It is a long time since I recorded any thoughts on this blog ... I may have more time now that I have finally 'retired'. I am certainly glad to be free of the often absurd burdens of administration in the higher education sector, to be free of its institutional anxieties and tiresome neuroses. On the other hand, I miss teaching, which I enjoyed.

I wrote something for a Guardian discussion a couple of weeks ago, about whether a university can have a soul .... Meanwhile I have undertaken a salutary exercise, copying out by hand a series of recently published papers which I want to form into a book length study of the idea of philosophy and its relation to religion and spirituality.

Once you start to write out what was once a finished piece it becomes fluid again, and you see what was tentative and what was wrong and, occasionally, what makes good sense. The other advantage is that you gain a panoramic view of a set of preoccupations that are not as it were finished with you, you see yourself circling round the same points, again and again, see the same metaphors at work, the same dependence on a key phrase or trope ...

There are six rams in the garden, obligingly munching away at the grass ... three Shetlands, a Texel and a couple of Suffolks.