Fact is, I am hitching a ride as this behemoth plods in fuel-economy mode. We’re cruising under cloudy skies from its temporary lodging near my Balearic home to have some refurbishment done in my favourite shipyard at La Spezia. Yes, I know the yacht’s owner. But I know its skipper and crew better. I am – as so often – halfway between being a guest and a governess (to use old countryhouse terminology). I know the people at the yard too, and love to be around the craftsmanship they lavish (at huge cost) on the boats they service. This yacht is a vulgar monstrosity, but I have often very much enjoyed myself on board. When we arrive, we’ll see some spectacular, elegant, antique schooners of the kind favoured by old(ish) Italian money. I prefer those, but then I’m a snob.

Ah. Back to my young friend’s remark. I will get to it. Later.

“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)

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.

 I may come to that in another post. And I ought to wrte a bit about the bits of Lewis which remind me of James Bond. But for now, I want to note a line of thought of Lewis’ which Evans thinks is of importance. This is that Lewis liked tribal people because they had a sort of

sublime humanity, supreme humanity

and said that he was (in Evans’ words) 

looking for the people who had always been there, and belonged to the places where they lived.

There’ a paradox, of course.

He believed in his own escape reflex (constant de-adherence) and  in the grace of harmonious cultures and of those who belong to them (constant adherence).

I do absolutely see that someone like Lewis is importantly unattached to the places and people he visits for all that he is wholly absorbed in them whilst he’s there. That’s famously the case with journalists. But I have become very sceptical of the admiration of our civilisation for those who are condemned to  what has been called “compulsory belonging”. Ours is a civilisation with flaws, of course. But I don’t think we are wise to believe that only people with tatoos done with sharpened bones have spiritual authenticity.

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.   

I am a natural royalist. Monarchy, opera, hunting and monasticism are similarly irrational, even absurd. And well worth defending. It would be tempting to do so because they are ancient. But that might take one toward celebrating torture and wouldn’t help you to defend opera. No comfort there, then. The best defence of any of them is that they are glamorous.

Princess Anne is the patron of the organisation which looks after the lighthouses of Britain’s northern coasts. But she’ s said to be a collector: an acquisition pharologist. It seems a wonderfully batty thing to be, and wholly admirable. The Times says she’s going round, ticking them off like a bird twitcher. Some, she sails to with her Navy husband.

Lord knows how she gets to the others. Probably on some sort of service vessel, as Robert Louis Stevenson did when he was still trying to prove to his father that he wanted to be a lighthouse engineer. That was before RLS tried to persuade his father that he wanted to be a lawyer. The story is beautifully told (though there’s not enough on lighthouses) in Claire Harman’s RLS biography, which I’d say is destined to be a classic. RLS was not keen to be a lighthouse engineer in the way of his grandfather and father. But he did like any kind of sea voyage and even went diving (at one his father’s sea defences) when to do so must have seemed a very hazardous thing to do. Like Anne and her husband, he liked married yachting, renting a schooner for Pacific cruises before taming bits of a tropical rainforest. Always thought to be on the point of death, discomfort and adversity seemed to invigorate him.

By the way, the Harman biography notes that Stevenson’s religious father’s wrestles with Darwinism matched those of Edmund Gosse’s father (who had his own seaside obsessions, as a naturalist). That story is told in Ann Thwaite’s biography of Gosse, which well matches Harman’s for sympathy and vigour. Gosse met and liked RLS, but then so did everybody, including, eventually, Henry James who didn’t take to him at first. (The correspondence between James and RLS, an almost incredibly different pair, made a neat book of its own.)

In the TV show, we sail toward the lighthouse on its islet off the Croatian coast. Francesco buzzes over from his schooner (The Black Swan) in a rib, and we meet the lighthouse keeper. It looks in every way an encounter with a charistmatic loner. He’s the kind of man I thrill to.

Online, I discover even better news. It seems one can rent an apartment and courtyard at the lighthouse. This what I really like: spiritual tourism. It’s my oxymoron of choice. I strongly believe in temporary monasticism, even if one shares one’s isolation with a partner. I accept that the pair pair be lightly hedonistic. None of that is quite penitential enough for some. But it can be very valuable as well as enjoyable. It goes toward the examined life.

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. 

My generation – the 60s baby boomers – heard very little good about the right in America. It was all part of the lazy superiority we felt about the non-liberal world. We vaguely felt there were those nice Kennedy’s and then the awful rest. Those other Americans who weren’t signed up to the creed were inclined to wear pointy hats and white sheets. Those Yanks! George Wallace was a particularly despised politician. But Barry Goldwater was up there too as a public enemy. 

This new book is edited by Goldwater’s son Barry, and John Dean (the Nixon associate and commentator). What comes zooming out of these pages is a portrait of the kind of politician we are in severe need of. Goldwater and his handsome wife zipped around the world fueled by James Bond quotients of Martini. The senator had been a lively pilot in an age when people expected to have larks. (These were the real, liberated late 1940s and 1950s – not the stuffy age as portrayed by 1960s radicals.) In one hilarious episode, Goldwater explains how he fetched up in a Mexican jail, having quite literally lost his shirt to a fellow convict, and bounced a cheque on his gaoler when he bribed his way out of chokey.

So we find someone who is relaxed in his own skin. He is also in love with the wilderness world of Arizona, his home state. In this, Goldwater’s enthusiasm strongly echoes the writing and sentiment of Ed Abbey or Doug Peacock, people of a later – hippy – generation, my own. What’s more, he shared these enthusiams with his wife. And that reminds us of the passion of John McCain’s western wife for horse-trekking in western wilderness. Goldwater’s wife and McCain’s wife may look like perfect, uptight blue-rinses. But that’s only because we don’t bother to inquire of them properly.

At the heart of the book is the stomach and the rather beaten-up male member of Misha Vainberg, the son of a dead gangster who was the 1,238th richest man in Russia. Our hero’s mind and heart come into the thing, too. The mind is rather messed up by  drugs, and the heart is in a perpetual state of yearning for a black girl met when Misha was studying multi-culturalism in New York.

Comic writing has to have a heart if its own. It needs to be merciless, but it has to have a fragile fingerhold on fellow-feeling. Misha is a mess of appetites and weaknesses. But he is as likeable as he is hapless. He would like to be good. In his (very exciting) adventures, he is very nearly brave. But he is up against a world in which everything is shifting too fast and too chaotically for it to be very clear what goodness might mean.

Very few cominc novels are brilliant at geo-politics, but Absurdistan takes us on a giddy tour of the power struggles of our world. At the same time, it is a hilarious account of second rate post-modern thinking.

All in all then, this is comic writing to put alongside Waugh’s Scoop. That it survives the comparison is saying something.