Never Give Someone With OCD a Check-list....

Never give someone with OCD a checklist, it could hold the entire enterprise up for days.

Take Doyle and the caravans...!

Big long list to check electrics, smoke alarms, appliances, Check under beds for consumerly debris; check the beds for stains; stuff left in cupboards; shite's left in toilets.

Three weeks ago he was given the list and he's still down there, checking everything for the umpteenth time. Soon as he'd ticked everything off, he had to do it another twice otherwise something awful was gonna happen to his maw; then another three times or it was going to be his brother meeting calamity. Then that made a six in total and that was no good because that meant everyone he knew that was still eligible (i.e. under sixty) was going to die in their sixties and that was no age, so another three rounds of checking to make it a nine which was a 'safe' number. Yer nineties was an OK time to be dying.

After four days of this he'd managed to get on a bus home from the caravan site but had to get off and head back after half-way convinced that he'd left a cooker on in number eighty-six. In whatever rational mind he'd by this time managed to retain, he was close to a hundred per cent sure that he had not left any cooker on anywhere, but rationality wasn't in control here.

He sat on the bed-couch looking at the cooker. If he looked at it long enough he'd manage to convince himself that all of it's rings, it's grill and oven were off, meaning that the gas was not in fact turned on and hissing quietly so that the next resident to light a fag wouldn't blow themselves and their young family to buggery, leaving himself as the responsible party facing questions of a highly serious nature in Edinburgh Sheriff Court.

The next time, he didn't even make the bus stop. Surely he'd left the door unlocked at number eighty-seven, and at least a window at eighty-five.

Never give a man with OCD a checklist....he will end up blowing the place sky-high....