Sunday 26 June 2016

Unhealthy obsessions - a first checklist

I'm sure I have nothing as interesting as an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but I do have certain traits, or tendencies if you will, that strike me as unusual. Here are some of them:

a) I have a log-standing obsession with the last meals (hearty or otherwise) served to inmates on death row, to the extent that several times a week when I sit down to eat, whether at home or in a restaurant, I momentarily brood on whatever is on the plate in front of me as if it were my own last meal before I take the long walk. It makes me crave a cigarette. This happens in the evenings only - never at breakfast or lunch time;

b) whenever I see a motorist in a car with any kind of personalised numberplate (and these are very commonplace these days) I always imagine they are cruel to their children (or perhaps to other people's children);

c) the sight of a aeroplane flying overhead frequently prompts thoughts of time travel;

d) I find myself irregularly, but with increasing frequency, wondering whether how many, if any, of the boys I went to school with are now dead; 

e) Likewise old schoolmasters, although I assume they're all long since gathered;

f) I mentally insert apostrophes into correctly-punctuated shop names,  John Lewi's, say;  

g) I tend to pronounce 'skeleton' as 'skellington' for reasons that escape me;

h) Whenever I hear (or even think of) Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' I also hear the phrase 'Soham killer Ian Huntley's former girl-friend Maxine Carr';

i) On filling a kettle with cold water from the tap I invariably wonder whether it would save time and energy to fill it with warm water.

j) I tend to make lists of things in order to figure out what I think of them . . .

There are more, for a later date.



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