I’m back! I apologise for having been away for so long. Since I last posted a lot has happened. Most importantly, I guess, on the 21st of August, I was admitted as an in-patient at a specialist Eating Disorders unit in a city around an hour and a half away from my home. Let me take you on my journey:

Before Jo weighed me, I’d already been to the doctor to tell them about my weight loss. Jo had been threatening to come too, but couldn’t make it, which was a relief, because I didn’t want to admit the truth about my weight loss in front of her.

The appointment was, in the end, very unimpressive. The doctor turned out to be a newly qualified locum registrar. They move between surgeries to fill gaps, and are thus not local and aren’t familiar with patients in this area. I told her that I had been diagnosed with anorexia and had been treated by the Eating Disorders clinic. They’d discharged me and now I’d relapsed badly. I was 50.3 kilos, which made my BMI 16.6 and off the underweight end of the scale, beyond even the red band. I asked to be re-referred to the Eating disorders service.

The doctor leaned forward attentively and, with mannered sympathy, started asking me leisurely, general questions about my condition: had I had it since I was a child? In my 40s? So, I’d had it for 7 years? And this was caused by a loss of appetite, was it? Did I get the symptoms and behaviours all at once? What was my job? (With sudden inspiration) was my condition the result of stress? And this was caused by a loss of appetite, was it? (again) Was I married? What did my wife do? Did I have kids? Ages? Was the family supportive?

So, ok, she wasn’t local and she hadn’t had time to read my notes. That’s understandable. Everyone in the NHS is highly over-worked, but I found myself having to take forays into unhelpful background detail while she orientated herself. This made her seem at a loss about what I was doing in her surgery. Finally, she confirmed this impression when she said “So you know that you have to eat more or exercise less? You seem to have good insight into your condition. So, what are you hoping we, at the NHS, can do to support you in your recovery?”

I felt an immediate sense of deflation. I wanted to cry out, “I was hoping you’d cure me; You’d save me. I was hoping you’d commit me, take my cares from off my shoulders; make me well.” And I suddenly felt abandoned. And frightened: I’m going to have to do all of this entirely by myself. Perhaps I really will I exercise myself into a heart attack.

I came across the following three pieces of climate change news this morning:

• One of the British Broadsheets (possibly the Sunday Times) is reporting, today, that the government has drawn up plans for the army to bring in supplies of food in the event of shortages caused by a no-deal Brexit. Britain has never been anywhere near self-sufficiency in food production, in modern times, and has always had to import a large proportion of its food.

• According to the National Union of Farmers, Reported in The Observer, a delegation of farmers is meeting government officials today to discuss the fragility of Britain’s food supply in the aftermath of this drought and its catastrophic effect on harvests, as well as the on-going threat to this delicate creature posed by continued climate change.

• A new study has linked rising temperatures to a rise in suicide rates. When average monthly temperatures rose by 1 degree, the suicide rate in the US rose by 0.7%, and by 2.1% in Mexico. This was reported in The Guardian, yesterday. Sounds like a pretty crude study, but you can imagine a link: a combination of heat-exhaustion ennui and anxiety about climate change…

So that’s reassuring! See you on the other side!

I wrote this just before it started raining yesterday, but, apparently, we’re due to return to hot conditions next week and local farmers are saying they need 4 weeks of steady, wet weather to save their harvests…

We haven’t had rain for weeks, now, and the plants are showing widespread signs of distress. Trees are dropping rolls of bark. There are drifts of fallen leaves in bright, reddish browns, quite unlike the earthy colours of natural leaf fall. All the grass is dead, stick-dry and the colour of sand. It’s like a strange, un-sequential autumn, all pale, aberrant hues; an illustration from a fanciful children’s book; an unfamiliar season on an alien planet.

Increasingly, now, I’m frightened. That’s my underlying mood: fear. I suspect this is my response to the drought. I feel so helpless in the face of climate change’s overwhelming malign power. It genuinely does seem to threaten catastrophe, desertification and death, there seems nothing I can do about it, and nobody else seems even to notice.

My response is complicated by the fact that I’m masking and managing my fear by cultivating a preoccupation with hunger, yet malnutrition seems to intensify my sense of distress. My mental landscape seems to be a confused series of wild alarms. I feel like a stag lost in a dead, heat-fossilised forest, tormented by thirst, my perceptions a series of fragments in which I’m sometimes standing, bewildered, tormented by thirst, and sometimes running wildly, my antlers clashing against skeletal tree limbs, followed by a phantom hunt.

Christ! Sorry about all the clumsy, over-extended metaphors.

It was after the last extended drought, I think, that I first began to control my eating and, possibly, over-exercising. We’d just moved to this, very dry, part of England, and, coming from Ireland, I was unfamiliar and unprepared for such an extended period without any water fall at all. I became so anxious waiting for it to rain that I began to have what, looking back, seems like a series of panic attacks. The thought “what if it never rains again?” would force its way into my head and appear increasingly plausible. I’d wake at night, hoping that every slight breeze, brushing the roof tiles, was a gust of rain, but the tarmac under the streetlight was always mercilessly dry when I looked out the window. Alone at night, I started to feel such breathless terror at these times, that I’d fantasize about lying on the parched lawn and opening my veins – ending the torture of suspense in the knowledge that I was watering the grass with 5 or so litres of fluid.

It seems a small step to attribute the rise of an affective, psychological condition that concerns itself with maintaining control, to this distressing experience.

I weigh myself once a week, on Sunday mornings, and my honest, actual, true weight is 49.8 kilos, which makes my BMI 16.6 and off the bottom of the red band on the scale. No doubt you hard-core dieters think that’s nothing, but it probably accounts for why I’m once again experiencing the old, familiar feelings and weird, inverted and contradictory thinking. The sense of satisfaction and achievement at my weight loss, for example, mild but undeniable, is a warming current beneath the surface of my generalised confusion and alarm.

Why am I doing this now? Well, my weight has been gently coasting down ever since I was discharged by the Eating Disorders service. I guess part of the reason I’d gained weight was to please them and not get into trouble, so, when I was discharged, my anorexia, suppressed but unvanquished, felt liberated and free to treat food exactly as it wanted.

Perhaps, now, I’m hoping for a proper medical collapse because it would be an undeniable demand for help. I fantasise about responsibility being taken away from me by health-care professionals: para-medics, specialist nurses cluster around me attentively. I could give up, relax, be fed, relinquish my panicked, convulsive, tyrannous grip… I’d be forced to eat, be supervised to make sure I did eat.

And it wouldn’t be too bad, would it? Because the power of the addiction to starvation lies, as it does in most addictions, not in the strength of its demands, but on their persistence. Because, no matter how many individual battles you win, the desire to restrict and control is always still there, gently persuading. In moments of distraction you make the wrong choice. Then wrong choices get easier and easier to make, until, in the full flowering of the disease, each wrong decision becomes almost instantly habit-forming, like quick setting concrete…

But hospitalisation is an impossible solution: I’d have to cause, or at least risk, very serious damage to my health, perhaps even a heart attack, to get it, and none of my plans work if I’m dead.

Last night it dawned on me, properly, that this condition is fatal. It could kill me, one day. Perhaps in my sleep; perhaps dropping dead on a run. Is it possible to stop the down-ward slide? Can I do it myself, because I haven’t so far, and clearly have no inclination to?

I don’t feel, though, that I can call on Jo for help. She’s far too busy to focus on my melodramatic collapse. I feel ashamed to set my self-inflicted and attention-seeking difficulties against her extreme, work-imposed stresses that aren’t in any way her fault or what she wants. While I’m making myself ill, she’s rising, with astonishing resourcefulness and industry, to all challenges, for the sake of her family, because she is our bread-winner, because I’m deliberately making myself unable to pull my weight.

I shouldn’t complain. I find looking after Jo, and not focussing on my silly problems, very rewarding. She’s our prize-winning race-horse and it’s my job to keep her in race condition: curry-combs and hot bran mash!

So, anyway, I guess I’ll just have to get better by myself. I AM NOT GOING BACK ON THE COLLOGEN SHOTS!!

…but I’m still a liar and a cheat.
I’m sorry I haven’t updated this blog for so long. I’m in the middle of a relapse and it’s been difficult to write anything worth reading. Anyway, I know Jo is one of the only people who reads it.

This has meant that, until recently, I’ve had to be a little “circumspect” about the weights I’ve been recording here. In other words, I’ve been lying and adding 3 kilos. Anorexia makes you mendacious.

However, a couple of weeks ago, she came home and insisted that I stand on the scales in front of her. Her work had let up, temporarily, and she’d been able to sit back and think about other aspects of her life, and realised that I’d gone odd again…So the cat was out of the bag (or the tin of beans out of the underpants, or whatever would be an appropriate metaphor for us lot.)

It was embarrassing. I had to stand, clad, appropriately, only in a pair of boxer shorts, exposed and vulnerable as I was revealed as a liar and a cheat by the undeniable, hard facts on the LCD display. I thought about looking surprised and confused, but, in the end, I opted for pointing out to Jo that she’d been preparing for a promotion at work, and was so busy that I hadn’t wanted to cause her further anxiety. I think this is true.

She has been remarkably good about this, so far. She was subdued and melancholy and said it was hard to watch somebody you loved trying to kill themselves, but she didn’t shout or blame me, confusingly, although I feel, with deep conviction, that she should, because I feel wholly and personally responsible for the shit this family goes through, the damage it has sustained and, therefore the bad behaviour and unhealthy thinking it manifests. I have twisted my own children. More on that story later in the programme.

An acquaintance was telling me about her cousin’s anorexia. Apparently, this woman was a size 14, but “successfully” managed her eating to lose a lot of weight and keep it off. This made her feel dynamic and successful and, according to my gossip-report, to achieve well academically, so that she qualified as a doctor. However, the highly stressful, reactive, environment of a modern hospital, for junior doctors, made her yearn for a greater sense of control over her life, and for strategies for coping. The result? Persistent anorexia nervosa. It’s strange how similar all our stories are. This is a familiar narrative, I think: the surprisingly successful diet, leading to a glow of achievement and confidence; the consequent burst of creative energy as your weight goes down, which tails off as you begin to bottom out into malnourishment; the stressful job and the desire to cling to that comforting glow as life becomes weirder, even more stressful, and less controllable.

Dieting, or managing your eating in any way, is a dynamic and on-going process. Like running down the up escalator, if you stop, you’ll automatically be carried to the top again, especially in our processed food culture, so you have to keep going, but the only real way of measuring this success is through further weight loss. No matter how stressful your life is, objectively, denying your brain the nourishment it needs seems to alter its perceptions of the world on a fundamental, bio-chemical level. As I’ve said before, it generates its own stress and weirdness and sense of life being out of control, which it then offers respite from. This is a key feature of its durability and success as a sort of meme-virus.

…And sometimes I glimpse the landscapes of a much more normal life through the barred asylum windows. It looks like an equally god-awful place to the world of global catastrophes. To lift an image from Terry Pratchett’s Sto Latt: a dank plain of endless cabbage fields where I would have to confront my aimless, friendless, joyless existence; the abandonment of all my age-eroded aspirations.

This is the other fear of recovery: to find yourself standing alone in a kitchen at midnight, forlorn – all that effort, the life or death struggle, the project, the constant cultivation of it, leading only to this: bereft, middle-aged, pointless, pot-bellied, balding and hairy. Nothing left to do.

Yup: the return of exhausted dejection and ennui.

Once again, I’m living the fevered existence of the under-nourished. Everything has a faint, unstable quiver of anxiety about it, like the sets of a cheap 70s sci-fi series – Blake 7, or something. Or perhaps it’s like the aqueous uncertainty of an underwater existence, where the brain’s anxious squid-ink blooms and diffuses through the water, making things even more murky. “Hell is murky”…

I’m not as writing-focussed or as driven as I was. Instead, I’m formlessly apprehensive and doomy. Again. I’m also becoming increasingly and unfairly volatile with the children. I tell myself they’ll recognise and forgive this as simply my flustered inability to cope, but this is putting so much unfair pressure on them to be mature. They’re only kids.

I’m unsure what I can do about all this. I’ve reached a dangerously comfortable accommodation with my anorexia, with reassuring rhythms of daytime hunger, leading to a satisfyingly large, though highly restricted, pay-off tea (mainly yummy breads).

Among many other advantages, this probably helps me to cope with, and not be able to feel, the impact and significance of, external crises. In Britain, where I live, Spring was characterised by clear signs of climate distress: spasms of unseasonal freezing weather followed by equally unprecedented heatwaves, that totally wrong-footed farmers and destroy all our food crops. I’m sure you noticed this, but nobody else seems to have placed much significance on it.

Apart from massive, un-noticed and unchecked, climate damage, there’s the looming economic and social carnage that Brexit has yet to unleash (the trade war with the U.S. that Brexit has left us horribly vulnerable to, for a start); an American president whose ego-centric stupidity and incompetence borders on actual insanity; the Syrian crisis; the sudden return of the far-right and its alarming normalisation; sabre-rattling stand-offs with a psychotic Russia or truculent Iran…You know all this, yourselves.

Curiously, though, the reasons why we anorexics do this to ourselves are not so simple or so explicit, are they? There’s something much more primitive and compulsive that drives us on. It’s difficult to properly isolate and define, conceptually, and this allows a monitoring, controlling compulsion to exercise a slight but constant pressure on our psyches that is ultimately much more potent than a sudden flight from grim reality, and grows in potency as its hold tightens. My condition, at least, is not directly an act of furious, self-loathing violence, or a suicidal act of self-negation. My own experience is that the explicit anguish felt by anorexics is as much a symptom of starvation as it is a demonstration of the sub-conscious state that drives our behaviours.

Then again, I’m returning to the notion that there is no anorexic type. We share a fundamentally similar brain chemistry and thus tend to use the same toolbox of behaviours for a variety of reasons. In my case, it appears to be a sort of anxiety-consolidation technique, as I’ve said before. I have substituted one easily resolvable problem, daily assuage-able hunger, for all the terrors, frustrations, humiliations and disappointments that beset the human animal.

So, I’m getting undeniably thinner and weaker. When I kneel down, say to put something in the fridge, it feels like I’m sinking into a lovely cushion of rest, and I find it difficult to muster the strength to get up again. I have to gather my resources, for a moment, and then push up with an effort. I could stay down there forever, gazing into the fridge’s humming, illuminated interior. It seems an attractive prospect, when you’re faced with the daunting up-thrust.

We’ve already established that running (in both the literal sense and the ‘organising” sense) at what I hope is a calorie deficit, every day, I am flirting with the hope of inflicting serious, though temporary, harm upon myself. However, I am not courting a heart attack. This would be too binary, too abrupt, too final: it would suddenly kick in, or it wouldn’t, like a pressed switch, and, if it did, it would probably kill me and do so at once without hope of compromise or mitigation or second thoughts. And this is not a suicide attempt.

When I run, I am very aware of, very sensitive to, the strange sense of tenderness in my chest: a sort of painless, ache or strain; a pervasive, breathless, exhausted murmur against the effort of it all. This feeling is luxuriantly absent if I cover the same distance at a walk.

Walking or running, I feel the weakness in my legs, though. My legs are now very thin and veiny. My thighs do not meet, even if I squeeze them together, and each bend clearly enunciates and delineates individual muscles in the thinning sheath of skin that clothes them.

The weakness in my legs is different and less ominous than that in my chest. It is a looseness, a ticklish tremor, a tiny shiver, almost just a blush of sensitivity that creeps into the muscle tissue, between the joints, the ball and socket. It testifies to low blood sugar, I believe: a job well done.

Jo has noticed that I’m thinner, though I’ve gained 100 grams since I weighed myself last week. On bad/ good days, my arm muscles have dwindled to slightly curved sheathes, covering the bone, and my fore-arms are mapped by veins which stand out like slack worms. My wasted thigh muscles feel the strain of every action, even just bending over (although this strain feels like a small, significant achievement.) I can often only muster the slowest stagger on my run, like an old man wading through a lake, feeling all my muscles, even my facial muscles, wanting to sag in exhaustion. At ominous points, as I cross roads, my strides just dwindle to a halt. Rest catches up with me in a delicious warm blanket, as if it had been trailing in my wake, blown back by the headwind and now it envelops me. I’m proud that I can simply start up again.

When I feel particularly undernourished, my legs have a tiny tremor; then, when I speak, I have to strain my voice simply to force the tepid, languid air to leak through my vocal chords. Often, as I run I seem to be wearing a leaden harness, attached to ropes which constantly pull me backwards. I have to lean forwards, trying to use gravity, to make a constant effort, merely to walk down the corridor, or even to stand still without collapsing. At work, my body grasps so gratefully at any moments of rest that just stopping and leaning against a desk feels like being ensconced in the comfiest armchair, and I want to stay there all day, observing the passing world. The only way to overcome this feeling is to force myself to stride around, building up a momentum, repeating the mantra “momentum = mass x velocity”, as we learnt in our physics lessons. And, yes, since you ask, the maddening loops of pointlessly repeated phrases and counting seem to be trying to seed themselves in my head again, and I’m having to actively weed them out, to stop myself when it starts. The constant sense of fevered anxiety is back.

I even experienced difficulty swallowing a few days ago. I wondered whether this was caused by weakening peristalsis as my body feeds off its own digestive tract muscle. Seems to have been psychosomatic, though.

In other words, I’m happily cultivating my starvation. Each of these afflictions seems like a signal of success, of something achieved, of progress; something to preoccupy myself with as I wait for dinner time.