All was quiet in the Papworth Mansion as I crept noisily along the creaky corridor and down to the computer room at six thirty. By the time my host emerged for breakfast at eight thirty my work was done and The Idea of the Resurgence Group of Institutes was strutting about in the public domain looking for converts.

I left Purton after breakfast and was home in Llangolman by one o’clock. First thing tomorrow the car has to go into the garage in Crymch. The exhaust is fading fast...or worse still the head gasket is getting ready to blow. This had to happen just as my daughter is coming back.

I stopped off at Glandy Cross for milk. Ten minutes later I staggered out £8 poorer with a WWII film...Head in the Clouds...and the Sunday Telegraph under my arm and red wine and a loaf of bread for company. No these last two items were not for holy communion. We had earlier given half a thought to entering that hotbed of Anglo-Catholic Fundamentalism in Swindon but decided against it. Men choristers wear surplices. Women choristers do not...lest they get ideas above their station and clamour for admission to the Church of England. God forbid! And let him forbid women in particular! It can’t be easy being Rowan Williams.

Some day one member of our Resurgence Group will be in South America. Here is what I wrote to Constanza: ‘I like where you are heading with Pensart. You'll be doing a lot of commuting between Mexico City and Bogota by the sound of it. You might care to think about the 10-year future in terms of the idea of the university embedded in the universities in Catholic Medieval Europe...with particularly attention to how the medieval university model should be scaled for the modern world. Perhaps you should start an institute for their study. This institute should be bilingual from the outset in English and Spanish.

Bogota is as good a place as any. Donate one of Pensart's five rooms at Gimnasio Jose Joaquim Casas...or start from a bench under a cherry tree in the garden. The institute's sacred works will include the writings of great medievalists like Erasmus and Aquinas as well as more recent thinkers like Cardinal Newman. His 19th Century essay on The Idea of The University had a major impact on thinking about schools and universities. And The Idea of a Christian Society by that Anglo-Catholic Yankee T.S.Eliot is well worth a read. If your father were starting out today I think he would be doing what you are doing with Pensart. So the Jaime Leal Institute would be a fitting legacy.

Kohr's Idea of The Academic Inn will also have a vital part to play in any future infrastructure for learning. It is available in English on the Academic Inn website. I would be honoured to be invited to be the first scholar in residence at the Bogota Academic Inn. We should be thinking in terms of a six month term of office from 1st April 2007 to 30th September 2007 and work towards making this happen.

It might also be worth talking to Toni Pinschof about taking on the next stint from 1st October to 31st March 2008. Job sharing. The subject of a proposal for Swedish Euro MPs five years ago. We are gearing up to ask for money for a Kergroaz-Vraz Institute in Bretagne which would complement what you will be doing in Colombia. But more on that another day. It will come out in the weblogs anyway as I need to do some work on the funding proposal for the Goldsmith Foundation next week. We are coming at them from all directions.

I have been in print off and on for 25 years. So I have become pretty blasé about the whole thing. Editors have been known to mess around with my purple prose. But despite this I can always recognise my own writing when I see it. Until now. Above my name and address in the latest issue of Fourth World Review is a letter headlined ‘War!’. ‘I took it from an e-mail,’ exclaimed the editor quite aghast at the implications of this erroneous attribution. ‘Don’t doubt it for one moment, old chap!’ saith I. ‘But the e-mail wasn’t from me!’

So unprecedented is this that I have dreamt up a theory, a motive and a suspect. Kurt Vonnegut sent the letter under an assumed name. Mine. I am the victim of identity theft. Judge for yourself. Here is what I am told I wrote: ‘A brilliant piece by Kirkpatrick Sale. My own view is identical save in one respect. He gives the present US system 15 years - I give it 4. It does seem that Bush & Co are all set to act in some way against Iran within the current presidency. I monitor all Bush’s speeches and he is quite relentless on this point. He refuses to rule out military action - and keeps on saying so. We shall see. More strength to your elbow!’

That last sentence...the strong elbow bit...could have been me. But ‘monitor all Bush’s speeches’? Excuse me. I can waste my time on better things. However Old Man Vonnegut at 84 has time on his hands. Listen to what he’s been saying to a Sunday Telegraph reporter: ‘Civilisation will come to an end when we run out of fossil fuels. I would guess that would be in the next five years. Human beings are pretty hardy so they will probably go on for a bit. But within a hundred years the last one will be gone.’ Five. Four. Forty five minutes. Mere technicalities. I rest my case. Who can I sue? Do all old men in a hurry preach ‘Armageddon in my lifetime!’