I used to sleep in my office, W. remembers that. I’d unroll the sleeping bag I kept in the cupboard, and lie under my desk. All the better to get my work done in the morning! All the better to keep working halfway through the night! I’d wake up, bleary-eyed, and eat a day-old discount sandwich at my desk. I’d wake up, and brush my teeth in the bathroom, before anyone had arrived at work.

And then I’d get to it, W. says. Or imagine I was getting to it. I’d work, W. says. Or imagine that I was working. Because I wasn’t working at all, was I?, W. says. I wasn’t advancing in my thought. I wasn’t testing myself, running forcibly against my own limits, was I? I wasn’t reading philosophy, and I wasn’t writing philosophy. I was administering, W. says. I was lost in administration. I taught, it’s true, but I taught like an administrator. I gave lessons like a bureaucrat. Really, I’d become a galley-slave of philosophy. I’d become a drone of thinking.

In the meantime, in the southwest, W. would spend whole weeks preparing his lecture courses. Whole weeks, distilling his latest researches into something teachable. He would spend months carefully crafting his lecture notes, going over them again and again, writing up the research notes he made for his own studies. And what would I do?, W. says. Crib something together from Wikipedia, or whatever they had back then. Cobble something together from Sparks Notes, or some other online rubbish. Draw on one of the innumerable introductions to philosophy, the introductions to this or that thinker, this or that idea, that everyone’s writing.

Of course, that was before I bought my flat, W. says. It was before I made my amazing decision to invest in a property. It was before my damp years! Before the years of rats! I hardly knew what a slug looked like, did I? I’d barely ever seen a mushroom up close. And damp was something I read about in books, W. says. Something I associated with slums, with tenements.

W. invested in a Georgian town-house, he says. In a former ship captain’s house with three stories and marble fireplaces. He moved into a house which didn’t need a bit of work. He made a study of one of the third floor bedrooms. He rose early each morning, and was at his desk before the sun had even risen above the Plymouth rooftops.

And what about me, W. says. Dare he ask? Dare he even consider the mess I had got myself into? It was like The Blob, W. says. It was like X: The Unknown, he says. I was living in the wilds, W. says. I was living in the philosophical wastes ...

The electricity failed in my kitchen, and began to fail in my living room. The walls turned green, then brown, then black. Rats settled beneath my floorboards. What horror! What horror! And how did I respond to my new surroundings?, W. asks. How did I hearken to the philosophical muse? I wrote, W. says. I blogged. Because that’s when they began, my blogging years, didn’t they? That’s when the years of raving began.