The crew has gone ashore and will be getting drunk. It’s not often they can all leave the boat and risk mild incapacity. In normal times, they have to be ready to take the boat to sea at short notice. But here in the repair yard, the main engines have been shut down and all but immobilised. We have domestic supplies only. The crew call them “hotel” services. 

Normally, when the owner’s aboard, the place is all subdued bustle. When he’s not around, there’s usually someone somewhere playing music. Often several, almost competitively.

But now, all is still and silent. It was all dark until I put on a reading light to tap this out. It did me good to let the gloaming take over.  

I try not to wonder about myself and my tastes too much. It’s a waste of time. But a note in a radio schedule reminded me that next month is the 40th anniversary of Thomas Merton’s death in Bangkok.

It is unwise to blame any particular person for one’s desire to be a monk. But I would blame Merton if anyone in my case. The more I know about him, the less I am inclined to really admire him. But that is not remotely the point.

When I first read Merton as a very young man, he struck me as embodying spirtuality as it applied to young people who wanted to be both modern and devout. Even now, I can’t rewind my initial impression of him. An idea of him is lodged in my person and perception and won’t be budged. Similarly, I think he threw a switch in me, and I am pretty sure I can’t find it and wouldn’t flick it the other way even if I could.

What is so odd is that I remain in many important respects the monk he made me. I have lost most of my faith and changed some of my opinions. But I remain loyal to the idea of a solitary person risking everything to pursue one rather odd approach to taking life seriously and trying to be useful. I find the shape of Benedictine monasticism still fits me. It remains the history that I want to add another soul to. 

There’s more to the Harris trick. The Ghost takes the business of research and makes the plot hinge on several bits of information as they become available. The Blair/Lang world turns out to be as layered as an onion, so the ghost-writer is peeling away stuff which matters to the story. All marvellous. It came as something of a disappointment that Mr Harris actually holds rather pedestrian views on Blair (at least as revealed in newspaper interviews).

The ghost-writer is himself a fascinating character. I see a sort of Piers Morgan: university-educated, but determined not to rise above the low-brow.

I think what made the book so intensely pleasurable to me is that I have spent many, many hours with powerful people – mostly men – and many of them have been dubious, peculiar and perhaps even wicked. I have written speeches for all sorts, and have sometimes counselled people I suspect of wrong-doing. This is always interesting work, and it is almost always exciting to speculate on how strong people accumulatre influence. The point is that it is always mysterious because it is always about the business of accumulating trust. And there is always the great oddity of really getting to grips with the longing of certain people to make a really big mark in the world. Mr Harris’s ghostwriter wrestles with his thoughts about Lang much as I often have done as I deal with corporate leaders and plenty of others.

Holroyd describes how Irving rose at 5am to swim in the Thames before work. The day done, he attended a “school of arms” in Chancery Lane. Reminiscent of something very similar portrayed in Bleak House, it taught him how to swashbuckle. (By the way, he might have attended to the kind of dancing class also found in Hard Times.) And then to elocution class (attended then and for decades since by most British people keen to get ahead). £100 allowed him to invest in the costumes and kit which equipped him for life on the stage.

The point is that he was just a clerk, but - like millions of his countrymen – he had the imagination and the means to better himself. In my talks with corporates, I call this self-entrepreneurship. It’s not a pretty neologism, but the idea is that one invests in oneself both as a person and a sort of mini-business. Samuel Smiles would have understood.   

“The 1950s were a good time to be a writer in Britain. Change and the redistibribution of priotiries and wealth were everywhere in political, economic and cultural spheres, yet the vantage point that individual thought and creativity stands on was peculiarly solid. Living was cheap and improving materially faster than its cost… [Social gaps were still large] but in the 1950s social permanences that had been bricked in until the war turned out not so resistant after all, and the many-accented voices of the suburbs and provinces, the not-public-schooled, not-county-housed, were no longer bricked out.” (Reference: Semi-invisible Man: The life of Norman Lewis, by Julian Evans. Page 363)

The lastest examples I have of the great and the good succumbing to the ridiculous affectation of enjoying this barbaric festival of testosterone come from last Saturday’s Financial Times. In it we learn that is the game of choice of (Jacques) Herzog and (Pierre) de Meuron, the designers of the Bejing Bird’s Nest. They designed the ground used by FC Basel, their home team. Now they are designing a ground for Portsmouth FC (a club which has the merit at least of being proud of its family following).

Lest I be taken to mean that there is no merit in football, I supposes I ought to concede its usefulness to the international investigators trying to understand the wrong-doings in Darfur, as retailed in the FT (26/27 July 2008). They resorted to talking football because they found it difficult to discuss the matter in hand. Who can blame them?

Question is, did he not know he was causing offence? Not care? Or believe – rightly – that his audience was white and in on the joke? Or believe – rightly – that TV-owning blacks would take the same humorous view of bush-dwelling blacks? Or believe these things, but wrongly? Anyway, I resist the idea that those were dark days when no-once cared about racial issues. (I notice that a new website deals with some of this stuff: The Black History Museum) For sure, though, the BBC would not broadcast such remarks now, unless of purely archival interest. And I rather think they turned the volume down as they showed us these vivid moments.

Typically, I had thought of the great man even as I looked down from 35,000 feet at a trans-Mediterranean ferry cleaving the sparkling briney. I would have been on it if my conscience had been in better nick.

The funny thing is, reading JP makes me feel less guilty than just dreaming him up. This latest piece berated politicians for not promoting a post-growth economic and social creed. Mr Porritt seems to believe that this absence of leadership is blameworthy. He may think (but doesn’t really say) that the public can’t be blamed for not getting the message, because their political masters haven’t pushed it.

I’d have thought that there is very limited scope for democratic politicians to get ahead of their voters. Voters have been on the receiving end of twenty years of green campaigning, and it has become the leading orthodoxy, so if the masses choose to ignore the green message I’m inclined to think that it may because they’re living life the way they prefer.

I got almost cross with the Porritt message at the end of his column. He seems to feel that if voters won’t lead or be led toward “sustainability” then it’s just as well a recession will show them the way.  

This argument suggests that recession will give people a taste of green living – and pehaps a taste for it. We’ll see. I can imagine that people may learn that a camping holiday in Britain is even nicer than a Tuscan villa. But it won’t stop people hoping that the recession passes and they can be more confident that their mortgage is safe. 

I think that Jonathon Porritt believes that there is a large spiritual as well as an ecological deficit in modern life. He thinks people ought to embrace a radical alternative. Maybe they should. But I haven’t, and I know very few people who have. I mean that I know monks, greens, environmentalists - exactly the people who understand Jonathon Porritt’s message and even share it. But in every serious respect almost all of them go on living lives which are well short of radical transformation in a green direction.  

For the life of me, I can’t imagine what would radicalise people. An apocalypse might force such a change, or fear of one. But I don’t think an abstract concern for humanity or the planet will. And I find I can’t despise my fellow-humans for not being as altruistic as Mr Porritt thinks they should be.

Nor is it quite an absence of altruism. It’s more a sense that they don’t want to give up their definite delights for hypothetical improvements accruing to others.   

Let’s leave aside for a moment whether these men are on to anything that will work. Everything about their coming together is a great American story. We meet an immigrant theoretical physicist (Klaus Lackner) who believes carbon can be scrubbed from air. He meets a climatologist (Wallace Broecker) who is inclined to agree. Lackner (as Columbia academic) worked on a late incarnation of the Biosphere project, the failed dream child of a Texan billionaire (Ed Bass). It was an attempt to replicate the earth’s atmosphere in a manmade bubble. There’s a practical mechanic (Allen Wright) who is fired when the Biosphere finally fails. His brother (Burt Wright ) is a Tucson fireman who works with ventilation systems. Broecker hooks all these men up with a further billionaire (Gary Comer), who agrees to fund an attempt to build and (patent) carbon scrubbers.

The team have made some kit which works. To cut to the chase, the US would need tens of millions of units about the size of lorry containers. (Quite how many depends on how many big power stations mop up their carbon emissions at source.) Luckily, these container-sized units could be anywhere, and they could be near disposal sites for the carbon-dioxide waste they’re designed to produce. But disposal seems to be a whole other dimension of problem.

I imagine that whether we “solve” climate change, or merely survive it, the story of the solutions we find will often look like this. Academics, mechanics and entrepreneurs will be crucial, and chance, inspiration and adventure will be at the core of it all. Quixotic people will turn out to have been invaluable. 

In previous series, I have relished his saucy little Alfa Romeo Spider, and – even more – his scruffy little blue speedboat. His runabout isn’t big and it isn’t smart, but it is very chic. It’s of a piece with Francesco’s easy familiarity with his waterworld. In the new series, we were taken to Francesco’s pretty litle island in the lagoon, replete with a retreat in hut form. Naturally, I warm to such a place, especially if it’s a base for travel.

That brings us to Francesco and the new heights of boatiness he has achieved. He’s off with a crew of stripey-jerseyed lovelies on a yachting cruise from Venice to Istanbul. The Black Swan, his schooner-home for the journey, is extraordinarily lovely. I don’t have many amenities in this corner of the Mediterranean, but satellite TV is one of them, and I’ll be glued to this show.