I've drifted in and out of vegetarianism for years.

I suppose what I can say is that I do feel I have a natural spiritual sensibility.

Anyway, yes, telephones but not mobile phones, fish and chips still wrapped in actual newspaper and still with some kind of flavour, people visiting each other without having to consult their appointment diaries, not being able to record anything from the television; if you missed it you missed it - these were all the kinds of thing that made up the normality of the seventies.

You might call this innocence. I had a sense of another world that had not been spoken of to me.

I'm constantly struggling with the futility and even sinfulness, from an antinatalist point of view, of creativity. And that struggle itself seems part of the creativity, though I sometimes suspect that it's nothing but a burden and an obstacle.

Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.

Some people have described Daoism as pantheist, and although there's something in me that resists this designation, I can see that Daoism is consistent with pantheism. If there is any way in which pantheism makes sense and is not redundant, then it is the way (or 'the Way') presented in Daoism.