A while ago I was writing about anxiety, do you remember? During a drought, I was fantasising about giving up entirely, lying on the lawn, opening my veins and letting my life-blood nourish the parched grass, and the idea felt like a relief, a terrible, fiercely painful, heartfelt sigh. I’d finally be treading lightly on the earth: making up for my unjustifiable environmental impact.

It feels as if this was a significant moment, a watershed, a paradigm shift, and ever since then I’ve incorporated anxiety into every moment of my waking or dream life. I know, however, that the brain imposes narrative shape and significance onto events. I’ve probably always lived in a state of perpetual semi-alarm. I don’t feel that anxiety has soaked into, or infused, my being. Rather, I feel that a deep anxiety is woven into the very fabric of my being, and extended into the weave of the whole universe, in my perception and conception of it. It is a necessary strand of the fabric – the weariness, the fever and the fret.

On the other hand, I used to love storms, but, ever since the drought, they’ve frightened me – another example of huge forces beyond my control. It’s around 6.30 a.m. as I write this, and there’s a wind-storm roaring and bellowing outside. When I came down, the front door was wide open. I guess, last night, someone had swung it shut, but the lock hadn’t caught. It felt like some huge, wild intruder had shoulder-barged in and invaded, taken possession of our cosy home, had made it a wild, night-lit, night-stormy space. It was exhilarating, but also frightening. I went around the house checking that no opportunistic passer-by had walked off with the laptops, but really I kind of felt the storm itself might be the thief and he’d stolen something as vast and intangibly powerful as himself, a metaphysical sense of security, or something.

After Jo and I had been together a little while, she started snuggling up against me on the sofa, in the evening, and murmuring “Let’s have a baby”. At first, I think, it was almost a joke, a way of expressing affection for me. Jo has always been determined and unsentimental. But the call became more and more insistent: “Let’s have a BABY!”

My response was always to immediately change the subject and start talking about politics or film. Eventually, though, Jo’s clamour became so strident, that even I, almost completely lacking in self-awareness, had to admit those early 30s maternal urges had hit Jo full in the face, and I was resisting them.

So, eventually, Jo sat me down for a serious talk and gave me an ultimatum: I must provide her with (ahem, ahem) the genetic material to make a baby, or she would have to find somebody else who would, before she was too old. My response? I changed the subject.

So, without ever making a serious, conscious decision, I discovered we were no longer going to be using contraceptives. I simply avoided thinking about it and, of course, sex without all that fiddly hassle is MUCH better, and, for a while, nothing happened.

Then I was diagnosed with, and treated for, Graves’ Disease, an auto-immune disorder that made me very hyperthyroid. Almost immediately, Jo conceived. (Is there a link? Any endocrinologists out there?) When she came home and told me, I ‘celebrated’ by drinking 3 quadruple gin and tonics in around 10 minutes, saying “I don’t feel very well”, and passing out on the sofa.

So, from then on, I was committed to fatherhood. Jo read all the baby books and passed on the information to me. I couldn’t bring myself to even look at one. I liked now. The future made me feel insecure.

And, of course, parenthood, birth, children are astounding – the sudden, apparently spontaneous existence of self-hood and autonomous, visionary consciousness! But I think it’s significant that I didn’t choose it. I used to say “having children was the best decision I never made”. Funny joke, but true: I acquiesced, but it wasn’t my idea. I just went along with it.

Here’s a diary entry, in its entirety, that I wrote recently:

It’s Friday, 6.00 a.m, dark and, to me it feels mild. I’m searching for that pangy hungry feeling I like to have in the morning. ‘Well People’ would call it “famished”. My dulled senses call it “peckish”. Anyway, it’s not there, today. I may have been too snacky yesterday. Or is it psycho-somatic?

We’re going to Centreparcs today. Last night I was manifesting that head-congested, fast-talking stress behaviour. I’m feeling a bit lost and threatened and goalless. I’m losing a whole weekend to this, from Friday evening to Sunday evening. Each weekend at home is a pause for breath in the bewildering headlong rush of life and I’m losing the whole thing and rushing straight back into Monday! I’ll suffocate! I’m anxious about not writing or keeping up my blog. I’m anxious about being able to manage my meals. I’m terrified of the deep, arctic, misery of queuing for the water slide as my body heat escapes through my wet, uninsulated skin and my core temperature drops and drops.

I’m desperate to take as much exercise as humanly and temporally possible. I want to experiment with seeing what is the smallest amount of food my body will let me take during the weekend. Why is this? My brain can’t see an emotional connection between these feelings and going to Centreparcs, but I know I shouldn’t trust my brain, even on apparently physical symptoms like hunger. “I know I shouldn’t trust my brain”?! That’s like 3 separate loci of consciousness! What a fractured self I have!

It’s not my children who bear the brunt of my unrecognised Christmas stress: they’re happy to keep out of the way with their presents, it’s my long-suffering in-laws, especially my sister-in-law, Sarah. I’m incredibly lucky in my in-laws. They are welcoming, tolerant, open-minded, intelligent and incredibly forgiving of me. They don’t deserve this, or to have their time with their own beloved sister/ daughter made difficult.

Sarah is very close to Jo, her sister, and thus makes herself at home in our house, comfortable and free with her opinions (which I don’t always agree with). This is good and right and is just as I would like it if in normal circumstances, but, these days, she’ll come into the kitchen and busy herself making tea, saying “Can I make anyone else a cup of tea?” and it irks me and, without warning, some caustic comment sort of erupts out of me. I mean, it’s not her kitchen or her tea, but, then again, I want her to feel at home. I confuse myself.

Jo gets upset when I snap at her sister. It puts her in a difficult position, and so I try to restrain myself but this seems to make me more sensitive to her ways – I’m just waiting to let myself down.

And hers are such minor transgressions. For example, because she is interested in other people, she engages with whole-hearted attention to what they say, but her habitual discourse is interrogating what you’ve said, turning it around and trying to see alternatives to it. She always says, “Well, … I suppose…” and then suggests an alternative. If you say “God, Robert Mugabe has turned into an absolute bastard”, she’d say “Well, … I suppose he’d say colonialist powers are interfering in his country” If you say “I guess I ought to put the turkey on” she’s say “well, … I suppose we could get a take-away”. This can even lead her to suggesting opinions that she fundamentally disagrees with. God only knows what she’d say if I said “I hate racists!” or “the holocaust was wrong.”

Of course, this is excellent intellectual practice, probably drummed into her over years of rigorous education (she’s a doctor) but to my over-sensitive mind, it seems she is always contradicting, challenging, checking. She says it all in the most caring, interested way, of course, but I have trouble negotiating even the simplest, most benign conversations.

This is also the problem with her elder-sisterly advice. She approaches any problem you tell her of with a fusillade of possible solutions, all of which you’ve already thought of and rejected, when all you want is for somebody to say “poor you” and let the conversation drift on! The barrage of facile solutions suggests (to me) that she thinks your problems are minor and easily solved (which she probably does – she’s a cancer specialist: she’s seen worse.) Part of the reason I resent this is because I’ve probably only brought up the subject in the first place because I’m trying to make conversation because I’ve been forced into society. (I believe it’s rude not to be mildly negative about your own life, otherwise you sound terribly smug and self-congratulatory.) And I find all conversations so difficult to manage!

Eventually, she’ll say something that causes me to flare up and suddenly I’m really snapping, telling it like it is, being critical and furiously defensive. A part of me seems to observe this with a calm and curious surprise. It doesn’t seem to be me who is acting this way, because I don’t feel rancour at all, and it’s only after I’ve managed to stop myself that I’m hit by a sort of back-wash of stress and shame.

It’s ghastly! Sarah must be really wounded and I sound like a teenager. It is mortifying that I should betray myself into such childish behaviour. I feel wretched, so I apologise and try to make it up with more cooking or cleaning, which inevitably brings me back into conflict with the poor old in-laws who just want to help.

My relationship with Sarah is very important to me. She’s Jo’s sister. We used to get on pretty well, but I think we’ve now got unhelpful expectations of each other. Perhaps there are ways we could both be more accommodating of each other, but I know Sarah tries really hard and always forgives me. The problem is that the narrative of saying sorry and magnanimously forgiving leaves no room for negotiating a new peace. One person surrenders and the other remains victoriously and completely in the right, in possession of the field of conflict.

I tell myself that she is making assumptions, is too set in her ways, but the reality of the situation is probably that I’ve become highly sensitive to all visitors, because I am ashamed of what I have become. I wish to hide my savage face away, my yellowing fangs. Sarah, for love of her sister, is the only one who dares approach the cave in which the maiden Jo has been imprisoned.

So – Christmas:

I guess Christmas is a difficult time for anyone who has trouble with food, because it’s a time of feasting and overindulgence. People seem disappointed if they haven’t collapsed, uncomfortably bloated, on the sofa by 6pm, eructating fragrantly. Emotionally, I associate over-eating at Christmas with greasy, staining, corruption and queasy, unwholesome, corpulence.

It’s difficult to explain, because I love Christmas dinner. It’s probably my favourite meal, or it used to be, because it brings families together and sustains them emotionally and physically. I also associate it with childhood and happiness and excitement, and I still love presents, both giving and receiving them (a feeling reserved, in adults, for people who can’t afford to just go out and buy whatever they want.) I love turkey and roast potatoes and gravy, and I adore Christmas pudding. I quite like sprouts.

But my party piece is actually losing weight at Christmas, while still having had some of all of these foods. Pretty impressive, eh? I’m not sure how I manage it, although I do limit myself to tiny morsels of each. Perhaps there will be further clues below:

I do the cooking on Christmas day. I enjoy it, and it allows me to maintain a sense of control as the house fills up with wayward in-laws. It has its own pressures, though, trying to get everything out on time, and it being your responsibility: everybody waiting.

Another problem is that I don’t like anybody helping me. I’d like to turn the kitchen into a fortress where I could be left alone to contribute to the family in my own anti-social way, while everybody else keeps out of my face, but I can still feel useful and be thanked. My in-laws, on the other hand, like to feel welcomed and embraced as part of a relaxed and loving family, so they want to help with the cooking! (My father-in-law and his wife delight in tramping through the garden and abruptly looming up at the kitchen door, like creatures from a horror movie dropping through the air vents straight into the warm heart of the home. Everyone else knocks at the front door and waits, allowing me to use the pause and the hallway as a pressure chamber to adjust to their presence. I guess the father-in-law likes to think that, as family, they have privileged access to the inner sanctum.)

The thing is, it’s a lovely idea: companionably chopping, shoulder to shoulder, gossiping as the kettle comes to the boil. When I was well, I would probably have loved this structured way of being with others, and caring for them, above all things.

Now it fills me with alarm. I have a vision of an unbearably crowded room, full of errant, waving limbs, people leaning over me at the cooker, people dropping glass and metal, whole trays tipping over, people shouting, “if I could just reach the…”, “Can I just…”, “Why don’t I…”, “Where’s the…”, while I reply “This is hot!”, “watch out for the…”, “Where have you put the bloody COLANDER?”

It’s also just a busy day and I don’t make it easy for myself. I got up at 5 so I could get a long run done before the kids opened their stockings at 6. (Meggie was already awake.) The turkey had to go on before 9 a.m. and, because I insist on doing almost all the cooking myself, I always have to miss church and its lovely carols. Despite being an atheist, I feel the loss of it. Christmas is too indulgent without a service and “I had most need of blessing”, as poor old Macbeth says.

It was a little quieter when people were at church, but I went for another quick run, to fortify myself against the terrible blow-out to come, that I intended to avoid anyway.

Then I managed to get the whole Christmas meal out without setting the fire-alarm off. Then I set off the fire-alarm.

And there are other, minor irritations: I always intend to remain as quiet as possible, to hoard my dwindling store of calm and to be able to think of myself as a quiet and reserved sort of person, rather than an over-bearing twat, yet I always betray myself into nervous chattering, which fills my own head, let alone everyone else’s.

I am also haunted, no terrified, by a Christmas pudding, as dense as dark matter, that I made, that lurks in the back of my mind all day. “What if nobody eats it? I can’t throw it out: I love it so. What if I have to eat it myself?!!”

So I get het up and irritable, with an irritability that springs up suddenly, without warning, from apparently empty vents. One moment I’m fine, I’m congratulating myself on my restraint, the next I’m being nasty. Then it’s gone again, leaving nothing but the distinctive hot stink of guilt and humiliation.

Apparently, in Frances Hardinge’s A Skinful of Shadows, the spirits of wild animals can hide in human souls, suddenly erupting at various point in the story. It feels like that, as abrupt and unexpected, as if something snarling and feral and frightened had burst out of the undergrowth, attacking because it felt threatened.

I think I don’t feel comfortable with all these people moving in different directions, with their disparate opinions, perceptions, needs and agendas, basically just being themselves – free-willed individuals doing their own wayward, uncontrollable thing in MY KITCHEN. So, when people suggest things that threaten to go against my careful self-protecting plans I feel the need to stop them. I become abrupt and intransigent in my denials. People start to wrangle with me, to get their own position heard and understood. I can feel the situation getting away from me: I’m not making myself understood; people think I’m angry when I’m not; my words aren’t coming out right. This makes me even more fraught and shouty and I end up being bloody rude.

William Leith, writing in the Guardian about his drink problem (06/01/18), says “without the shroud of a hangover, my mind would feel strangely defenceless; any emotion could just barge in and march around for hours” Substitute the words “extreme hunger” for “a hangover”…

Here’s a haiku I wrote about Anorexia, to keep you going. The idea was to keep the language and subject simple, humorous, and down to earth, as well as earthy, as is in keeping with the tradition. Apparently many haiku are scatological. there’s a famous one by Yamazaki Sokan (1464 – 1552) that goes “Even at the time/ when my father lay dying/ I still kept farting.” (Donald Keene’s translation in the Dover Thrift Editions The Classic Tradition of Haiku)

Anyway:
Resisting recovery

Take a starving man
fill his gut with bread and beans:
now there’s a problem!

Should haiku have titles?

So, it’s Christmas. Merry Christmas! What does an anorexic do a Middle-aged male anorexic do at Christmas? Maybe I’ll tell you later. In the meantime, here’s the rest of my meditation on Louis Theroux’s anorexia documentary:

It’s not just a cry for help, the anorexia of the women on Louis Theroux’s documentary. We need reassurance that we are genuinely ill because hunger generates its own brand of anguish. I am currently relapsing and I can confirm that every day I feel more hemmed in by a looming, baseless sense of threat and alarm. This makes me suspect anger and disdain in those around me.

The suspicion is not without cause: anorexia makes you boring, annoying and intolerant. However, my body does seem to be responding to immanent starvation with an urgent call to arms, possibly to make me do something about it. But, because I’m anorexic, I will do nothing. Soon it will overwhelm me, and then I’ll lose my bearings and sense of perspective and forget that these feelings are a response to a physical lack. Instead I’ll call them “guilt” or “fear” and attribute them to other causes, and these misattributions will then drive my behaviours. Similarly, Ipsana responds with terrified and entrenched defiance, and Janet claims that she won’t eat a tiny biscuit because of the “guilt” that comes from feeling fundamentally unworthy.

Jess, another patient, who is still losing weight replies to a doctor’s question, “how are you feeling today?”, with “quite stressed and anxious…quite despondent I’m doing this again”. She also says “I just feel a bit embarrassed, like I’ve failed, really.” “Stressed, anxious, despondent, embarrassed”: this sounds like the anguished turmoil of the starving, reduced, by exhaustion, to a blurred, uncertain whisper, even in her own mental discourse.

Anorexia appears to offer a refuge from all the complexities and anxieties of life. You don’t intentionally adopt it for this purpose, but, once you have it, hunger is so primitive and powerful that it overwhelms all other troubles. Like one of those debt-consolidation companies that promises to simplify all your debts into one. It demands attention and befuddles all other thoughts, and so it translates all other anguish into anorexia anxieties.

So Janet can say “when you’re starving you feel so bad you feel pain. It numbs everything. It numbs your thinking. You can’t think straight…When my mum died and my sister died I didn’t feel the pain. I was numb I was so hungry”. And this is why Jess’s doctor’s question is pointless. He knows how she’s feeling: survivably anxious, mournfully confused and very very hungry. Same as always. That’s the whole point. Ipsana says “I usually don’t like reflecting on things, especially like this process” Anorexia stops you thinking.

So anorexia promises a solution to all other psychological ailments: because it is simpler and more urgent, it masks other fears and anxieties.  Janet suggests that she lacked control – she didn’t want to get married; she didn’t want to grow up: “I wanted to be a child…The anorexia was my best friend because I didn’t have to do anything because I was sick all the time…It was my own little world that I could hide inside” And anorexia is also easily assuaged, temporarily. All it takes is a carefully planned meal. You may postpone this assuagement indefinitely, but it’s there if you need it.

Furthermore, starvation makes you feel anxious and fraught, so the worries you’re hiding from can seem insurmountable, more threatening, more calamitous, when glimpsed with the added exhaustion caused by malnutrition, as can the struggle to overcome the anorexia itself. The world of the well is a daunting place.

All this encourages you to just carry on managing your hunger, maintaining your soothing, self-hugging rhythms of need, and satisfaction of that need. People who are well can’t conceive of how absorbing and therefore comforting and satisfying tending to your illness can be. Louis Theroux says “It was baffling to find people seemingly so insightful and full of promise who were at the same time in the grip of something so irrational…Making it all the more strange was the way patients valued and held on to symptoms that could end up killing them while recovery was almost always viewed with ambivalence and fear.” Let me tell him: it’s difficult to give up because it genuinely serves a need and something would be lost if we abandoned it. It’s made out of us, and it serves a purpose. As Louis theroux says, “the healthier and the unhealthier impulses get intertwined so that it’s quite hard to separate the two.”

This partly explains why we can talk so calmly and honestly about it, but not throw it off; why we make such odd self-contradictory comments; why Ipsana, after putting on weight, and thus not dying, can say “the eating disorder side of me is obviously not thrilled.”

Interestingly, eating disorder specialists seem to accept this. Anorexia is a chronic condition that we may just have to live with for a while. The average recovery time from anorexia is 7 years, apparently. Ipsana’s doctor says, “We’d always encourage people to go for recovery, but if it’s too difficult we say ‘right, ok, let’s go somewhere in between: you don’t give up the eating disorder because you need it for whatever reason. It’s a way of managing something, and so we’ll help you manage things in a community so you can have some sort of quality of life”

Louis Theroux’s signs off by saying: “Anorexia is an illness associated with appearances but in my time speaking to people with the disorder I’ve been struck by how much it had to do with the deepest feelings of powerlessness and lack of self-worth. It intertwines itself with positive qualities like conscientiousness and self-discipline and makes them poisonous. Demanding from those who have it a daily heroism in facing down an illness often indistinguishable from their own selves.”

“Heroism”! Oh poo, Mr Theroux! Now you’re just trying to charm us! As Jess points out, “it takes a hell of a lot more strength to eat and recover from this illness than it does…to indulge in it.”

I like to compare myself with other anorexics, and the women in Louis Theroux’s documentary, Talking to Anorexia, have some pleasingly familiar symptoms, although, as in-patients, they are much thinner (and, consequently, madder.) There are the similar physical symptoms (cracked fingers, corrupted nails), and, more interestingly, similar behaviours. Like Rosie, I don’t like being watched while I’m eating; like Ipsana, I indulge in truly ludicrous levels of “every-little-helps” exercise. I run everywhere, always take the stairs, and do star jumps every day; she never even sits down, because standing burns off more calories.

I recognise the need to “Walk it off” when we’re unhappy with what we’ve eaten. I’m all too familiar with the fraught, frightened and unyielding arguing and negotiation, as backed into a corner by the pitiless logic of care workers, the threatened anorexic attempts to escape.

I am also deeply untrustworthy when I make promises about eating, just like these patients. We all need supervision and tend to lose weight when sent home and left to our own devices. “Once out of hospital”, says one patient, “give me long enough, and eventually things will start going backwards.”

And I recognise the exhausted brain’s resigned acceptance of an illogical and unreconciled double perspective. This allows Janet to say,when she puts on weight, “I’ve done well, haven’t I?…I’m not happy. I don’t know why I’ve put on LOADS, haven’t I?”

I feel it’s important to compare myself with these women, because they are so clearly unwell, and I need to reassure myself that I am genuinely ill, and not just childishly attention-seeking. This also seems to be the case with them. We often don’t take our own condition seriously.

Ipsana was the best example of this on the documentary. She tells Louis Theroux “I was at a much, much lower weight. My ECGA basically looked similar to someone who’d had a heart attack.” She sounds as if she’s boasting. “It sounds like you nearly died”, Louis Theroux murmurs, sympathetically. “Even now it feels like ‘oh you’re just being melodramatic’”, she responds, but you can tell she’s pleased. She’s reluctant to recognise her anorexia at all, even though she’s been in hospital for 9 months, and admits she wouldn’t be there if she hadn’t been sectioned. Louise Theroux says “I have the impression she’s not really sure she has the illness”.

Ipsana’s truculent defiance seems like an appeal for confirmation. She wants medical professionals to prove to her that she’s genuinely ill to justify the fuss she’s causing. I think this is characteristic of anorexics. On these documentaries, you keep hearing girls complaining that their poor, long-suffering mothers don’t praise them enough when they do well. Louis Theroux says he wants to tell Janet, a 63-year-old lifelong sufferer, just to EAT and this may be what she wants – to make him act like a parent towards her. Her therapist says “they do elicit lots of care from others.” I do this myself: I want Jo to tell me that it’s alright for me to have another piece of bread, even though that would mean she’d have to second guess my complicated motivations, including giving up responsibility for my food choices.

It is ironic, of course, that a condition fuelled by guilt should make us so difficult to be with. I guess that is part of its diabolical, self-propelling ingenuity. We are dependent on others, highly sensitive to what they think, and yet unable to respond to them. We’re horribly blunt with everyone and want to be alone, but then we feel guilty and lonely and worthless and misunderstood, so we medicate these feelings by attempting to replace them with extreme hunger.

Diagnosis provides us with an excuse for all this. Thank God! We’re actually ill! It’s not our fault! But, because the symptoms and causes of the condition are extreme versions of recognisable, ordinary human thoughts and emotions, because it is built out of pieces of us, it seems unconvincing, so we need to constantly demonstrate to ourselves and others that we are genuinely ill by getting worse, by being close to death, even.

I see a therapist called Philip. Did I mention this? He’s fantastic. He charges me half his normal fee because I’m a public-sector worker and don’t earn much. Of course, Jo is well paid, but I pay for this myself, which is empowering, because I’m not burdening the floundering NHS with a condition that I suspect is self-indulgent nonsense. By paying, I can justify wittering on about myself, something you don’t get much opportunity to do in a loudly vocal family.

I saw Philip last Monday. As always I felt apprehensive and reluctant to go, thinking I’d nothing to say and was an imposter. As always, afterwards I felt more wholesome and healthy, though in a very slight, almost unnoticeable, and unspectacular way.

We talked about disenfranchisement, I guess – how, perhaps, I view anorexia as my job: “This is Jo, she’s a deputy head and history teacher at a large comprehensive, and this is her husband, Xan. He’s an anorexic.” Can I identify myself as an ex-anorexic and writer, instead?

I’m very honest with Philip. Surprisingly so, even about thoughts and desires that do me little credit. Perhaps the act of talking about the things that congest my mind – expressed in inner dialogue, but never coming out of my mouth – unclogs me, emotionally. That seems self-evident when you write it down. Anyway, I’d recommend counselling to absolutely everybody in the world. In a perfect society everyone would be counsellor to everyone else. Perhaps that would be the duty you’d have to fulfil to earn universal basic income, because it’s impossible to reach adulthood without sustaining psychological damage: everybody’s wounded; everybody’s been fiddled with, at least a little. At best, we knock bits off each other as we bump together, or rub ourselves against each other.

But, if therapy works, what did we do in the past? All historical societies seem pretty traumatic to me.  I guess the whole of human history has been perpetrated, and recorded, by the psychologically traumatised.

Of course, the people closest to us have the greatest opportunity to knock the corners off us, emotionally. I guess this is why therapists are always supposed to ask you about your relationship with your mother.  And the biggest culprit of all is going to be yourself, and the humiliating betrayals you have inevitably inflicted on your better self, over the years.

Jo and I had one of our periodic moments of emotional sensitivity, last night, where we skip away from each other like alarmed gazelles, spooked by something we can’t properly identify.

On the surface, Jo took fright because I wasn’t very enthusiastic about possibly spending some of my savings on a new sofa. She worries, I think, that if I even conceive of our money as being separate, it suggests that, conceptually, I see us as living separate lives and thus, in some psychological way, I have my bags permanently packed to leave her. I was alarmed by the idea I had upset Jo and made her question the solidity of the relationship that I rely on almost exclusively. For both of us this rawness is the consequence of past wounding, largely perpetrated by my former ambivalence about being in a relationship. Long past, but clearly deeply internalised.

Incidentally, I think I’m more aware of the working of my own brain, these days. This may be due to habits of internal dialogue developed by seeing Philip and writing my diary and blog. I’ve realised that I immediately identified the origins of our sensitivity last night, but then, just as immediately dismissed it as fanciful. For some reason, this dismissal made it very difficult to return to as an explanation for how I was feeling. Or is it fanciful, but writing it up gives it solidity and plausibility? Hmmm.

“’Oh help,’ said Pooh, ‘I’d better go back!’ ‘Oh bother!’ said Pooh, ‘I shall have to go on!’ ‘I can’t do either!’, said Pooh. ‘Oh help and bother!’

I weigh myself on Sunday mornings. I’m down below 57 kilos on our scales. I’m sure this isn’t accurate because I haven’t totally collapsed, as I’d’ve expected, but presumably the trend downwards is correct.

I guess I’m displaying other symptoms of weight loss, also. My arms are maybe a little more veiny and I may have lost a little muscle; I often feel cold and have a cold nose; I’m very tired and have involuntary micro-naps in class if I have to sit still. Mind you, I’m not letting myself sleep very long at night. Looking in the mirror, I see hints, sometimes, of the ghastly yellow-skinned, red eyed spectre that used to greet me. If I do extra exercise my legs feel very slightly shivery.

I’m also getting night sweats and anxious dreams. Last night I had some terrible dream in which I was having a heart attack or something. I awoke sweating and thinking my heart was drumming. I tried to take my pulse, but couldn’t see my watch in the dark. It seemed quite slow. Was it? Was it weak? By that point the particulars of the dream had escaped me. Anyway, I was in a right old pother and worry, now, that I’m going to die in my sleep, which makes dropping off a bit fraught! I seem to spend my life in a state of damped down alarm.

I’m loving my food, again, especially yogurt and honey, and seem, to Jo, very manic and fussy. Certainly, I feel I’m coping less well with the normal argy-bargy of the children and am being a dreadful nag around their food. (Poor kids!)

I do eat, lots, just not quite enough. The problem for me appears to be individual decisions I make, rather than a goal of losing weight. I don’t want to gain weight, but I’m happy not to lose it, either. However, faced with a decision to be made about food, I inevitably go for the low fat, low-calorie option. I “err on the side of caution” if faced with an unfamiliar meal, but with no clear purpose in mind. I guess I want to be in control, or command of my body, and my life, but these decisions are habitual and virtually automatic, these days. For example, I was dithering, on Monday, about whether to have a plain ham roll (279 calories) or a plain ham sandwich (220 calories) for my lunch. After the fright I’d got with my weight, I decided I’d better go for the slightly more calorific option. I was happy with this and felt decisive and forthright as I entered the canteen, yet I walked out with the less calorific sandwich. It was a totally impulsive decision.

I’m also becoming pretty obsessive about exercise. In addition to my daily run, I’m now doing 200 star jumps a day, in four groups of 50, went swimming on Friday, and did an extra run on Saturday and Sunday. The swimming felt very invigorating, and, on Saturday, I really felt I could happily exercise all day. It’s not even about compensating for individual bouts of eating, as it used to be. (I guess you’d call them “meals”, not “bouts of eating”!). Yesterday, finding myself unexpectedly free at lunchtime, I signed out, ran home, got changed, did a 20 minute jog around the park, and got back to school before the bell went. Then, at around 11.30 at night, feeling unhappily full after my dinner, I nipped out for another 15 minute jog. The question is: can I back pedal, before I really go off the cliff? I ought to put on some weight before Christmas, because I tend to lose weight at Christmas. Isn’t that astonishing?! I guess it’s an anorexic thing.