I have an undiagnosed medical condition. Let’s call it Tidy Table Syndrome. The symptoms are that while I might be blind to clutter and filth in certain parts of the house, I am borderline obsessed with keeping other parts spotless. There is no borderline when it comes to keeping clutter off the dining-room table. I’m what you might call focussed on that.

It wasn’t always like this. 15 years ago I lived a life of studied scruffiness. Back then I was 28, sharing a house with two friends in Ranelagh.  They were scruffy too. It was 1995, everybody was.

The house wasn’t clean. The oven was so alive it qualified for a medical card. We had three years worth of newspapers in a pile behind the telly that we never got around to throwing out. We had four feet high grass out the back – it was like our house had long hair. That was cool back then too.

Back then, you wanted people to think you lived in a hedge. I wore a suit and drove a company car for a living so that I could spend five pounds on a second hand corduroy jacket that looked like its previous owner had been savaged by wolves. It was my way of not really working in an office, for the man.

One Wednesday night myself and the two housemates strolled down to Birchalls in Ranelagh, where the Guinness was so good we’d often drink five in one hour. Somewhere around pint three, Paul, who had a nose-stud, said “of course, in 15 years time we’ll all be cutting chicken shapes in the hedge out the back of our semi-d in the suburbs.” Boy, did we mock him.

I’m looking out at my own hedge as I write this. It needs a tidy up for the summer; I’m not ruling out a chicken.

Every Irish man goes through this transformation. We’re brought up not to notice clutter. If our mother didn’t clear up after us at home, our sisters were made do it. It was very kind of them to help out and it was funny to see smoke coming out of their ears.

Then we leave home and move in with our friends. That’s a lot of dirty plates in the sink and a new cleaning lady every four months because a woman can only take so much. You’d tidy your bedroom if there was a chance of bringing a girl back, maybe even give it a few rounds of shake n vac if she seemed the fussy type, but that was it.

Then, just when it seemed we band of brothers might live out our days together like pigs in shit, Paul starts thinking about his chicken-shaped hedge. He was married within two years. It was only when he moved out that we realised he had been doing a lot of tidying around the place, on the sly. The place went downhill quick. So we started a bit of tidying ourselves. I started to like it.

Fifteen years later and I have full-blown Tidy Table Syndrome. My wife, a perfectly normal person, will often open the post and put it back down on the kitchen table when she has read it. In an attempt to look sane myself, I’ll say nothing, but the crazy clock is already ticking.

The voices in my head want to know she intends to leave the ESB bill there forever, with the same kind of sarcasm deployed by my father when I was growing up. The poor man. I used to think he needed a chill-pill, but I now realise he suffered from Tidy Table Syndrome and passed it on to me.

The problem with Tidy Table Syndrome is that it’s selective. For instance, I seem to have no problem leaving four pairs of shoes lying around the living room; at least this is what I’ve been told when I point out that the ESB bill has been on the table for over twenty minutes.

When I try tidying away my shoes first she asks if I’m about to complain about the post on the table. This is tidy-up-argument checkmate. I say that yes I am. She says it’s funny that I can miss a layer of grime on the shower door but still get upset by a letter on a table.

I say it isn’t funny in the slightest because I have a medical condition. At least that gets a laugh. The net result is that I agree to clean the shower if she will only keep her post off the table. She picks up the bill and puts in a drawer. I spend an hour cleaning the shower. That’s one hell of a beating. All because I have a medical condition. Trust me; you’re better off suffering in silence.