Circa 1996

Bink, about ten years ago:

‘One day when I was about eleven, I wrote a list of all the things I had to get done that evening (homework, music practice, brush teeth etc.) and then ticked them off as I did them. Because I found the list useful, I used it again the next day, adding a second column of ticks as I did the things. I kept the list for about ten days, each day ticking the things off, until there was no more room on the page. Then I wrote up a list on my mother’s computer, so that I could print one each day. I used these lists every day for several years, until I was fourteen. I had two separate lists. One was a list of daily tasks, which included sensible things like homework, but also various things that I had to do each night before I went to bed, including: brush teeth, wash face, use loo and set alarm clock. The other list was a set of things that I had to do in the bath (which I had every morning before school, getting up at 6.30 to give myself a good hour or so before leaving the house at 8.15). I had a whole set of rituals that I did in a certain order each time I had a bath, and each of these rituals had to be ticked on the list. They included washing each individual part of my body, as well as: wet hair, put shampoo in hair, rinse hair, check hair. Of course, “wet hair” doesn’t just mean get hair wet; it meats a complicated ritual to make sure that hair is completely wet. “Check hair” involved rubbing the bit of hair in the very middle of my forehead, next to the scalp, between my thumb and finger to hear it squeak (when I was little, my mother told me that clean hair squeaks when you do this). I had to make seven squeaks, and if they weren’t satisfying enough they didn’t count. Then I had to do the same thing with the hair at the nape of my neck. Another thing I had to do was hold my body under the water for a certain length of time (a few minutes); with my face, of course, I dipped it underwater several times and timed how long each dip was. The longest ritual was that I had to sit in a certain position in the bath for fifteen minutes. The point of this ritual was to clean my anus, and the special position was intended to make my legs be spread as wide as possible. There was a difficult ritual to get into the right position, which I then held for fifteen minutes. As well as this, I spent a long time each morning cleaning out the inside of my vagina (they never tell you useful things in those school sex education lessons, such as that it’s a bad idea to wash inside yourself). I saw my genitals as by far the dirtiest part of the body, which I think was because of being bullied in a sexual way at primary school, and I was very anxious about getting them completely clean. In fact, genitals were not just a particularly dirty part of the body; they were actually in the category of “dirty objects”, such as poo…’

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