Philosophy and Backgammon

From an online interview with Hugh Mellor:

Cogito: One of your passions is the theatre, and I believe that you still act. Is there any connection between that passion and your commitment to philosophy?

Mellor: Only that they are both things that I feel quite passionately about and want to pursue as long as I can. The only moral I would draw from this is that it's probably bad for people to treat philosophy as an all consuming vocation, to which they should devote their whole lives. I think it's healthy from time to time to get right away from a subject with the pretensions that philosophy rightly has. That makes you see and think about the world in a way that's fresh and independent of your philosophical ways of seeing and thinking. So the theatre is for me, perhaps, what backgammon was for Hume.