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At the same time as the draw for the 2006 World Cup was announced, another announcement took place - the winner of the awful writing competition. I was the favourite to win, but because the judges used the same voting system as the 2000 U.S. election, the result was a fiddle.

But I've found another competition that I'm almost certain to win. Lee Ann posted about OCD, and as everyone was leaving comments it developed into an OCD competition.

It turns out that virtually every commenter there, including me, has the same symptoms! Lee Ann has stumbled on a new scientific principle, and she has agreed to be a co-author of my next McDonald Institute research monograph - OCD Incidence Amongst Bloggers.

There were only 2 non-OCD commenters, and they were both Scottish. This doesn't surpise me. In Scotland, OCD is almost unknown. They're too busy vomiting and knifing each other.

I can thank my mother's German wartime childhood under an authoritarian father for my own OCD. But I also suffer from retention deficit disorder, which has the opposite symptoms - sufferers don't care about anything and often live in filthy squalor. I can thank my Scots father for passing this on to me. It balances out my OCD, that's why I'm so normal overall.

There's one OCD symptom that I don't have, but my aunt (one of the ringed hands in my last HNT photo) has it in spades. At her house she makes everyone wipe down the hand basin (and the shower) after every use. She inspects the bathroom after you've used it, and there's hell to pay if there's a stray drop of water. Even if I was to go along with this, it would generate its own OCD sub-problem. Think about it: you've finished wiping the basin, and supposing you want to floss your teeth, you don't want to put basin-cloth fingers in your mouth, so you need to wash them first - in the basin! You'd never get out of the bathroom.

So when I visit her, I never shower at her house, as a protest and to avoid friction. Instead I use the local swimming pool showers. And I may buy a packet of wet wipes next time I visit, so I need never wash my hands in the basin either.

I won't bore you with my aunt's rules about using the toilet, but you can imagine why my uncle used to pee in the garden.

I have one extra symptom that Lee Ann doesn't have, and this is going to win me the prize. I store video tapes in order of fullness, so all the full ones are at one end and the blanks at the other end. And the part-empty ones are ranged in the middle, in order of how much blank space is left on them. I'm sure nobody else does that.