My OCD is like a religion - and this pencil is my God

Most people have a superstition. There’s even a name for my dread of the number 8

Does saying "I'm a bit OCD" trivialise the issue? (Apple)

On a Virgin train to Edinburgh a few days ago, during a refreshing hour of motionlessness (points failure) outside York, I fell to chatting with the holidaying American family sharing the table. I say “I fell”, but that is misleading. In fact, I shoved the poor creatures over the edge of a companionable silence into a conversational abyss out of which, being delightful folk from Wisconsin, they were for a while too polite to clamber.

While their daughter did her homework, I asked Mom and Dad about Donald Trump, who featured in that morning’s dispatches after apparently taunting a reporter’s physical disability. Trump has been on my mind lately, as perhaps he has been on yours, due to the disturbing resilience of his polling numbers.

“Look, even if he has an outside chance of the Republican nomination,” I said, needily, “tell me he doesn’t have a prayer of winning the presidency.” “No way,” said Mom. “I know what you guys think, but even Americans aren’t that craz... Sorry, are you OK?” She was staring at the index finger of my right hand. “Oh yes, I’m fine,” I said, tapping the wooden pencil I carry for such eventualities, while counting, fast and sotto voce: “44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49. Sorry, just an OCD. I touch wood seven times for trivial things, but for big things – like Donald Trump being handed the nuclear codes – it’s seven squared. And for the really huge stuff, like Andy Murray playing in a Davis Cup final, it’s cubed.”

“Seven cubed?” “Mm, that’s 343.” “You touch wood 343 times?” “Not often. Generally, it’s just the 49.” “I see.”

At this stage I sensed some reciprocal eyebrow-raising at the table. When Virgin team leader Rachel came on the Tannoy, they took the interruption as a cue. Dad became engrossed in his book, which he was holding upside down. Mom buried herself in an iPad, although it visibly had no battery power. In the void, I flicked through my Daily Mail until chancing, in the health section, on a classic instance of Jungian synchronicity. “Why do so many celebs claim to have OCD?” asked a headline. “How the crippling condition of obsessive compulsive disorder is a status symbol.”

It’s always exciting to be in on the birth of an allegedly new Hollywood fad, in succession to Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs and collecting babies from Indochina. But am I clambering pitiably on to a celeb bandwagon, or does the ubiquity of OCD bespeak something deeper? Among those whom the Mail seemed to regard as OCD pretenders were Cameron Diaz (terror of door handles), Emily Blunt (cluck-clucks with her tongue when passing a lamp post) and Leonardo DiCaprio (steps on cracks in the pavement – which makes a nice change). Trump himself had a mention for a Howard Hughesian germ-phobia about shaking hands.

The Mail takes an unwontedly censorious view of what it scorns as “the trendiest affliction you can claim to have”. A few weeks ago, its resident psychiatrist complained about the purloining of OCD by people who are simply a touch neurotic or fiddly. People such as David Beckham, who needs to arrange the Diet Coke cans in his fridge into a neat row. “So do I!” wrote Dr Max Pemberton. “That’s a perfectly sensible thing to do – keeping your fridge tidy means there isn’t a yoghurt sitting at the back quietly going out of date.” Sage advice on the dairy front.

The good doctor feels the misappropriation of the initials trivialises the misery of patients whose lives are less inconvenienced than wrecked by their compulsions. The ones who scrub their hands and faces until they bleed, who cannot leave the house without returning 127 times to reassure themselves the oven is off. He feels that the popular phrase “I’m a bit OCD” diminishes what no one denies to be a wickedly debilitating problem at its worst. “You don’t hear anyone saying they’ve got ‘a bit’ of cancer, do you? We all know cancer is out-and-out terrible and not something to be glib about.”

Fair enough, but should someone with a basal cell carcinoma – the commonest skin cancer, which is never fatal and almost invariably easily treated – avoid using the C-word for fear of offending someone with a melanoma? There are degrees of everything, after all – and almost everyone has something akin to an OCD, even if it doesn’t meet Dr Pemberton’s professional standards.

It would be distasteful to describe the basis of Judaeo-Christian worship as a form of OCD. (Do that, and before you know it cinemas will be banning harmlessly prayerful advertisements.) Yet what is it, at root, if not one gigantic Pascal’s wager using the repetition of ritual in the hope of placating the fates? Almost everyone, devout and godless, has a curious superstition and one bizarre phobia. My own morbid dread of the number 8, for example, is surprisingly common (“octophobia”: look it up). A colleague reports living in mortal dread of 11, which is not. How anyone ever wins a game of bingo is beyond me.

And even the Daily Mail, while deriding the claims of others, has what looks suspiciously like a minor OCD. Its first sniffy reference to obsessive compulsive disorder as “the latest trendy celebrity affliction”, rigorous research establishes, was in October 2009. This is either a spectacularly tenacious “latest trend”, or else the need to make a ritual of repetition to ward off the darkness is a central, inalienable part of what it is to be human.

As the wait outside York approached its second hour, Mom muttered something about missing their connection in Newcastle. “Would you mind?” she asked, reaching towards my side of the table. “Be my guest,” I said as she took the pencil and began to tap.