The symptoms of eating disorders are astonishingly similar in most sufferers. We display exactly the same thoughts and behaviours at the same stages of our illness, like babies hitting developmental milestones.

While you are still in denial, or if you still think it’s a purely “psychological” condition, a response to formative experiences, this is insulting to your independence. As you come to terms with the biological aspect, the synchronised choreography of our declines makes more sense: we are all the same species and our brains are constructed of the same materials, to the same plan. They starve in the same manner.

How we came to this state seems to have some variation, though. Many, often teenagers, often teenage girls, seem to negate themselves in a demonstrative fury of self-hatred. They actively renounce food as a way of denying the world that has wronged them and made them unhappy.

Not me. I lack their strength, their venom, their diabolical energy. Theirs is a more glorious immolation.[1] Is it really the same condition?

I never even completely skipped a meal. There was always some little scrap to masquerade as food and punctuate the barren wastes of time and hunger. I just, you know, … dieted. As people do. I just made sure I was always in calorie deficit. I gradually dialled up the exercise and dialled down the portion sizes.

But I didn’t want to revert to being a slob.

And I didn’t know how to stop.  (Still don’t.)

Footnotes

[1] A classic symptom of anorexia is comparing yourself unfavourably with the commitment and ferocity of other sufferers.

Chucking out old newspapers I found this:

“Some eating-disorder sufferers – who are already often grappling with feelings of guilt about buying food – have reported that reading stories of panic buying have triggered worries that they must not buy food at all, lest they be taking food away from people who need it more.” [1]

See what a resourceful opportunist anorexia is! You’d think the planetary scale of this pandemic would put our silly troubles in perspective. But, no, Old Scratch can find, in any situation, a chance to promote himself. This quotation contains so many of his familiar tropes: an unflattering comparison to other people; a belief that we are less deserving than they are and thus should consume less and have less of an impact on the world; hence guilt; anxiety caused by perceiving a vast, uncontrollable threat, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, but treated with the same alarm; the attempt to calm that alarm by occupying ourselves with a project that we can control: self-denial; the need for self-sacrifice to mitigate our guilt; an awareness of how small and useless such a contribution would be and thus that it’s more about personal integrity than about saving others; the consequent worry that our desire to sacrifice is actually a form of selfishness; making it all about us. This leads, finally, to a bitter and defeated resignation: “I know I’m a selfish shit. I hate that about myself, too, but that is who I am.”

This would be exactly my reaction if I was still ill/ iller, especially if I was only catering for myself. But I haven’t had these thought at all throughout the lockdown, and for entirely practical reasons: I have to live with my family. It’s my job to feed them and, since my return, to eat with them. After my disgrace, they are highly sensitive to any signs that I am under-eating. They watch me.

In other words, I am locked into a domesticity that won’t allow me to stray. The family, and Abi, have extorted promises from me. They tell me that I show my love for them, and my commitment to my community, by keeping eating. I contribute to the NHS by no longer being a financial burden on them. I sacrifice by not sacrificing.

Much as I’d like to.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard says that Abraham’s great act of faith is that he does not sacrifice himself in the place of the son he loves. Instead of committing suicide to save Isaac, and thus being praised and honoured, he is willing to carry out God’s order to sacrifice the boy, and then return to face the horror and condemnation of his community, especially Sarah’s. He is willing to live with it, not just as a broken old man, reviled and lonely, tormented by ghastly memories, wallowing in it, but as a celebrant of the God-given life, who still praises his lord in gratitude,

if God so wishes it:

“If Abraham had doubted, – then he would have done something else, something great and glorious; … He would have thrust the knife into his own breast. He would have been admired in the world and his name never forgotten; but it is one thing to be admired, another to be a guiding star that saves the anguished.”[2]

At least, that’s what I think he’s saying. I don’t understand Kierkegaard very well, but he appears to be suggesting that there is more honour in living humbly, suffering life’s compromising and belittling indignities, embracing living, than in haughtily renouncing it for a life of self-important, virtuous abstinence, than in suicide, that utter renouncement, so declarative and absolute, so irreversible and uncompromising as to be, simultaneously,  principled and a little cowardly; virtuous and selfish[3].

Footnotes

[1] Bee Wilson What stockpiling during the coronavirus crisis reveals about Britain, The Guardian 3^rd April  2020

[2] Soren Kierkegaard, 2005, Fear and Trembling, London: Penguin, p21

[3] Although this summary seems unfairly prosaic and narrow. Kierkegaard has far more scope, more cosmic profundity.

Why we need to forgive Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings (Dominic Cumberbatch? Benedict Cummings?) is on the back foot. The left is out for his head. I’m no supporter of Mr Cumberbatch, because he was one of the architects of the BREXIT campaign. This is enough, in my opinion, to justify having him shot.

However, I’m uncomfortable with this persecution. It will be a pity if we take him down for something so minor and understandable, especially as his other offenses are rank and smell to heaven. How bad would it look if we rewarded him, with a position in 10 Downing street, for destroying our country’s economy, reputation and relationships with the rest of the world, but dismissed him for spending time with his family?

To have integrity we must be consistent. If we call for the resignation of offenders when they are Conservatives, while calling for tolerance if they are left-wing, we make ourselves look partisan and this undermines the validity of anything we say.

Even if we can’t be accused of hypocrisy, it trivialises us to descend to such Machiavellian strategies. It makes us look like nasty, mean-spirited, curtain-twitchers. It implies that we have no better reasons to object than tribal hostility. We should leave such behaviour to The Daily Telegraph.

On the other hand, given that other public figures, most notably Neil Ferguson, have resigned, it’s galling that Mr Cummibatch was not more apologetic. Some of his excuses were the most unconvincing dog-ate-my-homework efforts. It would be ludicrous to drive a huge hunk of metal at murderous speeds, to check if you were safe to drive a huge hunk of metal at murderous speeds. I don’t believe Mr Cumberdom would be so foolish. It would make as much sense to say “I tested if the gun was loaded by holding it to my head, and pulling the trigger. (And the heads of my wife and child.)”

To offer such flimsy excuses shows a lack of respect for the public, and disdain for the lock-down rules which, as his critics have said, will serve as an example to everyone else. If Mr Cucumber can break the rules, why can’t they? And this would put everyone in danger. Or it may suggest that he thinks the rules shouldn’t apply to the intelligently privileged.

Rules are important: why should you know best? To submit to the collective decision does much more than just reaffirm your membership of the group. It admits that you could be wrong; it accepts the selfhood of other members and thus their existential equality – that they might view your decisions with equal suspicion and submit to collective decisions with equal reluctance, but still be willing to go along with them to maintain the alliance. It confirms the central deal of any collective, which must always be negotiated, will always be a compromise: I’ll look after your interests, if you look after mine.

The problem is that these rules are absolutely unenforceable. How would the police know if this particular person is your designated friend or not? It would be extremely difficult to prove Mr Benedict’s explanations were false. All we can do is try to keep to the rules assiduously ourselves, even when they seem unnecessarily strict, and trust others to do the same.

This is how such slippery figures always weasel their way out of trouble. I suspect the Bullingdon club has always predicated its sense of entitlement on the moral force of its members’ loyalty to each other. It allows them to view themselves as good people. And good people should be in charge. Unfortunately, loyalty to the gang comes before loyalty to the country. This would explain David Cameron’s inexplicable faith in George Osborne as he repeatedly stifled any chances of economic recovery after the 2008 crash. Boris Johnson will support Mr Cummings; The old boy MPs and the privately educated members of the press will support their colleague and ex-colleague, Mr Johnson.

This leaves us with nothing but the moral high ground, and it’s a barren upland, but at least it’s ours. We need to remember that we are not the good guys, a priori, because we were born that way. We’re the good guys because we act and speak morally, based on sound moral principles.

One of those is tolerance and flexibility. We can’t, and have no right to, control other people, so we will have to trust them, as far as possible, to make their own sensible, moral decisions, even if it puts us in peril. Trust is an act of courage and principled socialism.

And credit where credit’s due: Mr Cummings is a wonderful actor, both as Doctor Holmes and as Sherlock Who. I first noticed his skills when he played that reptile in Atonement, years ago. Playing to type, I guess.

Cooking became my domain. We still shared much of the housework, at weekends, and I was never going to be as efficient as Jo. But cooking was satisfying and creative and necessary. Its results were supremely tangible, and you could justify taking some time over it, which Jo didn’t have.

And you would be praised for it! Cooking serves such a primal need that it is always going to be appreciated far more than any other domestic chore and I craved recognition (I don’t know if you’ve noticed.) I wrangled my way into the job, taking advantage of how busy Jo was, then stuck out my elbows and refused to be budged. It made me a provider. Poor Jo was relegated to tasks she probably would rather I’d done, but she didn’t have the time to negotiate.

I come from a generation of men who still feel a tiny bit proud to have made a simple meal. It’s changed now, and hopefully we’ve got over ourselves, but we used to appear in the doorway to announce, “I have made… (pause for drumroll)…A QUICHE!!…(pause for applause)… To which our girlfriends/sisters/mothers would reply, “Yeah? Well, this week I’ve continued to manage a successful logistics company employing 40 people, made 7 family dinners, 5 sets of packed lunches, two cooked lunches, a set of muffins for the office Cake-Friday, and 3 Victoria sponges for the school bake sale, but you won’t catch me BRAGGING ABOUT IT!”[1]

I became very possessive of both the kitchen space and my role, chasing off all challengers for my title, often by being incredibly rude. The last thing I needed was other people muscling in and stealing my only source of usefulness. Especially Jo, back from a hard day’s earning.

As my weight plummeted, I became particularly rigid in my routines and practices, because, like all anorexics, I was stricken by deep anxiety at the thought of losing control. It’s partly because you feel something terrible will happen – all the demons of the abyss will come spilling and howling out of some gaping portal in your walls. It is also because just existing is so exhausting, by this stage. Staying upright demands a supreme effort of will and self-control. If anyone wrests even a small part of that control from you, you fear you’ll just collapse, your strings will be cut; you’ll lose control of everything – your bowels, your words, you’ll sprawl to the floor in a tangle of arachnid-thin limbs and body, shit, snot, tears, a thin puke like whey.

So anyone intruding on my kitchen, especially if they were offering to help, brought with them the threat of their own wayward and uncontrollable will. Driven by alarm, I needed to resist them as fiercely as possible, even to the extent of physical violence[2]. To hell with politeness, this was life and death struggle!

The worst is my sister-in-law. When she comes to visit, she is brutally insistent that she must cook or help to cook, or, at least lay the table. Or do the washing up. I have to employ eye-watering levels of rudeness to get her to back off. She will literally make feints and rushes towards the cooker or cutlery drawer; I have to physically block her line of attack. This is not a metaphor. [3]

Footnotes

[1] At this point, you needed to be careful not to put an arm around her shoulders and say, “You’re right, darling, and we don’t appreciate you enough!” That would be deeply complacent and patronising. She wasn’t asking for appreciation; she was putting you in your place. The gentlemanly thing to do was hurl the quiche into the bin and storm off in a huff. This demonstrated that you took her seriously, was threatened by her agency, had no reply to her, and were far more immature than she was. All of which was sweet of you.

[2] Luckily this would never happen: we are as weak as kittens. Never give an anorexic a gun, though, and then offer to cook them a lovely breakfast in their own kitchen, or offer to serve them…

[3] Last Christmas, as Jo’s family sat around the kitchen table, talking easily, Katherine and I stood, hovering around the edges trying to serve people tea and cheap fizz. I caught her eye. It finally dawned on me that our motivations are identical: we are both just awkward people trying to find a niche.

I’m not claiming to be uniquely troubled or worthy of special levels of pity. I realise these problems afflict all of us. That’s my excuse for whining on and on about myself: that you might see in me a kindred spirit, an exemplar of our common suffering. I’m someone you can compare yourselves to, perhaps identify with, and who might sympathise with you because I’ve felt the same.

Søren Kierkegaard is a fellow traveller, in this regard. (It’s kinship, not equality, of course: he’s the Father of Existentialism; I’m a schmuck.) He hunted through his own experience for philosophical truth, and, although he keeps resolutely to abstractions, in the two short works I’ve read, there’s a clear sense that he’s offering his own experience as an example, that the battle for the soul that he describes is taking place within his own breast.

Kierkegaard recognised that the vivid, living spirit inside you, the brilliant flame of consciousness, is indistinguishable from anguish. To be cognitive, self-aware, is to writhe and shrivel in tongues of fire, of painful memory and inarticulate feeling, but “the possibility of this sickness is man’s advantage over the beast, and it is an advantage which characterises him quite otherwise than the upright posture, for it bespeaks the infinite erectness or loftiness of the spirit.”[1] “Despair is a characteristic of the spirit, is related to the eternal.[2] That’s the price of admission. It is a gift to be grateful for.

“What occupied [Abraham] was not the finely wrought fabric of the imagination, but the shudder of thought” (Soren Kierkegaard, 2005, Fear and Trembling, London: Penguin, p9.)

Kierkegaard also understood the problem of the secret self. In her biography, Philosopher of the Heart: the Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (2019)[3], Clare Carlisle discusses the difficulty the philosopher has expressing his interior truth:

“Religious people have to live conspicuously in the world like everyone else, though they harbour a ‘secret’ that is not willingly concealed, but impossible to express: ‘inwardness is incommensurable with outwardness, and no person, even the most open-hearted, manages to say everything’”[4]

And he used writing for an identical purpose to my own. Ms. Carlisle summarises:

“Writing is inseparable from this effort of self-understanding: it is through words as well as through silence that he brings coherence to the motions of the soul. Yet for Kierkegaard this is always a paradoxical exercise, revealing and concealing at the same time – like telling someone you have a secret that can’t be told. Writing gives his most solitary reflections a public aspect, exhibits the contradiction between his inward and outward life, brings his hiddenness into the open. He evasively offers to the world an image of himself to explain that he cannot be understood… ‘After my death,’ he wrote in his journal that year, ‘no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least information about what has really filled my life’ … When Kierkegaard writes something truly private, he cuts it out of his journal with a knife and throws it on the fire.

            He is consoled by the thought of remaining hidden because he has been so afraid of being seen… Sheer anxiety compounded by high ideals”[5]

That’s pretty prestigious company to keep! All my own concerns are here: the sense of an enlivening despair that anguish and anxiety inspire; writing as a journey of self-discovery; the inability to communicate, to unlock and share the secret self; the solitariness in company, the fear of exposure…

There’s a sense, I think, that the integrity of the self would be compromised and weakened, if it was communicated. I understand that, too: once you have become used to solitary thinking, with a single point of view, you think your whole identity would start to crumble if brought to the attention of others. You’d start to become part of a negotiated, collective identity; You’d be changed; you’d lose yourself. That is a threatening idea, so to ‘keep it in’ becomes to ‘hold it together’[6].

It’s reassuring to realise that I’m not the only person who’s ever been concerned with these issues or thought them worth writing about; it’s humbling to realise how unoriginal and primitive my writing is, in comparison. It’s depressing to realise how dry a subject it can be!

Still, it’s nice to share something with Kierkegaard (not the high ideals, of course!)

Footnotes

[1] Søren Kierkegaard, 2008, The Sickness unto Death, London: Penguin, p11

[2] ibid, p24

[3] Clare Carlisle, 2019, Philosopher of the Heart: the Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard, London: Penguin, pp50-51

[4] the quotation Ms Carlisle uses is from his notebooks

[5] ibid

[6] I know: I’m far too much into Kierkegaard. I’m co-opting his work for my own purposes and it’s terribly presumptuous, but then, not understanding something gives you a lot of scope for interpretation!

Writing this, so many months after the Eating Disorders Clinic, after the dreadful betrayals, the cataclysmic rifts and alienations, the return: being reluctantly allowed back into the house, allowed a second chance; on this long, gently undulating journey of small advances and retreats, rehabilitation and relapse, I realise that I’ve been gradually drawn back into their lives. Although I’m prohibited from doing anything, I’m still involved with them: I’m interested in Jo’s work troubles; I am worried when Meggie argues with her friends; I’m so distressed when Danny’s distressed that I’m virtually wringing my hands.[1] I bear witness. Is this enough?

In a search for narrative structure (and writing always is) will this do as a hopeful ending?

Footnotes

[1] Parenthood is terror and guilt, folks (as I’m always saying)!

The problem with my policy of doing fatherhood, rather than being a father. was that it forced me into direct competition with Jo’s terrifying, unflagging industry. To this day, she strides through the door at around 6.30, kicks off her shoes, drops her smart jacket on the floor, gathers up a child, and whisks them off to talk through their troubles, while she puts a wash on[1].

She’ll also be working on her phone, in snatches, between supervising piano practice, checking homework, arbitrating in sibling disputes. She’s checking and sending emails, talking to colleagues, researching government policy, writing memos… I’m always walking in on the tail end of conversations that go, “To be honest, John, if the government white paper proposes half the measures they’ve been threatening, we’ll have to rewrite the whole capital bid…” She uses the language with ease, now. She says, “If you could get Catherine to action this…” and “The steer from the Home Office is…” I once heard her say, of a presentation, “I think you should tee off…” “TEE OFF”!? Jo’s never played a game of golf in her life![2]

As she does this, she’ll be striding around the kitchen, her phone held uncomfortably between cocked head and raised shoulder, emptying the dish-washer or cleaning the surfaces.

It’s not all hot air, either. Jo and her people devise and implement multi-part strategies, managing and co-ordinating any number of people, to respond to complex and varied problems and thus measurably better the lives, and future prospects, of large sections of society. They are highly effective, and, for all its business speak, their language is also meaningful and effective. It gets things done.

I, on the other hand, am a lazy fucking arsehole. I’ll have been in all day and still not have got the bloody wash on, because I’d been “trying to write” (sitting on my fat arse). If I was following my instincts, I’d lounge around all day in my jim-jams. When people came home from work demanding their tea, I’d say “get it your damn self!” But then, I’m a worthless prick.

Nowadays I know not to try to compete with Jo. I just haunt the background “being” a father. A morose and selfish one, like some inanimate object with “father” properties. If people don’t like it, fuck ‘em. I tried to be useful and it went horribly, horribly wrong, didn’t it?

Footnotes

[1] In fact, as I am writing those very words in the early morning, Jo has got up, immediately put on a wash, and is now scrubbing the bathroom floor!

[2] Notice how gendered such language remains. Golf still seems a very male past-time, so executives are expected to be men, I think.

To be worth something to my family; to do my duty, to compensate for my inability as a father or a teacher or a writer, or an LSA; to be included, I needed to work. For them. I needed domestic achievements to set against Jo’s career and parenting triumphs. I needed to cook, clean, wash the clothes, hang them out, go shopping, feed the rabbit: make myself indispensable.

These were demonstrably, measurably useful targets. They could be ticked off. They could be used to structure and control a life that felt wayward, that seemed to be getting away from me.

We live in a post-religious age, yet Love remains our objective, and family has become its most exalted institution. Tending to our family has become our most elevated purpose, but it is a practice. It begins in practical, physical actions that keeps our children alive: labour, breast-feeding, protection, cuddles. These expand, early on, into doing necessary chores – sweeping floors; chopping onions.

It’s unclear how such earthy roots lead to transcendence. The implication is that somewhere inside the experience, there must be an evolutionary, ontological leap, perhaps the way the brain, a lump of flesh tormented by chemical spasms, projects a mind and identity as a side-effect of its ability to self-monitor: a shimmering, electrical halo.

It was one of life’s inexplicable mysteries, but I hoped that, by tending to these foundational activities, I too would be subsumed into the profound, soulful existence family seemed to offer, despite how foreign it all seemed to me: Per Ardua Ad Astra. While the messiah is preaching, somebody still has to take the bins out, but they, too, are a vital part of his numinous project: salvation by the kitchen door: grace by means of a toilet brush. I could be like Kierkegaard’s Abraham, serving the spiritual by embracing an ignominious, quotidian reality.

But I didn’t really want to do it. I was too selfish, uncaring, lazy. I had to force myself, fiercely, nose to the grindstone. All the time. Without stopping, because the flip side of the doable is that, well, anyone can do it. if I didn’t, Jo would, weeping with the stress of it, but capable, nonetheless. And then where would I be? What would I be? Why..?

And I also needed to hide my reluctance – another secret. Every demand for tea made me swear, inwardly, as I hauled myself up to make it. I had to resist that and be constantly vigilant because it wasn’t just the unceasing effort of parenting and husbandry that was exhausting, but also, ironically, the effort required to hide it. At any moment I was likely to collapse onto the sofa groaning “fuck this!” and never get up again, revealing myself to be exactly the useless scrounger I’d been denying, an illegal immigrant in the land of industry. (I could be sacked. I could be deported!)

It was a paranoid and negative version of the immigrant mentality: the same lack of entitlement, but without the hopeful self-belief.

Making eye-contact is awkward for me. Its intimacy makes my eyes water. Even my closest relationships are conducted with eyes cast down. No doubt this comes from a mixture of temperament and how I was brought up to manage that temperament. My father, especially, is not effusive.

So a family home didn’t feel like my natural environment at first. I’d found myself marooned in an alien landscape full of…people, and I knew I needed to proceed with great caution.

It didn’t occur to me, though, that relationships with my own children, bonding with them, would be so intellectually challenging.  This was because, cleverly, I refused to think about it. When the future frightens me, I just shut down any predictive faculty and let it come on. Why ruin the present by pre-living the ruinous future?

You can’t just do parenting by instinct, though: bear-hugging them when they’re sad so they feel loved; bellowing at them when they are naughty so they learn how to be good. What if they’re sad because they’ve been naughty and you bellowed at them and they think the bellow was an exercise in arbitrary and tyrannical power because they can’t see why it was naughty in the first place, or need to protect their fragile egos, and now they think you are saying they are a bad person and they wonder if maybe they are, or you are, and are you abusive and/or are they worthless and evil, but they’re not properly aware that they feel this way, just that they’re sad and angry with you, so, even though they were the ones who were thoughtless and hurtful, suddenly you’re the bad guy, but they need to be comforted by you but you’re the bad guy, somehow, so how do you go about that, especially as you are sad because they are, and feel terribly guilty, and yet also angry with them for causing such a fuss, and have had no time to process it because this all blew up out of nowhere…?

You have to pick your way carefully through these things. It’s like balancing fiendishly complicated emotional equations, especially as they hit their teenage years.

Even Jo doesn’t always find it easy, but bonding is what she most relishes. Provoked into laying down the law, she’ll then spend hours lying all cuddled up in bed with the tearful child, talking it through. I tiptoe out of the room and leave them to it.

I’m used to it now, but at first, it was both mortifying and a relief to I leave it up to her. I knew I wasn’t throwing myself into parenting, exactly, but I tried to be supportive, accommodating and amiable, and let my relationship with the children go where it would, secure in the knowledge that they’d have Jo to fill in any emotional absence.

That isn’t enough, especially if you’re not the bread-winner. I regretted it; I felt neglectful, a bad parent[1], but I felt so overwhelmed that I didn’t feel capable of any greater engagement. And this made me feel lazy and uncaring.

When the children were small, my reliance on Jo meant that if she was in the house, somewhere, I could parent with (relative) ease. I knew I could call on her if necessary, but the minute she stepped out the door, I became a much stricter, more shouty dad. I worried about losing control, and the dreadful consequences of that.

I hoped I could compensate by being the dogsbody that families require. I could demonstrate my love by doing the necessary chores, running the necessary errands.

• Footnotes

[1] In my mind, I am still about 15. Admit it, you feel the same. Every pregnancy is a teen-pregnancy: how did we end up in this situation?! We’re not ready!

An example of anorexic overthinking:

1. To eat the gorgeously yummy ginger biscuit is to give in to appetite; to indulge. You must resist it to show strength.
2. But not to eat it is not to embrace recovery, to stay in your holt curled up and quivering with fear. It is to give in to anorexia and you must resist that, which is good because it means you get to taste that sweet and lovely gingeryness.
3. But you suspect you are just using the sanctimonious language of wanting to recover as an excuse to get the biscuit, to indulge your sybaritic, luxurious weakness for biscuits, so you should resist the urge to eat biscuits, as a demonstration of strength of character.
4. But that sounds like the treacherous mendacity of the disease whispering insidious un-logic into your ear, so you should resist that and eat the biscuit.
5. Surely you can keep your hands off one little biscuit for five minutes, you spineless shit?! Resist it!
6. Are you mad? It’s one little biscuit. What harm can it do? Eat it, enjoy it, move on.
7. Eat it. Eat it.
8. Don’t eat the biscuit.
9. Eatthebiscuit. Resistthebiscuit.
10. eat resist eat resist.
11. Eatdon’teatdon’t Eatdon’teatdon’t Eatdon’teatdon’t.
12. biscuitbiscuit biscuitbiscuit biscuitbiscuit biscuitbiscuit
13. Bisbisbisbisbis bisbisbisbisbis bisbisbisbisbis
14. Bisbisbisbisbis bisbisbisbisbis bisbisbisbisbis bisbisbisbisbis bisbisbisbisbis
15. Bis bis.

Coda:

I’ve got it! I’ll have half the biscuit! (Let’s avoid the word “eat”.)

Or a quarter.

 

Or an eighth.