Dread

I once read that the overwhelming compulsion which people who suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) feel to do what they do, is mainly one of terrifying incomprehensible dread.

A dread that, for instance, if they don’t wash their hands ten times every half an hour, that all of their family – every single person they love - will immediately and inexplicably fall down dead.

A dread that if they don’t turn the light on and off three times whenever they enter a room, the earth will be hit by a giant meteorite and all life on the planet immediately extinguished.

A dread that…well you get the idea.

They know it’s illogical, improbably and deeply damaging/debilitating to their lives…..but…well… it’s just there nevertheless.

They feel it in their bones, to their core…and goodness it’s difficult to change the way you feel.

They live caught in a perpetual dichotomy – a nightmarish cognitive dissonance in which they both know that their compulsion is illogical and a product of their own rebellious consciousness – but they also feel absolutely and entirely convinced that their dread is real.

Frankly it must be bloody awful and I feel for the poor blighters, and…you know what….I sort of get it.

With me – as most of you know – it’s sitting at corners.

I’m nowhere near suffering what those poor buggers have to daily endure, but I do sort of understand where they’re coming from.

In Taps I have to sit at the corner of the bar; whether that be behind the hatch, at the hatch or in the Perryman.

Anything else and I feel like I have ants in my brain. An unreasonably rage – a back of the neck burning, ears ringing, rage.

And of course I know it’s unreasonable – I really do. Contrary to all evidence I’m only half as stupid as I look. But it is what it is. That’s just me. That’s just it.

It’s undoubtedly my own fault of course; for letting it get so far I mean – for not squashing it dead and flat when those feelings first arose, but…well… it’s done now.

It is. It had become. It has manifested.

The ridiculous thing is that I can sit anywhere in the Kings Head. Obviously I much prefer to sit near the hatch – but I can live without it – but when it comes to Taps all bets are off. Whenever someone – someone who isn’t Barry that is – is sat in the corner or at the hatch, I just can’t enjoy myself.

For all the time that I’m in there all I’m doing is waiting for them to go. That’s it. I’m waiting, I’m worrying, by God I’m worrying, and minute by minute I’m becoming more and more enraged.

You might think we’re having a moderately interesting conversation about your day, or my day, or your holiday, or my….well, your holiday, but that isn’t what’s happening.

What’s happening is that I’m eyeing the corner and plotting blue bloody murder. I’m chopping up limbs in bath tubs in my head. I’m wondering where I can buy limestone. I’m bludgeoning some poor aged motherfucker to death with his own walking stick.

And I really wish I wasn’t like that – genuinely I do – and I know it’s immensely annoying to many people, but as I said, it just is what it is.

So all I can ask is that you continue to indulge me…after all, who knows, maybe it really is all that stands between us and planetary destruction.