At the age of 14 or 15, I won the poetry prize at school, much to my surprise. We’d been asked to write a response to the famine in Sudan (or possibly Ethiopia) and I was completely at a loss.

My father gave me an article to read about it. The journalist had been having a cup of coffee, when he was surrounded by hundreds of starving refugees from the countryside. He didn’t know what to do; he couldn’t share his complimentary roll[1] with all of them. Dad suggested I base it on this and link it to the feeding of the 5,000[2]. This was clearly a good idea, although I was too ignorant to pick up on all the cultural associations such a tale might have.

I still had no idea how to go about it. In the end, I just baldly stated the story, ending with the narrator questioning himself: “how can I share one roll amongst so many?” Something like that. I wanted to cap it off with some sort of pithy epigram, but Dad suggested I left it there, the unanswerable question hanging in the air, with all the biblical resonances echoing into the silence.

They loved it. A couple of teachers even came up and congratulated me. This was Ireland in the 1980s and I went to a religious school, so they were overly respectful of poets and at least partially bible-literate.

Then, to my even greater astonishment, I won an all-Ireland under 18s poetry competition! It didn’t feel quite real or right. I couldn’t see why I deserved it. My work wasn’t that good. Sure, I wrote quite a lot, and these, at least, were entirely my own creations, but I didn’t apply myself with much diligence. I was revising my work more, but all I did was substitute one word for another. I kept a blind grip on form and diction and images I liked, even if they no longer worked; I didn’t explore. I didn’t experiment or try to take a different perspective or say something original. I just expressed myself in the same way I always did. It was all too easy.

I was puzzled, but I thought, “I’m not sure how I’m doing it, but I appear to be able to write poetry, so that’s my future sorted out: I’m going to be a poet. Now I can get on with thinking about girls.” I was never more ambitious than that. While my friends agonised over choices and futures and celebrated youth’s endless possibilities, I wandered around with a pacific smile and a vacant brain, occasionally dashing off a quick piece of doggerel about love, crucially, fatally, assuming I’d acquire the skills just by living; that I didn’t need to do an apprenticeship in the art. In other words, I was bloody lazy.

For years, I occupied myself with falling in love, being rejected and being an unrequited lover, but beneath all this, my identity was that of a poet. I was a poet falling in love, a poet being rejected, an unrequited poet-lover. I rattled off a lot of tedious, unreadable free verse about my feelings, entered a few poetry competitions, sent a few poems off to magazines, And, of course, nothing came of it. It’s much easier to show promise as a teenager than to actually deliver as an adult, especially if you’re a shallow, immature and self-absorbed adult.

After a few years, it dawned on me that I ought to take the craft a little more seriously, rather than relying entirely on sincerity and direct address as my only poetic gifts. I needed to work at it. Work – that’s the thing. The difference between a concert pianist and an amateur is 10,000 hours of practice, as the wise saying goes.

And now there was an urgency to it. I’d squandered my early years when my mind was pliant and adaptable and could grow its own poetic abilities. My time was limited.

Work.

I needed to get on with it.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Famine doesn’t directly affect the affluent. Pricey hotels still serve breakfast to the press corps, while the poor die in their doorways. You know this.

[2] The Bible, you ignorant gits: Matthew 14, 13-21!

This isn’t a rebuttal of Philip Larkin’s This be the Verse (see my previous post), it’s a meditation on that theme.:

Aged 7

                        You grip the rope with fists

and thighs. I pull you back,

high, high, then let you go.

You swing and spin wildly out over the stones

and logs, laughing, reckless. I cringe,

imagining greenstick fractures,

hangman’s fractures,

clutching your body.

 

But the knot seems tight

and you love it and what are the chances? And,

I think, this is what I’m supposed to give you.

 

So, once again, I pull you back,

then let you go.

 

Given the subject of my last post, it was inevitable that I’d have to quote Phillip Larkin. Sorry:

(1)“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extras just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats

Man hands on misery to man
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can
And don’t have any kids yourself.”

I wrote this entirely from memory. I hope it’s correct.

Anyway, back to work: I had given up my job as an English teacher at an FE college. The work-load and the commute were unsustainable. I’d been leaving the house before 6am, and coming home as late as 11.30. I’d spend all weekend preparing lessons and lectures, and marking. Jo’s job was terribly demanding, but she was virtually a single parent. She was getting both our small children up every morning, getting them ready for nursery, dropping them off, picking them up, feeding them, entertaining them. Then, in any snatched moments, she was dashing off reports. She even had to help me at the weekends. (My natural inefficiency and lack of resourcefulness were made worse by exhaustion.)

A week in a busy secondary had shown me that I was never going to make it as a school teacher, either. I stayed as an LSA on around £10K a year. I justified this by agreeing with Jo that I would take on more of the parenting and house work so that she could concentrate on doing her job well. I’d forced, or at least manoeuvred, Jo into a career by my failure to have one. Somebody’s got to take responsibility for keeping the family’s heads above water, financially. That role fell to Jo.

So I hope I haven’t given the impression that Jo is a careerist witch thirsting for advancement. Actually, she’s very laid-back, being happiest lying in a hammock, in a garden, in a sunhat, reading a book, while various children (hers, other people’s) race around. She’s much better at chilling than I am. She’s just cursed with being more capable than many of her peers, and better able to focus on her goals and carry through projects with determination, drive and industry. But she does it because she wants things to be done right, to help others. She’s a nurturer.

Meanwhile I was left with the parenting, a job Jo does brilliantly, because it’s her real vocation, but which I felt I had no aptitude for, no natural inclination towards, no idea of how to go about. I was terrified I’d fuck it up.

I told myself I’d just have to work really hard at it, but this was daunting. While it would be immensely rewarding, I’m a lazy little shite who works so he can reap the rewards of stopping, and there seemed to be no end to these new tasks: there were no holidays, and the shifts were literally endless, apart from a few snatched moments of sleep. It felt like being asked to hold your breath for the rest of your life.

When the children were at their youngest and most vulnerable, I was completely bewildered by them. I had no idea, from moment to moment, what I was supposed to do. I spent a lot of time simply being in attendance while they engaged furiously with this new business of existing.

It turns out this is kind of the right thing to do, but I didn’t know this. I was too terrified to read all the parenting manuals Jo absorbed. Why, I thought, subject yourself to the terrors of parenting in advance? And I can’t understand anything unless it’s written as a unified, coherent story. Bullet points, lists of instructions or advice: anything broken up into many brief, separate parts, is instantly forgotten. I can’t comprehend its flickering confusion. Jo says it’s my dyslexia.

I found that if Jo was in the house, I could be a (relatively) relaxed and flexible parent, even if she was upstairs asleep. I knew I could call on her to tell me what to do, or for back-up or to take over. But the minute she left the house, I lost my nerve. Not only their psychological well-being, but their very survival was now solely my responsibility, yet I couldn’t see why I had any authority over them. What the hell did I know? What gave me the right to decide when we had for lunch or what we ate, or when we went home from the park? Sure, even I would make the more sensible decisions, given their total ignorance of the world, but why should, or would, they do what I say? And how could I enforce my diktats? once again, I felt fraudulent.

I feared that I would lose control and I feared the consequences of losing control, that Jo would come home to find one of the children had died or been abducted by murderous paedophiles. This made me overly fierce and inflexible and domineering. Only a little, but enough to slightly damage our relationship.

All these feelings were terrible secrets that must be kept hidden, or they would seriously mess the children up. It’s probably impossible not to screw your children up, a little. All psyches are damaged. I’m sure some of my more unhelpful attitudes and experiences were inherited from my parents.

The duty of parents, therefore, is to try and minimise their negative impacts and maximise their positive. I hope my love for Meggie and Dan comes through in these posts. I have never doubted that, nor that I love them more than anything else, but It would not be helpful for their sense of self-worth if they were aware of the confusion and ambivalence with which I greeted their birth and infanthood (I wasn’t aware of it myself), or my fear that I might not have the capacity to love, or the ability to look after, them as much as they deserved or as much as other people could. We could dismiss this as another example of my foolish self-doubt, but it would rattle their foundations all the same.

And Jo would be FURIOUS.

And the confusion goes on. Most people are still the most lovely, sweet and supportive love-bundles. Others, apparently, continue to Corona-shame each other for buying non-essential items. Of course, this is an entirely subjective definition, but some chief of police was threatening to stop and search people’s shopping to check they’d only got essentials! (I wonder what sort of racial or class profiling this would involve?)

I think this stems from a conflation of the Government’s advice to only make “essential trips” and “Only buy what you need” They mean don’t over-buy or stockpile, but you can see the problem with combining those messages. In fact, it is perceived essentials that run out if people stock-pile so, if I want to live entirely off caviar, and I can afford it, I should be encouraged. It reduces pressure on supermarket stocks and it keeps the fish-farmers in business. In other words, the government should be saying, “Shop flexibly – save lives”.

Police are saying that some people are using Corona-shaming to settle old scores, and are advising people to “only report well-meaning concerns.” They admit, however, that most unnecessary calls “stemmed from over-zealousness, rather than attempts to deliberately misinform the police” (according to the Observer, 19/04/20).

This seems very forgiving of the curtain-twitchers. I can’t easily imagine scenarios where informing on your neighbours is kind and caring. It seems much more likely to be driven by malice and a desire to persecute. Presumably you are doing this behind their backs; presumably they are doing something that would, in normal times, be perfectly innocent, and which they have judged to be safe and acceptable.

Maybe getting the police to take your neighbours aside and have a quick word is more tactful than getting into a slanging match yourself and ruining your relationship. Such judge-y snitching just seems nasty to me, though, and it is a sad thing if this has become necessary.

Meanwhile, a head teacher on twitter has said that 0.2% of people between the ages of 10 and 18 who test positive for the Corona-virus have died, and that a 1 in 500 death rate is too high a price to pay for opening the schools again. “What if it was your child?”, the twitterarchy ask. “One child death is too many”, they cry. Fair point. My work-place has over 2000 kids. Four of them would die, if we reopened with those odds. These would be kids I know whose parents trusted us to look after them.

HOWEVER, at the point of writing, the NHS only had enough tests to give to people who were in hospital with Corona Virus symptoms, so the real statistic is 1 in 500 people who were so severely ill that they were rushed to hospital with suspected Corona virus, and then tested positive for it, have died. Alternatively you could say, “of the small minority of teenagers who become severely ill, 499 out of 500 have survived.” That’s a much, much smaller risk. And this is one of the leaders of education in our country, tasked with driving back the shadows of ignorance and prejudice.

Finally, there’s the fire-bombing of 5G towers. The attacks are illogical, atavistic, and demonstrate a complete ignorance of how viruses or the immune system work. I suspect they are caused by a generalised suspicion of digital technology, because it’s inexplicable, combined with a resistance to government surveillance. This is reinforced by the involvement of China’s Huawei in setting up the network. Huawei is the technological arm of an oppressive police state whose interests are often in opposition to our own and, we suspect, could engage in cyber-warfare against us. These vague feelings and hazy conceptions, along with the fact that China is the source of the virus, have coalesced into an emotional, irrational hostility to the towers.

What’s more surprising is Eamonn Holmes asking why the “mainstream media” were so quick to dismiss the link between 5G towers and the Corona Virus. He suggested they were doing this because “it didn’t fit with the official narrative”. He said he was asking these questions as someone “with an enquiring mind”. I was gob-smacked. Mr Holmes’s “enquiring mind” hadn’t led him to question the definition of “mainstream media”. Who coined the term and for what reason? Is he saying any reasonable, analytical and well researched news story should be viewed with suspicion BECAUSE it chimes with what we know about the world and this socio-political situation? Does he view it as part of some vast conspiracy of the sane, specifically BECAUSE it agrees with other similar stories on similar reputable news platforms? Is he suggesting any weird, paranoid fantasy must be treated as fact BECAUSE it’s not supported by anyone else?

And what is he implying by “Official narrative”? Is there a hidden, more true, “un-official narrative”? Is it more to be trusted because it’s unofficial and unverifiable? Why does he give that more credence? I’m sure many individuals in many governments are willing to lie like fury to shift the blame, but how would it benefit any government to lie about the causes and spread of a pandemic, thus causing more deaths, unless their aim was simply to kill us all?

Of course, most people are acting with good-sense and kindness and blah blah blah, but that’s much less fun to write about, and, anyway, it’s the madness that makes me feel small, powerless and vulnerable. The nonsense seems so powerful, so loudly clamorous, so widely believed, that it seems about to sweep away all controls, all sense, and the world is about to descend into a hideous, Breughel-esque nightmare with hordes of violent, gibbering madmen, the popular majority, spreading out across the landscape destroying everything I value.

Therefore I cling to my comfort rituals, my certainties. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”.

The point being, I’m probably running a bit too much again.

The Covid 19 epidemic threatens in two ways. Firstly, a vast plague is sweeping the globe and nobody seems able to stop it – not governments or international organisations, so there seems no way for me to ensure my safety or that of people I care about.

Secondly, there’s the reaction of other people, which seems blind, irrational, and violently emotional.

I first noticed this tendency years and years ago, watching the funeral of Princess Diana. She was a tragic and badly treated figure. We were all very familiar with her and liked her, and her death was a shock, but the howling, animal misery of the crowd over the death of a woman they didn’t know terrified me. I think if somebody had been presented to them, then, as the cause of her death, they’d not only have torn them to pieces, they’d have eaten the corpse.

Now people are wearing plastic visors, like welding masks, and surgical gloves to go shopping. Many are bleaching all the packets when they get home. This would be fine, if they simply didn’t want to get sick or give the virus to other people who might get sick, or even die. It’s also not a mad precaution to avoid the slim chance of dying yourself – a bit OCD and probably futile, but, hey: each to their own…

But some seem genuinely terrified of dying, as if it was imminent and highly likely. Others seem to have a generalised anxiety that, if they don’t keep to the rules, somehow civilisation will come to an end.

So seeing somebody in full HAZMAT gear reaching for the last packet of sugar is profoundly disturbing because either they are right to take such precautions, in which case I should be very frightened of the virus, or they’re crazy, in which case I should be very frightened of them. And I wanted that sugar!

And, rather than being the beliefs and behaviours of quiet, individual eccentrics, these attitudes are held by huge, shouting crowds of people, on-line, who mercilessly persecute anyone who is singled out as having stepped out of line, their blood-lust given energy and legitimacy by each other, and by the idea that they are performing a public service, given that the rules aren’t enforceable by law. They are doing it for the good of their community, because PEOPLE COULD DIE!

I think a lot of these people aren’t so scared. They just want to do the right thing by self-isolating, but now they’re bored, mean-spirited and misanthropic, and they like persecuting each other. It’s fun.

And they all drive to Tesco’s, even though thousands of people die in car accidents each year. They all accept these background risks because they’re used to them and because, ultimately, that’s what they are: risks, not culpable homicides.

They’d point out that we now have to add the risk of death by Corona-virus to the pre-existing risk of death by car, making life even more hazardous. That’s true, but I still don’t see that a tipping point into mass hysteria needs to be reached. Wouldn’t it not be better to extend the stoicism that has served us so well in facing car deaths to our response to the Covid 19? Would it not be better to enforce and fund a humane and comfortable isolation of the vulnerable and let everyone else carry on?

We respond to our disenfranchisement in different ways. We are very possessive of our charges. Each of us wants to be the expert, the one who has a special relationship with the child, who knows how to manage them, what their limitations are and how to get around them. It’s always disappointing to realise that other LSAs, who support the same learner in other lessons, feel exactly the same.

For example, I like working with students who have autism or Asperger’s syndrome. It tends to be the most capable who end up in mainstream schools. I have quite a lot of experience with them, and feel I can tune in to their scatter-brained mental busyness, and their need for linear simplicity and calm.

And so do all my colleagues.

We admire, support and sympathise with our teachers, but some of us pick up on any mishandling of a child, any failure to differentiate lessons adequately, with a sort of sympathetic, forgiving relish. It allows us to think we know better, at least in this small area. This is comforting, but, deep down, we’re not convinced by our own expertise.

And we’re such cuddle-bunnies! Whenever a tearful year 7 appears at the door, they almost disappear under a scrum of LSAs desperate to sort them out. We virtually elbow each other out of the way, shouting, “Me! Me! Oh, please let ME be the one to look after you!”

We get 2 free periods a week to do our paperwork and plan with our teachers. A lot of my co-workers use this time to create materials and learning activities, worksheets to simplify the tasks the teachers have set the students.

I hate having free periods. The few bits of paperwork I need to complete terrify me because I’m invariably behind with them, but if I sit down to write some of these worksheets, I am frozen by the sheer futility of it. When will these actually be used? How much impact will they have on the learning of my challenged kid? Will they retain any of it? Will the teacher think I’m trying to do her job for her, sort of photobombing her delivery of learning experiences?

Then I think I should try to do or create something more infrastructural, but what? With what authority? I feel nonplussed and useless, so I busy myself making revision sheets (“12 things to say about Macbeth in your exam”) that I know the students will never look at because SEN children are specifically those who find it difficult to work at home, independently, or from worksheets. But at least I feel like I’m doing something.

Luckily we are a large department and someone is always off sick, so there is a lot of cover. I leap up eagerly to volunteer for any classes available and hurry away from this sense of inadequacy. And if there’s any paperwork I’ve failed to do, I can say, indignantly, “Planning sheets!? Reports?! And when would I have time for those, with all this cover?!”

So, work didn’t cause my anorexia, but I think the sense of insignificance was an ingredient in a poisonous brew. I think, once I’d started developing odd eating and exercise habits, this environment gave me incentives to continue. Anorexia gave me purpose and structure and achievable goals in a work life that seemed to lack them. I could occupy myself cultivating my disease, planning restrictions on my eating, planning and looking forward to my next meal, working little bits of exercise, little strenuous asides, into my day, to compensate for perceived excesses in my eating. I could tell myself I was working hard overcoming the obstacles I had placed in my way in the first place, chief among which was exhaustion and hunger.

Anorexia made it far more difficult to be resourceful and think of productive things to do at work, but by then I didn’t need to: it was a terrible struggle simply making it through the day. I could congratulate myself on not collapsing. At my worst, I couldn’t stand still in a lesson because if I did, I’d instantly fall asleep on my feet (or pass out.) My legs would buckle under me, which would wake me as I went down and I could jerk myself upright, again. It was an achievement making it to the end of the lesson, even though the problem was entirely self-inflicted. Even now, I’m perversely proud that I never missed a single day’s work because of my eating disorder, until the moment I was hospitalised.

So perhaps I viewed anorexia as my job. Your job is an essential part of your identity: “This is Jo, she’s the co-director of a large institution, and this is her husband, Xan. He’s anorexic.”

When I first admitted to a few of my colleagues that I was being treated for anorexia and was taking Sertraline, I discovered some of them were on the very same, or similar, medication for a variety of nervous complaints, especially older people who’d been in the department for a long time.

This is probably just the wear and tear of being alive: over time you get worn down, psychologically frayed: my colleague’s son fell off his bicycle and suffered a life-changing head trauma at the same time as she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She found God, Sertraline and unreasonable irritation with her work-mates almost simultaneously. Another colleague died, abruptly, of pancreatic cancer, in her 50s.

Or maybe it’s the exact opposite. Maybe if you have a relatively easy life, with washing machines, the NHS and little fear of war or famine, the worry part of your brain turns inwards, starts to eat itself. You worry about climate change, you fear some unknown future existential threat; you worry about your identity and place in society, about how unfamiliar the world has become. You worry about worrying all the time.

Another possibility, though, is that some parts of our psyches aren’t nourished by our job, that our sense of self-worth may be eroded by spending all our days as the supporting act, never coming into our own, always the bridesmaid. Is it significant that many of us are 2nd income house-spouses earning pin-money and reliant on our partner’s better salary to survive? You can’t live on an LSA’s salary alone.

I know I’m making spurious, unproven connections, but think about it: we deal all day with children who are trying to overcome profound barriers to their learning, yet we have little formal pedagogical training or authority. We’re at sea in that easy, jargon-littered language teachers use to reinforce their solidarity and sense of professionalism. We hover at the edge of their conversations while they say things like, “Take the PPGs, and I mean those with CAT scores in the normal range: when you look at their Progress 8s – well I don’t need to tell you!” (Actually, you do need to tell me!)

(I need to say, here, that almost all the teaching staff at our school is very appreciative and supportive of what we do, but their kind expressions aren’t reassurance enough. In my case, I think they’re just saying it to be nice, but then, the other LSAs work much harder than me.)

Learning support assistants comfort children in psychological and emotional crisis, yet are not therapists and have no formal psychological qualifications. Some of our students are severely disadvantaged at home by poverty, or abuse or narcotic-dependency or social and mental inadequacy, or simply neglect, sometimes all five. They are distracted by these troubles yet we must help them learn without having any social-service role. In each of these areas we must defer to the experts, pass our concerns on to them and walk away, because our amateurish interventions could do actual harm. Then, because of the student’s right to confidentiality, we will hear nothing more about it. We are excluded.

The kids don’t recognise us as figures of authority, either. It is very difficult for us to curb bad behaviour. In class, you need to tell on (of?) them to the teacher to get them to stop, in which case they feel you’ve betrayed them. In the school yard, it’s even more problematic. Often they will get themselves into hideous trouble because they forget that the LSA is a member of staff with a duty of care to them and to the school. You’ll be standing right in front of them while they jovially set fire to their friend’s PE kit, or rip the branches off the one surviving cherry tree.

And students are very vulnerable. Their new, unfinished senses of self are very fragile. They crave attention because they need their existence to be recognised, but they’re easily damaged, easily crushed. It makes them terribly risk-averse, socially, and desperate not to be singled out, desperate to find protection, comfort and belonging in the tribe, even if the tribe is on its final warning and is still smoking weed behind the shipping container where they keep the cricket nets.

Teachers and LSAs have to be so careful of these kids, even when they are being horrible and ruining lessons. Parents are acutely aware of their children’s vulnerability and are desperately anxious for them to do well. They know how momentous and how singular this educational opportunity is. Each successive generation squanders that opportunity when they are teenagers. We only realise when we’re older that we’ll never have such a facility for learning again, combined with the time and lack of responsibility. So, every morning
parents deliver their precious children into the school’s care, tormented by the knowledge of how unprotected they are. They entrust the school with their education and their physical and mental well-being. Our sense of responsibility is enormous. Yet LSAs are hampered in the extent they can effectively respond to the challenge.

In fact, some studies have found that children make LESS progress if supported by an LSA! This seems to be specifically in cases where the teacher leaves the instruction of a difficult child to an LSA with little subject expertise. Unsurprisingly, the conclusion of these studies is that children with special educational needs learn best when TAUGHT by a TEACHER. LSAs must support the teacher, not substitute for them.

Is it any wonder, then, if we begin to feel a little ineffectual? A little insubstantial? So easily replaceable that we already seem to be fading away…

The corona virus is another example of an overwhelming catastrophe that makes us all feel small and powerless and unsure what to do for the best, exactly the circumstances that led to my previous lapses or relapses: Climate change, the responsibilities of working in a school, Brexit, etc. My comforting rituals rear up again, even though, or because, I’m not concentrating on them. For example, the threat of being locked in my house all day has led to me lengthening my morning run, “just in case”.

The behaviours assert themselves gently, so it takes a while to realise that you’ve started doing them again, and then that you’re doing them more and more slavishly. You can only guess at their causes, because the decisions to run a bit further, for example, sell themselves as unimportant and unthreatening whims, not worth thinking about, something you could take or leave as you wanted.

I don’t intend to lose weight, just as I never intended to develop anorexia, although the diagnosis has become part of my identity. Behaviours I indulged in for other reasons had weight loss as a side effect. Weight loss was the price I paid for other benefits.

Now, exercising is a form of self-control, and thus self-comforting, in the face of an uncontrollable crisis. But, of course, losing weight could be an “undesirable” side effect, and, because it’s unitary, it’s a good way of measuring my success.

When you think about your illness, the negative effects of the condition are so glaringly obvious, they eclipse those benefits (of thinking about what you eat, of exercise, of having something absorbing to busy yourself with, to distract you from the helpless terror.) It therefore seems wholly nonsensical that you should pursue such a self-destructive goal. It almost makes more sense to say anorexia has a mind of its own (mankind’s favourite strategy when faced with the inexplicable) and to ascribe to it malign intentions.

In fact, its survival is predicated on deeper habitudes. The true purposes of our restricting or our exercising are more deep seated than the superficial demands of a specific situation. The mind-set is always there, underneath, so unless we are constantly vigilant, we will return to our habitual activities.

Any new crisis that distracts us will lead to the re-establishment of the behaviours, which we then retrospectively explain to ourselves as the condition trying to reassert itself. It makes more sense to characterise it as a resourceful enemy that will cannibalise any situation and any thought process to survive. It also allows us to excuse ourselves.

This gives us the impression that we are possessed, and need to exorcise the demon. I’m not sure how healthy such an assumption is – to be at war with your own brain seems a recipe for a crisis of identity. We know what we know about anorexia from writing, even though part of that writing only exists in our heads as verbalised, retrospective, and self-justifying narratives of ourselves. What makes writing the most glorious art form is that metaphors, fantasies, lies and objective truth (or its signifiers), all co-exist, side by side, in exactly the same form, words, and thus with exactly the same status. Hence fairy-tales, meta-fiction magic realism and fake news. I know this is prosaic and disappointing but, in this situation, if you want to get better, IF, it’s worth remembering that anorexia isn’t a twisty little beast, satisfying as that image is. It’s just us. Being a bit crap. As humans are.

On the other hand, when your weight drops right down, you do go into an uncontrollable self-fuelling, tailspin. Severe malnourishment causes such alarm and anxiety that you compulsively try to control your world by indulging in your comforting activities, which cause severe malnutrition. I guess the human brain, by its structures, tends to go off the rails in certain pre-determined ways, and the only thing to do at this point is for people to hold you down and feed you up, to forcibly pull you out of the spin.

I’ve just had a phone conversation with Abi, because, she said, the eating disorders team were only meeting face to face with people who were seriously ill, and then they had to wear full protective gear! The eating disorders team! I was amused by the idea of Abi in full Hazmat suit asking, *Wheeze* “And how are you feeling in yourself?” *Wheeze*, like Darth Vader trying to sound compassionate: “Luke,” *Wheeze*, “I am your therapist” *wheeze*. “NOOOOO…”

I was flattered that she didn’t see me as seriously ill. This is a significant sign of improvement. Normally, anorexics would think, “Oh my God! I’m not trying hard enough! They think I’m putting it on! Everyone else is better at being ill than I am!”

However, the Corona Virus outbreak makes me feel bloody silly, wittering on about my trivial shit. It’s humiliating to be so shallow, but I persevere, defiantly. Fuck you, life. Fuck you, other people!

We’re supposed to self-isolate to protect each other. There are full-page ads from the government and NHS in the papers saying,
“Coronavirus
STAY AT HOME TO HELP SAVE LIVES.
Anyone can get it.
Anyone can spread it.
STAY HOME – PROTECT THE NHS – SAVE LIVES”.

We are supposed to sit on our arses, watching box sets and surfing the net all day, for the good of the nation! Now we can finally feel virtuous about it. Social Media has apparently lit up with everyone “calling out” everyone else as selfish and anti-social, evil even, for endangering lives simply by going for a walk, or standing too close to someone else. Revenge of the couch potato! The mob are hunting for victims to lynch to make themselves feel self-righteous, intellectually superior and powerful. And, no doubt, to pass the time while they’re stuck in their homes. They’ve coined the awful, sanctimonious term “covidiot” to define their prey.

To me, these self-appointed martinets seem like the nasty, bullying vigilantes of an oppressive regime, and, no doubt, they’re being hypocritical and breaking the rules themselves, when they feel like it. I want to say, “can’t you just trust people to make sensible decisions for themselves?”

The problem for me is that you probably can’t, and shaming seems to work. People don’t keep slavishly to the rules. We get slack; we cut corners. We need more than reminders, we need to fear the consequences. People say that they are much less likely to break the rules after seeing somebody else get roasted. People who have had house-parties have apologised and haven’t done it again. So this nasty, mean-spirited, behaviour may genuinely save lives. People can congratulate themselves for being ungenerous, disdainful and misanthropic. This may be what is necessary. The horrible people are the good, community-minded people.

I naturally revolt at these restrictions. When I see the queue for the supermarket, each person dutifully two metres behind the next, I want to shout “Oh, for Fuck’s Sake!” and just run through the doorway. (I imagine myself being chased up and down the aisles by security.) When I see other citizens out for a walk and we smilingly give each other a wide berth, I want to shout, “Ooh! look, strangers! Let’s lick them!” and then charge at them, waving my arms and shouting, “Cuddles!”, while they scatter in terror.

I wonder if my parents’ defiantly pro-British stance, in the face of Irish orthodoxy, unconsciously trained me to be socially wayward. They, as Brits living in The Republic, were displaying a deeply conservative loyalty to their roots. But I was born and raised in Ireland. So, ironically, they were training me to have a contrarian and resistant way of thinking.

Then, again, I haven’t given in to the urges to shoulder barge the supermarket entrance, so probably everyone feels this way, but hides it. Still, they seem to know that it’s wrong and so they have the strength to restrain themselves with good humour.

It doesn’t feel wrong to me, so I know I’m going to bend the rules as much as I can, when no-one’s looking, but lack the courage to admit it. And I’ll be petulant when I can’t. I know I’m going to try to find reasons for it, and rant at Jo about them, then feel humiliated when she puts me straight.

It would help if I was sure that the lock-down was the right thing to do, but even the scientists aren’t sure. It would help if I could see the immediate consequences of my good or bad behaviour, but, of course, it’s all theoretical. No one drops dead in front of you if you go for an extra trip to the shops; no one recovers dramatically directly because you stayed in bed.

Meanwhile, the papers are full of heartening stories of everyone pulling together to help each other. The Queen has made an address to the nation full of phrases like “common British decency” and “plain good sense”. This platitudinous, self-congratulatory nonsense really puts my hackles up, partly because it shames me. I don’t recognise this society of good-natured, caring philanthropists, and I’m certainly not part of it, if it exists. I really want to, but I can’t see a way of to get involved to help my neighbours. Nobody seems to need me.

So, I’m left with the sense that everybody is coping with this far better than me. They are much more caring, socially responsible, good citizens. Over the years I’ve taken far more from the NHS, with my anorexia and my Graves’ Disease, than I’ve ever put back in taxes or effort or any form of support. I am a pariah