Scorpions by Tuppence Middleton: I have to take photos of my taps before I leave the house...

Here’s part of actress Tuppence Middleton’s daily routine before leaving the house: Stand facing the cooker. Observe the four hob buttons for any sign of misalignment. Touch each button with your right hand, while saying the number of the button aloud. Move from left to right, counting one, two, three, four. Repeat backwards from right to left.

Now repeat the action from left to right, but this time count from one to eight on each button before moving to the next. Repeat backwards from left to right. Begin the whole ritual again, starting from right to left.

That’s just the start. The routine goes through more stages of counting from one to eight four times, before the final instruction: ‘Take four photographs of the cooker from different angles for visual reassurance during the day.’

Her phone, she tells us, is full of old photographs of fully switched-off gas rings and bathroom taps.

Only by going through long-drawn-out counting rituals of checking things are switched off can she appease the ‘scorpions’ that live inside her head, thus preventing terrible things from happening to her family.

And if anyone interrupts the ritual halfway through, she has to start the whole thing again.

Many of us like to say, ‘I’m a bit OCD’, about the way we wipe our surfaces or wash our hands after using public transport. But reading Tuppence Middleton’s unflinching memoir about what it’s really like to live with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder puts those minor tics in perspective.

It’s hell, a kind of madness, and it has almost ruined her life. She warns the reader at the beginning of this book that it ‘contains descriptions of compulsive rituals which those with the condition could find distressing or disrupting to their own recovery, should they be vulnerable to adopting the compulsions of others.’ Be warned.

It all started in her teens, when she developed an abject fear of vomiting, after a four-day sick-bug. She started feeling nauseous on the way to school but not actually being sick, and had to take time out of school.

It was then that the ‘scorpions’ started taking up residence inside her brain: the ‘guardians of my mind’, as she calls them, dictating what she had to do to keep her family safe.

She developed a compulsory ritual before going to bed each evening, involving checking, or ‘baptising’, all four corners of her bedroom ceiling, counting from one to eight for each one, and then doing the same for every other rectangular item in the room: pillows, mirror, poster, television screen, cupboard doors, bed, bookshelf and window.

By doing this, she was preventing her parents from dying and the house from burning down. Her mother found her one evening, embarking on this routine, and took her to the doctor, who said she had OCD.

‘Scorpions’ are the right metaphor to describe this mental horror. Each chapter of Middleton’s gripping memoir begins with a brief description of a property of the scorpion: its curly, stinging tail, or its stubborn resilience.

They’re one of very few species that have survived exposure to nuclear radiation. And it seems that once OCD takes up residence inside your brain, it has a similar indestructible resilience. Your mind becomes a hostage to ‘obsessive intrusive thought cycles’.

Middleton developed, and still has, a particular terror about vomit. She distinguishes the two kinds of vomit: the ‘good’ non-contagious kind, and the ‘bad’ kind containing germs. ‘To me,’ she writes, ‘it is entirely dumbfounding that other people do not spend a significant part of each day analysing or fretting about the various ways in which anyone or everyone could be infectiously sick.’

Once, on a plane flying to a filming job, she sat far away from, but in sight of, a passenger who was filling bags with the bad stuff, and it terrified her so much that she couldn’t sleep that night.

If she’s like this on a normal day, I thought, what on earth was she like during the Covid pandemic?

Actually, to my surprise (and hers), the isolation of the pandemic had the miraculous effect of making her less, rather than more, obsessive-compulsive. Her partner, the Swedish film director Mans Marlind, was in another country at the time, so it was just Middleton and her cat alone in their flat.

And Middleton felt an amazing sense of calm. ‘The world suddenly aligned with my experience of the everyday. All of a sudden, everyone was washing their hands properly. Hallelujah!’

Had the scorpions gone away for good? No. As soon as the virus diminished, she heard ‘the tap-tap of tiny feet returning diligently back to their nest’. She tried cognitive behavioural therapy, which didn’t work.

But then she started taking SSRIs – selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors – and they did gradually diminish the power of the vile ‘little critters’. Now she sometimes goes for weeks on end without them; but then there’ll be ‘a lone scorpion stuck in the outer reaches of my mind, leading all the others to the same place until the pressure builds up.’

One day, after she’d given birth to her baby daughter in 2022, her partner mentioned that she’d forgotten to check and re-check the door when they’d left the house. This was unheard of.

But then her daughter was sick (the illness kind of sick) all over her in aisle 23 of Sainsbury’s, and Middleton rushed to the lavatories in horror, ‘fingers spread like they’re coated in Novichok’.

In the wake of this traumatic incident, she set up her own ‘personal hygiene lab’ at home, keeping a box containing extra-strong rubber gloves, 100 face masks and six bottles of bleach.

It’s the domestic details, and the itemising, that make this such a lively and sometimes comic read. But it wasn’t at all funny for Middleton. ‘It’s a bitter pill to swallow, admitting the shame of letting a disorder hijack your ability to care for your sick child.’

Now she’s worried about passing the condition on to her daughter. ‘Will those same scorpions one day, when I am distracted or elsewhere, move to set up home inside her own unspoiled mind? Perhaps they already have.’

Don’t miss Tuppence on Bryony Gordon’s The Life Of Bryony podcast on Monday.