired a little further onward on a grey day, or perhaps just start by moving your bag off that seat next to you so that the old lady can sit down?

Oh you won’t? I see. Did you pay for two seats? No.

You just like to have two seats to yourself? OK.

But the evolution thing? They all worked so hard to get us here and you could just …?

I see, you’ve had a bad day at work and you …? Right.

Well then, fuck all mankind, may we all disappear in a great flash of light and let cats and dogs rule the planet for a while and see if they can behave any less ignorantly than we do – we with our evolved thinking and deep beliefs. People who see my shows have sometimes described my thoughts as a stream of consciousness, but I think a river of scorn would be more like it. I don’t mean to hate people, I get forced into it.

As you can see it takes very little for the good man in me, the one who wants to care and to believe the best of people, to be suffocated. Let me witness the success of a moral person any day of the week over the success of a twat – show me an England football team filled with players who give their money to charity and congratulate their opponents and I will applaud their ten–nil defeat in a way I could never applaud a narrow one–nil victory by a bunch of greedy, philandering morons. Struggle to do something right and I will help you; profit in selfishness and I will hope you die. There’s the line, right there.

ODD COMIC’S DEFINITION

In talking about some of the things I obsess about and my routines for executing certain tasks, a certain level of compulsion will become apparent. While I may appear to display certain traits of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I am keen to point out from the outset that I do not refer to myself as a sufferer. I have never been given, nor sought, a medical diagnosis for my mental condition, but rather consider myself to be someone who has been allowed to develop certain habits, and beyond that has been able to exploit those habits for comedic effect. I do not seek to make light of an illness that can cripple lives and leave people unable to function in modern society and the over-simplistic treatment of OCD for comedy is a huge bugbear of mine.

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.

I cannot bear to be bad at things I love. I long to play the piano but the sound I make with my clumsy fingers crashing down irregularly on the keys is enough to shatter my spine. Like loving someone so much that all you can bear to do is strangle them to death for fear that they might not love you back, I can never go near a brand new piano in case of what might happen.

I hope that in these pages there will be some counsel for anyone who has ever lost their temper at an inanimate object, for those lost sheep who have sacrificed whole afternoons calling a biro a shiteater because it ran out part way through an important document. It is not the pen that is to blame, of course, but the entire cosmos that has decided to make you its victim for that day – but you can’t very well snap the cosmos in half and jump all over it can you? That is a much longer game.

RICHARDSON’S LAW OF MOMENTS

There will, of course, be a small number of people reading this who will not be able to associate at all with the desire to do things in a certain way time after time. If you think you fall into that category, then you should be made aware of this fact: I probably wouldn’t click with you if we met. I doubt it bothers you, since by nature you are probably an impulsive person who doesn’t carry with them the rejections of the past, preferring instead to ‘live for the moment’. Well, let me tell you that you can keep your moments; I for one do not like the present.

People who tell you that they live their lives in the moment are, in my experience, only doing so because they are afraid of their future or ashamed of their past. These are people for whom thinking of anything other than the fork in their hand or the song in their head or the next step they are going to take frightens them so much that they pretend it is some kind of inspiring and advisable philosophy to do simply whatever it occurs to them to do at that moment in time.

Not only does this life philosophy appal me, I am also annoyed by the fact that it is me who is preached at for having forgotten what it is to be truly alive. Optimists and thrill seekers are riddled with sicken-ingly sweet sayings and mottos that serve to reinforce their flawed beliefs. People who style their hair for hours to make it look as though it hasn’t been styled at all will send you emails with pictures of cats doing water sports and taglines like ‘Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift, that’s why they call it the present.’

The problem with simplistic and poetic sentiments such as these is that they sound so nice and catchy. I can understand completely why people choose to think that way, of course. Who doesn’t want to believe that every day of their life is a perfectly wrapped gift from the hands of fate? Well, it isn’t, not as far as I am concerned. There are no easily quotable sayings about just knuckling down and getting on with life in all its inconsistent and unfair glory, and if there were, they wouldn’t rhyme or have witty wordplays so people would choose to ignore them. There is simply too much to be done for us all to go around ‘enjoying ourselves’. When the world is perfect, then we can all sit down and eat jelly beans, but for now the fact that things are going well for you just means that you are in a position to alleviate someone else’s suffering for a while.

Not living in the present doesn’t mean not enjoying life at all – far from it! Things can be enjoyed all the more when you appreciate the sacrifice and hard work that went into their organisation, like a slow-cooked piece of meat. All the gristle and toughness that were there at the beginning have been worn away through consistent application of heat over time to leave behind something as smooth as silk. Brace yourselves for plenty more unjustifiable food similes. When you plan your life properly every day can be as exciting as Christmas Eve and you never have to suffer the come-down that is Boxing Day. Just look at Boxing Day as the eve of the eve (and so on) of Christmas Eve.

I seem to be at a time of life where my thoughts are involuntarily turning towards more permanent things, relationships that will last and where I want to be when I settle down, but I also know that I’m still at an age when I should be enjoying my freedom and taking risks and making mistakes.

Apparently ‘making mistakes’ is what your youth is for and, whilst I can’t say I agree, I will certainly concede that life was a lot simpler when I wasn’t expected at all to be thinking long term and living from day-to-day was simply how it was. I am no longer sure that I am a better balanced person with a greater understanding of myself for having spent the last ten years taking life so seriously. Perhaps I should have spent more of my time in nightclubs, having promiscuous sex with people I never intended to see again? It just never appealed to me.

The last time I went back to a girl’s house for an impromptu house party I spent most of the night straightening out rugs, putting down coasters and alphabetising DVDs while all around me people got off with whoever was closest and gradually headed off to various rooms to make more mess, no doubt. I ended up getting violently drunk, tutting at a number of strangers and walking home. I only just about made it.

Personally I alphabetise my DVD collection, but like most of the things I do I maintain that this is nothing to do with OCD, this is simply common sense. How can you expect to find the film you are looking for if you do not have a system in place on the shelf? Given that the likely piece of information you have about what you want to watch is its title, it is logical to sort them thus.

Obviously if you are the kind of person who thinks, ‘I’m not sure what I want to watch but I want it to have been directed by John Hughes’, then you may sort by director, but who does that? The alphabetised system is one that is easy to identify so there is no excuse for replacing a DVD wrongly and yet people do it simply to annoy me. If I have guests, rare though the occasion may be, after each trip to the toilet or into the kitchen I will return to a room filled with sniggering guests staring at me intently.

‘We’ve moved something!’

And the gales of laughter continue as I move around looking for the swapped DVDs or the rotated ornament, like Annie Wilkes in Misery. Perhaps the reason I don’t have guests more often is the gleeful way in which they try to make me feel uncomfortable in my own home, or perhaps they move things as a way of making themselves feel more comfortable. Such a sanitised environment cannot be easy to relax in, so perhaps they are trying to make themselves feel at home, which I suppose is valid. I myself resent being asked to remove my shoes when entering a friend’s house, even though I understand the reasoning behind it. It nevertheless sets a precedent for a visit which must leave behind no reminder. When you leave, I don’t even want to know you were ever here.

Must I really make a mess to make people feel comfortable in my house? How far do we go in making ourselves appear weak to elevate those around us? This willingness not only to expose weaknesses but to revel in them is what has led to the misguided belief that breaking wind in front of your partner is some kind of display of trust.

‘I love you so much I want you to see all sides of me, inside and out.’

I have argued with several people who believe that breaking wind is a part of life and therefore should not be hidden from someone you care about once you are over the initial dating period in which the desire to impress is paramount.

I am of the opinion that there is never a point in a relationship at which it stops being a lack of respect for someone near to you to force them to inhale the smell of your own semi-digested gut slurry. Even writing these words makes me feel uncomfortable and you can call it anal retention or weirdness if you like but if you truly can’t be bothered to leave the room to break wind then you are on a slippery slope which ends with you leaving the toilet door open and continuing a conversation with your partner while you void your bowels.

Such is my desire only to see the best parts of my partner and vice-versa that I must confess to being able to remember each time I have seen someone I was in love with fall over. I cannot help but be disappointed by such a shocking inability to perform such a simple task as staying upright. I can’t remember the last time I fell over, mostly because if it does happen it is through drunkenness which gladly takes my ability to remember anything at all away with my dexterity, but I place my feet very carefully to avoid the possibility. If we learn to walk as toddlers how can it be that, once we have mastered the basics, we accept that we don’t get any better at it? As a fully grown adult I expect at very least that I will be able to stay upright in polite society at all times.

LOOKING FOR MS VERY VERY VERY TIDY

I hope this book won’t be a predictable journey: I’m no rule-following loser all the time! I even took my dinner out of the microwave last night barely thirty seconds into the required one minute resting time. That’s right, I’m bad too, when I need to be and when I have properly assessed the potential risk. Deal with it. A few small indiscretions aside, I’m not unaware that my life isn’t following the patterns for someone my age. Even I catch myself doing things that I would be embarrassed for anyone else to find out about. In the spirit of full disclosure, here is a list.

    *   I find myself washing up at eleven p.m. on a Saturday night

        Nothing makes me feel more like a loser than seeing myself reflected in the kitchen window wearing marigolds and scrubbing at soufflé moulds on what is widely accepted to be ‘party night’. I wouldn’t want to be out at a club, and I don’t want to wake up on Sunday morning with a load of dirty dishes staring me down while I make a cup of tea, but still I am aware of how my situation looks and cannot help but feel as though in the eyes of my peers I ought to be ashamed, which isn’t much worse than actually being ashamed.

    *   I smile more at dogs than their owners

        I have rarely met a dog I didn’t like. Little fat dumpy ones, who look like grumpy old men as they waddle down the street; big, tall hairy ones, who look as though they are trying to convince you that they are really too cool to be tied up outside Wilkinson’s; bright-eyed, bouncy, energetic ones, who make no effort to disguise the fact that every second of their life is a revelation to them, they want to meet everyone, to smell everything and to run as fast as possible at all times. I wish I felt the same.

    *   I laugh at jokes the Eggheads make

        I watch this teatime quiz without exception while I have my first glass of wine on days when I do not have to work. My favourite kind of people to watch on television are those who give off the impression that no matter how much they do, they will never quite be any good at it. Nervous, embarrassed by their immense founts of knowledge, the 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 …