I have just been overwhelmed by listening to Monteverdi's Quinto Libro de Madrigali, I suppose I was very tired after travelling and my physical body was relaxed but it was all so exquisite as though my spiritual body were in the hands of a skilled lover with the lightest touch ...

For a while I have felt uneasy about talk of life having a 'meaning' and I noticed a similar expression being used in an extract from an interview with Tom Stoppard in the Independent: the 'search for meaning'. It seems to me that the search for meaning is already futile (rather like the search for happiness) because meaning (like happiness) looks after itself. The image that occurs to me comes from teaching the other day in a basement room, during the recent storms affecting the North West coast. I had been talking about the metaphor invoked in the notion of 'spirit', that of 'breath' or 'wind', and as I was doing so the wind could be heard whistling around the building, not very loud but quite constant, and you feel it under the door and through the extractor fan in the window, and there we were in our bunker and there was the wind, making its presence felt, something heard, outside the bunker, and we started to listen to the sound it was making, and it seemed that this just was the metaphor of wind, something heard, a sense of something that lies outside our normal awareness ... something that tells us that there is indeed an outside. What is interesting is not that someone finds a meaning in life, it is what they find gives it meaning, and that is more important than the talk of meaning itself.