I don’t like sleeping because my brain doesn’t like to turn off. It fears the blankness.

I don’t like sleeping because it makes me vulnerable. I’m off my guard.

I don’t like sleeping because it makes me feel refreshed and I don’t like to feel good. Perhaps I don’t deserve to, after all the damage I’ve done. Perhaps it would invalidate my struggles and excuses, if, even temporarily, the illness could be so easily shrugged off.

We’re forbidden to get up until 6.30, at Ascot House, but for weeks, when I first arrived here, I was waking before 4a.m., clambering out of dark and ruined wells of sleep, my heart drumming. I don’t know why this was happening. It seemed to proceed from a nasty, dreamless somnolence that felt like black and stagnant water, but wasn’t.

I share a room with the only other male patient, and don’t want to wake him, especially as I get up to pee five times a night. This presumably disturbs him, although he never says anything. (He’s incredibly long suffering.) I’d stare into the dark while the panic receded, trying to breathe quietly. When I couldn’t control my fidgeting (or bladder) any longer, I’d creep into the bathroom and read.

We don’t sleep very well, do we? Often, we barely dip below the surface in short, shallow glides, before resurfacing abruptly. Our alarmed and starving bodies are constantly jolting us awake, I think, to drive us to find food. I’ve discovered from the nutritionist, here, that adults use around 1200 – 1500 calories simply running their bodies’ basic functions. We could starve to death in our sleep, like unsuccessful, hibernating bears.

At home, I used to wake up at some god-awful hour and hold myself in wakefulness. I’d convince myself that, as I was wide awake, it was a pity to waste the time. I could go for my run now, and free up the rest of the day. In winter, I’d jog into the parkland behind our house, navigating by faint suggestions of contours, almost imaginary lines of lighter murk in the pitch blackness. I’d immerse myself, disappearing into a liminal, felt landscape, where the veil between the worlds was thin, Hades’ dark halls revealing themselves through dissolving meadows.

Later in the day, I’d use the time I’d freed up to… go for a run! I medicated myself with tiredness. I sought out the wonderful, awful sense of almost nauseating exhaustion and hunger that excused me from any real engagement or attempts to achieve anything or challenge myself, triumphant that I’d simply survived, given the obstacles I had placed in my own way. I could dawdle through my day feeling half-asleep and bilious and looking for opportunities to stumble-jog up to 4000 calories, thus further fuelling the exhaustion and hunger, too befuddled to acknowledge that I’d fucked everything up: marriage, children, work, my own internal organs. There is a perfect incentive not to sleep long and wake refreshed.

Now I am denied this blind, nocturnal existence. I am confined to the rigid interiors of this house, and I am no longer touched; the feverish, shamanistic visions have left me. It is a loss. Instead, I’m plagued by night-sweats. I wake around 5.30, still with a pang of relief, as if I was leaving a stressful situation, perspiration pooling in the hollows at the back of my knees, the sheets damp and supple. Apparently, it’s my body’s metabolism rebooting and rebuilding the organs and muscles I’ve been feeding off. This takes energy, and a product of respiration, the process of releasing energy, is heat.

I get up straight away and closet myself in the bathroom until, on the dot of 6.30a.m., I’m out the door. All moments of the day, at Ascot House, are spent communally. Even in sleep, I’m not alone. I wake eagerly. early mornings are the only times when I can experience solitude: the true balm of hurt minds.

Susan, the dietician at Ascot House, occasionally gives talks about nutrition. Everybody loves them because they’re so informative and seem to clarify our perceptions, though I’m not sure what we’ll do with the knowledge. The latest was on the gut and what it does. Susan described all the icky, bodily stuff with great gusto. It was sweet to see somebody taking such pleasure in the visceral, biological aspects of life, and most anorexics seem too jaded and malnourished to be squeamish. This is ironic because the condition is so clearly an attempt to reject or transcend the ignominy of the physical. I guess we have insulated ourselves against that disgust.

Susan reminded us that digestive organs are tubes of muscle. If you reduce the body’s nourishment, this muscle begins to fail. Malnourishment also begins to hamper the gut’s ability to produce enzymes or to maintain a healthy biome for beneficial bacteria that break down food.

What we manage to eat is imperfectly digested. When Ascot House begins to feed us up, we experience these difficulties as bloating and gut pain and a sense of intolerable fullness, as our poor old system labours to process the truculent, lumpen matter. It feels as if we are poisoning ourselves, which compliments the thought that we’re soiling ourselves with grease, as fat layers creep back along our limbs, under our skin, like a subcutaneous tide.

Anorexics’ poo, in my experience, is remarkably inoffensive. It appears as dense, black, odourless, sheep droppings, apparently mined for every molecule of nutrition, very infrequently, and cleanly, produced. This is one of the advantages of the condition. The return to a “Healthy weight” is accompanied by the humiliating return of squashy, smearing and revoltingly odoriferous shite and dreadful, mortifying, stomach-churning farts that can’t be disavowed.

Susan’s comments confirmed what I’ve suspected for a while. I’ve had difficulty swallowing, at times. Another patient, here, can only eat soup or pureed food. This could be psychosomatic: the symbolism behind your throat refusing food is obvious. It could also be caused by weakening peristalsis as our bodies feed off their own digestive tracts. We cannibalise our own bodies.

I noticed this first in the slimness of my biceps. The muscles in my arms and legs had quietly vanished, leaving behind a sort of veiny relief map of bulging, sluggish-looking blood vessels: I’d also consumed the fat layers of my skin.

The next sign was an increased need to pee. I drink a lot of scalding tea and coffee. The sharpness of the heat serves as a substitute for eating, I think, and it also provides a sensation of temporary fullness. This may account for the extra trips to the bathroom, as might some disturbance in my electrolyte imbalances, or something.

However, I suspect the main reason was the weakening of my bladder muscles. I started having to nip into the bushes to pee during my run, and go to the loo, four or five times a night. Then I started to seep urine into my boxer shorts. This seemed to be partly psychological – I’d make it to the loo, but before I got my flies undone, I’d begin to pee. A couple of times I’ve pissed on my hands. I began to stink like a goat.

When it was warm and I was standing still, I’d get subtle, aromatic strains of pee. Standing in our local bookshop, talking to my friend’s beautiful girlfriend, I became aware that notes of pee were gently wafting up past my nose, please God, I hope, keeping close to my skin and so unnoticed by others.

A further ignominy comes from the wastage of my arse. As my hams disappeared, a cavernous hole opened between them, but I have also eaten my own sphincter, so on the infrequent occasions that my sluggish gut reached the point of defecation, I was afflicted by a need so sharp and urgent that it had to be attended to immediately or I felt I’d soil myself. I could feel my delicate sphincter shuddering with the effort to stay shut. On one occasion, I went for a run with my sister. Towards the end I was suddenly visited by an urgent need. If I’d been on my own, I might have tried to find a place in the bushes, and prayed that nobody walked past, but with my sister, I had to soldier on. (I’d spent the whole of her visit trying to convince her I was coping.) I barely made it to the loo, and as I locked the door and pulled down my trousers, I couldn’t hold on any longer. I dropped a (luckily) solid poo onto my pants and stood on it in the scramble to sit on the loo. I don’t want to dwell on this. I had to bin the socks and pants.

And then there’s sex. As I’ve said elsewhere, the whole framework of synapses governing, sexuality, eroticism and romance, is lifted, cleanly, out of your brain when you’re malnourished. No vestige of it remains at all. You don’t even miss it, viewing the urgent, fevered, frottage-drives of teenagers with perplexity and incomprehension. There appears to be a governing principle in the body that allows it to perform triage on less vital functions. In a time of famine, I guess reproducing would be a very bad idea because you wouldn’t be able feed either the gestating mother-to-be, or the newly born infant, so this function, and even the desire to exercise this function, is simply turned off. It’s very strange that the human body can make these decisions without the engagement of the conscious brain.

There is also a subconscious benefit to being asexual, of course. Sexuality complicates life horribly. It can lead to betrayal, humiliation, mortification and general misery. The calmness of a sexless universe – it is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

I recently heard a programme about Viagra on Radio 4. Apparently, erections occur when the neuro transmitter nitrous oxide is released into the smooth muscle cells of the arteries, the corpus cavernosum, which causes the release of a substance called cyclic GMP. Have I simply consumed my own arterial muscle?

I was feeling wrecked. I kept falling over. I couldn’t lift my feet up properly and so kept tripping on tree roots. The toe of one shoe would catch, and I’d be unable to bring the other leg forward in time. Residual forward momentum would overtake my tardy limbs, and, merging smoothly with liberated gravity, would draw me downwards, in an arc, to the ground.

There always seems to be a long moment of calmness as I go down. A stab of alarm is followed by a sense of acceptance. I am fully committed; I accept my fate; I embrace the fall in all the fullness and its implications – it’s demonstration of Newton’s pitiless laws; the mortal fragility and fallibility of man; the coming pain and bloodshed. Then, because I can’t get my arms out in time, my face abruptly slams into the gritty path.

One Saturday, I fell twice on my run. The first time, I scraped my elbows, knees and the palms of my hands and bled copiously, presumably because my skin is so thin. 10 minutes later, I fell again, this time with my right arm across my rib-cage, and I felt one of my right-hand ribs give. It was sore for a couple of weeks, especially when I ran, breathed deeply, or did my star jumps.

The next day, trotting back from the supermarket, down I went again, full length, and had to be helped up by a wiry, wrinkled bloke, with a face red from sun and beer, who was very sweet and sympathetic. Unusually, I didn’t resent the intrusion but was rather touched. I guess anorexia is making me more emotionally needy. I’d re-opened the scab on the heel of my right hand, which bled, quietly, right down to my elbow and dripped off onto the ground.

A few mornings later, I tripped over the flex from Jo’s work laptop, fell full length on the kitchen floor, bruised my chin on it, and, sliding across the floor, smacked the top of my head, hard, on the door. It gave me a slight headache that’s persisted for 24 hours.

Not long after that, on holiday, I tripped on cobbles and had a total wipe-out in front of a packed restaurant. I went down, full force, knees, forearms, chest and face to the ground, leapt up and continued as if nothing had happened, glancing, sheepishly at the restaurant crowd, who had gone quiet.

I was quite shocked by this. My head got a bad jar and I had a headache, a sore neck and a tender lump on my chin. I felt I was falling to bits, staggering around aching, exhausted, on the edge of emotionless tears, feeling bewildered, fevered, and alarmed by nothings. Jo was gratifyingly nurturing and sympathetic and put me in a hot bath, which I got out of just in time for my evening run…

When I first developed an eating disorder, I slowly restricted my diet but continued to run. My job is relatively active, so my weight started to decline. My first round of treatment taught me to keep to a regime of regular meals and snacks. After I was discharged, I was still wary of fat, protein and carbs, but I used exercise as much as food restriction as a mechanism to invoke hunger. The twisty little beast in my head had learned to use running to compensate, although, admittedly, I also kept my food intake low between breakfast and tea. By the time I was admitted to Ascot House, I was just exercising and exercising and exercising, largely jogging, until hunger-weakness flowered in my chest, down into my stomach and up into my shoulders.

By the end, I was only able to muster the slowest, drifting stroll, indistinguishable from walking except for the fact that my legs were more bent, which I hoped gave other joggers the faint impression of hurry, or an attitude of hurry. When going uphill, I became more and more bent over like a little old person with a curved osteoporotic spine, my head almost touching my knees, the flesh on my arms, on my cheeks, sagging loose. I kept having to remind myself to straighten up. It felt like wading through a lake. I’m not sure, therefore, how many calories I was burning off, but I appeared to be running up a deficit, because my weight was going down.

As my BMI dropped off the end of the NHS scale, it dawned on me that I could have a heart attack, but, in the grip of this disease, you will take any risks to indulge your compulsions. My only concession was to bring my phone, but I became sensitive to the strange tenderness in my chest: a sort of painless ache or strain; a pervasive, breathless, exhausted murmur against the effort of it all, that is luxuriantly absent if I covered the same distance at a walk.

Walking or running, though, I felt the weakness in my legs. They were thin and veiny. My thighs didn’t meet, even if I squeezed them together, and each bend clearly enunciated and delineated individual muscles in the slim sheath clothing my bones, my thinning skin.

This seemed less ominous than the sensation in my chest. There was a looseness, a ticklish tremor, a tiny shiver, almost just a blush of sensitivity that crept into the muscle tissue, between the joints, the ball and socket. It testified to low blood sugar, I think: a job well done.

And I was seeking, seeking the hunger, yearning for it, hunting for it; feeling down inside myself for those pangs, conjuring them up, drawing them up, feeling my stomach clinging to my spine like a wet shirt; hunger-weakness pulling me backwards like lines pulling back a harness on my chest, threatening to fold up my legs. But I was too robust. Phillip says I want to make myself disappear, become a ghost.

In the week before I was admitted, two people strode past me. They were moving briskly, but, still, they were definitely walking, and I was definitely jogging!

Sorry about the delay – I’ve been having problems with internet access. Here, though, is the next instalment of my in-patient treatment saga:

It’s difficult to remember the next part very clearly. I can’t properly remember, now, what I did – tried to enjoy my last few days of being able to control my own life, keeping my daytime eating to a minimum so I felt I could reward myself with my yummy comfort foods: my bread, my low-carb, low-protein stews, my yogurt and honey.

I also exercised hard, jogging as much as possible, even though, precisely because, I knew this was the last opportunity I’d have. Despite knowing it would immediately become irrelevant, I was determined to enter treatment weighing as little, being as exhausted, and having done as much exercise, as possible. I’m not sure why this was, but I suspect I was driven by a need to justify my place, at the NHS’s expense, in this place. It must cost such a lot of money.

I got up before 5.00a.m., as always, on the day I was admitted, and went for the usual long run. Jo drove me. I think I was nervous and aware how momentous this could be, but also hopeful and excited because, realising that I’d never really recovered, I now saw this as a genuine chance to rid myself of this pale, unwholesome, parasitic demon. Imagine being free and able to eat pizza! Luckily, the numbing exhaustion of anorexia keeps all these feelings muted and therefore manageable, as does Polly’s warm, nurturing support. Otherwise the keen pangs of emotion might be horrifying.

We arrived at a substantial, late-Victorian, bay-windowed property in the suburbs, and walked into a large, light-coloured hall with a high ceiling and comfortable sofas. I immediately felt a great sense of relief: not your standard under-funded hospital, then, patched up and smelling of bleach. Lots of people greeted me kindly and cheerfully; too many to remember. However, as I was processed through the initial interviews, sitting in an anonymous bedroom I will share, with consultants and dieticians and nurses, telling the same anecdotal information about why I’m eligible for treatment, I returned to my usual passive and bewildered self.

I can’t even remember what happened next or who anyone is. There are so many different Care Assistants, so we can be supervised 24 hours a day. All lovely. Then there are occupational therapists, psycho-therapists, the medical consultants. It’s all a bit overwhelming.

Jo drove me back to the horribly familiar North-Eastern Road House, and accompanied me to see Abi and another social worker. We were ushered into the neutral tones of the usual pre-fabricated office and I began to explain to them how I had relapsed. Abi interrupted me, saying something like, “We both know that your anorexia tries to lie to you about exercise”. I felt alarmed at this: I’d brought up my disordered thinking precisely because I was trying to acknowledge it, but now it began to dawn on me how seriously other people might take my condition. I tend to doubt the severity of my situation, but Abi seemed to feel I needed quite an aggressive intervention to sort me out.

Jo said she felt I’d never fully recovered from my first bout of anorexia. Abi said “That’s right. Last time, when I brought up starting the signing off process, you insisted on stopping straight away. Normally we’d work on techniques for how to combat relapsing, but you just wanted to stop.”

At this point I experienced one of reality’s little betrayals, those shifts in the ground beneath my feet, because this isn’t how I’d remembered this conversation at all. I’d told myself Abi had brought up the idea of signing off, although she’d said it was up to me to decide. I didn’t remember any significant mention of techniques to combat relapsing, but I knew those anyway. I, keenly aware of how overstretched and underfunded the NHS is, felt Abi must want to bring my treatment to a close, and I felt that my recovery had hit a fallow period, anyway, so I opted to just stop.

In retrospect, though, Abi was right: I was too eager to stop treatment; the fact that everything continued to be such a chore should have been an indication that I was still under-nourished. I think, in the back of my mind, I’ve always known that anorexia wasn’t finished with me. I thought it was an inherent condition, and would just have to be managed. I hoped it was weakened enough for me to stay in control, but I knew we hadn’t grubbed the roots out, and I was almost treasuring my ability to eat badly, in case I needed it, nurturing the last of the disease like a plant cutting, in my treacherous brain.

And then, frowning severely, Abi declared that the only option she could see for me was either full day-care or in-patient care.

I almost wept with relief and gratitude. I said “That’s exactly what I want.” Jo intervened, saying she thought in-patient care would be the only option because if I came home in the evening I would definitely exercise and cut down on my food.

Later that same day, Abi phoned and said she’d secured funding and a place for me at Ascot House, a specialist Eating Disorder unit, starting the following Tuesday and that I didn’t really have the option to say no or I’d lose it.

Here is something I wrote around this time:
“I don’t think I eat too badly, not compared to some anorexics. I just make sure that my calorie intake is below my output. I don’t count calories, much. Instead, I constantly seek out as intense a sense of hunger as I can bear before medicating it with tiny snacklets. Then I eat heartily in the evening. That’s my reward and pay-off. Control of this predictable system, and the easy achievability of the goal, gives me the reassurance I crave in a threatening and unpredictable universe, I guess. The problem is that I’m intentionally mismanaging my eating routines, precisely to stimulate my hunger, my days are too frugal, and my dinner is too big – too stodgy. And because I have it so late, my fullness runs into my very early breakfasts, I think.

So I’m constantly chasing my hunger, questing it. When I don’t feel hungry, I check if it is growing. I feel carefully down inside myself, a fingertip search, hunting, yearning for those pangs, conjuring, drawing them up, hoping for the feeling that my stomach is clinging to my spine like a wet shirt, for the weakness you set yourself against in order to get anything done; the weakness that feels like a parachute harness with the canopy billowing behind you, pulling on you, threatening to fold up your legs. (Resisting, and overcoming, its drag is a substitute for hard work; it gives you a sense of achievement when you lack it.)

These sensations are unpredictable. Sometimes I’m faintingly hungry all day and this feels reassuring, but sometimes hunger abandons me without apparent reason, and its absence seems total and convincing. It’s odd. Feelings like hunger should be (literally) visceral, shouldn’t they? Direct and sincere, and real, in a way that more cognitive or affective sensations are not. Yet my declining weight would suggest that my lack of hunger isn’t accurate, that I can be fundamentally mislead by my own most primitive sensations.

So I fret. I feel alarmed and upset and cast around for ways to cultivate my hunger. Now that it’s summer, I walk around town “taking in the evening air” (which is full of music and threatening teenage shouts) or walk around and around the garden. Often, however, I simply don’t have enough time to pack in much more exercise, and, anyway, this seems a weak and indulgent way of combatting weight gain. To match exercise against food seems to be off-setting the indulgence of one compulsion against another. Surely abstinence from both would be a better demonstration of strength of character? I could lie in bed and waste away like a medieval saint, at no cost to anyone. It could even reduce my carbon footprint.

On The Listening Project (BBC Radio 4), two lifeboat men were talking about their work, life and friendship. I felt a sudden, envious need to be like them– without these neurotic, navel-gazing hang-ups: engaging with life, secure in the knowledge that I’m living a useful, varied, adventurous existence. The thought was so refreshingly unusual for me. I hope it signals a slow, subterranean, continental shift in my attitudes, which will, one day, have changed the whole landscape of my thinking (probably because of working with Phil, the therapist I see.) I hope this relapse is temporary and superficial.

Meanwhile, I’m further plagued by stomach aches, exhaustion and the tendency to pee myself, slightly. I smell like a goat.”

I nearly dropped the phone and fell to the ground tearing my hair out, because this was exactly the same place, and the same Eating Disorder specialist, that I used to see! The sense of despair, of retrogression, of being right back where I’d started, with the whole exhausting, horrifically difficult, grinding task still to do, was almost overwhelming. I hated it! Abi saved my life and I love her character and attitude to the world, and admired her immensely, but this meant I hated her disapproval; I hated being badgered by her about my weight, trying to squirm out of admitting how emotionally uncommitted to recovery I really was. I hated North Eastern Road House. I hated exhausting myself getting to the station, the awful train journey; the mendacious promises I made, the journey back. And, it hadn’t worked. Surely my present predicament proved that? Sisyphus, Sisyphus, Sisyphus!

“Oh great!” I replied, weakly, “I know Abi of old”. “Yes, I know!”, said the duty manager, happily, “so she’ll know all about you!” I pictured her waiting for me with a grim look of disappointment…

I took this call on the last day of term at the school I work in. I had to reel straight into a staff Leaving Do, without time to digest what I had just been told. Schools have a high turn-over of staff, so there are always a number of leavers, but taking the temperature of the room, they tend to keep their leaving speeches short. The problem is those old warhorses, who have been at school for 30 years. They want to bear witness to a lifetime spent serving the school, rather than just saying goodbye. They start their speeches with “When I joined the school in 1950…” and use phrases like “That was in the old maths block…” and “it was just me and Geoff Whiteman, who taught maths, but you won’t remember him…”

This year we had two. The first stood up and delivered the full English breakfast: all the people he referred to had long since left, and all the incidents he referred to were long since passed. At one point, during an anecdote about his high blood pressure, he said: “So I walked down to the surgery; you know, trousers, jacket, shirt…” He actually told us what he was wearing! He told us the name he gave his old Morris Minor before embarking on a series of rambling accounts of tenuous links various other members of staff have with the village where he grew up (“but I’m digressing…”)

The second guy was no better: another interminable, rambling reminiscence, while I grew more and more tense. I was desperate to get home, go for a calming run, brood, and talk to Jo about this development. My stomach was becoming so knotted that it seemed to be climbing up my chest. I thought I’d end up chewing on it, frantically.

By the time the 2nd guy had ground to a halt, I was so overwrought I was almost weeping with frustration, so when my lovely deputy boss gave me a lovely warm hug, I actually burst into tears! This was very embarrassing – people started milling around, getting in the way and the wrong end of the stick, giving unhelpful advice. A friend of Jo’s phoned her and told her I’d collapsed, leading to a very flustered phone call! It was all very touching but also harassing.

In retrospect, I guess I was rather proud of myself for having relapsed. Jo’s alarm, along with the danger signals of lack of sleep, exhaustion, dizziness, falling over, made me feel I was achieving something. It confirmed to me, again, that I was genuinely ill and messed up, rather than self-indulgently making a fuss about nothing. Thus I was hoping that being off the bottom of the NHS Choices BMI scale would indicate that I was properly flirting with danger. The duty manager letting slip that I was not morbidly thin, and the sense of almost travelling back in time to a grey and awful, lonely past; of having lost all the ground I’d gained, punctured that inflated sense of importance I’d developed. I’m a tiresome malingerer demanding attention from a horribly over-stretched NHS. I’m not even properly ill, but I’ll still have to start gurning through great gollops of awful, stomach-aching stodge in order to gain weight. The reality of what it was actually like dawned on me…

I said, “As I just said, I was hoping you’d refer me back to the Eating Disorders clinic”. (And, to give her her due, this is what she did.)

Next, the Access and Assessment service called me. Because I’ve been through the process before, I had some understanding of the answers that would trigger a concern: the carelessness for my own health and welfare, the strain on my marriage and family relationships; the fact that I don’t want to get better, all played out right in front of the children who are at particularly vulnerable, impressionable ages.

The first time I went through this process, I had no goal or clear sense of what was going on or where it would, ultimately, lead. I was just a bewildered little pudding who had been made to realise that something was wrong with him and had promised to do something about it. I had no real sense of what these people asking me the same questions (was I suicidal? Did I self-harm) would actually do with this information, or how they might help me.

Now, however, I had a definite sense of how I wanted to be treated: I wanted them to hospitalise me and force me to eat. The relief from my kitchen duties would be immense. I could relinquish control of my eating, and of my food hoarding, shopping, listing and cooking. I could eat horrid food until my weight was high enough to be discharged, and have the energy to work with Phil effectively, and to write well. In my fantasy, this would all happen immediately, so that the children and Jo would be on holiday in Portugal and Ireland while I was in hospital. I’d avoid the challenges of weaving my way around meals in Portugal and of my parents in Ireland, while also not having to worry about Jo, Meggie and Daniel trashing the kitchen and my food stores.

So I tried to press the right buttons to trigger a hospital admission, telling the truth but not playing it down, as you naturally want to. I said things like, “I’m not suicidal, but I really don’t care if I’m risking a heart-attack; my survival seems a source of indifference to me…” Then I hopefully brought up the idea of a stay in hospital. The duty manager I spoke to was lovely, and very sympathetic, but, having established that my BMI was 16.6, she said “We wouldn’t recommend hospitalisation unless you were at risk of death, which you aren’t.” I said “I guess you’re not going to tell me what my BMI needs to be for me to be a death-risk, are you?” “No”, she replied with sweet tones of sympathy and regret.

This was disappointing, but worse was to come. An hour later she called me back, sounding triumphant: she’d arranged an early appointment for me to see the Eating disorders team. The appointment would be at 1.30, in North Road House, in the next town over from mine, with Abi! In other words, exactly the same time, place and the same specialist I used to see!