It’s been 196 days since I last sat here in my local pub – drinking coffee obviously, it’s only 3pm – to write this blog because I firmly believed that the blog I really wanted to write – the triumphant one that tells the world that against all the odds I’ve finally found the inner resources to haul myself out of this black hole of emotional and psychological inertia – was one that I’d never be well enough to write.

After two years of cognitive, social and professional paralysis I was re- signed to the fact that I’d never even come close to being the person I’d been before the depression took hold of me.

Such was the crippling day to day, minute to minute anxiety that was continuing to shrink my existence that any dreams or normality were just that; dreams.

After my last fleetingly hopeful post in late March things somehow took a turn for the worse.

Prior to April I’d at least been able to rely on my physical health despite my mental fragility but probably due to the compound physiological strain of months and months of incessant daily stress my body started to crumble under the pressure.

A heavy cough morphed into a hacking bout of pleurisy which several rounds of antibiotics – combined with the ineffectual antidepressants I was already taking – failed to quell.

Then came the joy of a urinary tract infection, which ultimately manifested itself in a grotesquely swollen right testicle, which ballooned to the size of a plump grapefruit.

Before I knew it I was on an intrave- nous morphine drip for 48 hours at my local hospital and being pumped full of enough drugs to tranquilise a horse.

Bizarrely this anatomical distraction fuelled a (very) short-term spike in my mental health and for 24 hours after I left hospital I was so fixated by my gargantuan gonad – by then only the size or a ripe avocado – that I almost forgot I was depressed.

The distraction was short lived though and normal dysfunctional ab- normality returned with a vengeance and my already subterranean mood nosedived.