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.   

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. 

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.

Years ago I used to think Kingsley Amis was tiresome with his anxieties that English as she is spoke and writ was going to the dogs. What a lower middle-class anxiety that was, I thought. And all muddled-up with academic snobbery. Now, I want to avoid my own outbreak of middle-aged grumpiness by getting my irritations of my chest. I shall only remark on the bad habits of broadsheets. I don’t want to take cheap shots. Here’s a couple for starters. Oops. “Here are a couple…?”

(1)   ”Fed up of”
This is very awkward. There is no reason why one should not be “fed up of” things, any more than that one should be “tired of” them. But, sorry chaps, the habit of saying one is “fed up with” things is simply the habit of people who care about language.    

(2)
“Had of….”
Lots of speakers who should know better use: “If he had of gone to Rome” instead of “If he had gone to Rome”. They are probably sloppily carrying on from the feeling that, “He would of gone to Rome” is as good as, “He would have gone to Rome”.

A reader challenges me that he doesn’t believe I could have seen this usage in a broadsheet. I agree that I haven’t seen the former, but I swear I’ve seen the latter. (Can’t remember where though. Damn it.)

(3)
“He use to..”
I saw this the other day, as in “He use to go to town”. Of course, this might be a sub’s typo (and missing “d”) rather than someone phonetically taking sloppy speech into sloppy writing. “He used to go to town” is an odd usage, for sure. I suppose it’s an elision or an elipsis or an eliding of “He was used to go town…”.

Nixonland is a vivid piece of work. It’s almost a film script. It sets scenes in the most deft way.

Perlstein describes the emergence of the hippie-straight split, as I said. Eggheads and hard hats were ranged against one another. Nixon managed to ride the massive, unpredicted surge of reaction, patriotism, religiosity, plain clean-ness with which so many Americans met the new world. Nixon experienced a new politics in which he could herd “hard-hat” natural Democrats into the Republican fold. Much of the anti-Vietnam war sentiment which McGovern expressed produced the effect that Nixon gained votes as the man who would most likely stop the war. Nixon could never actually have a victory, because he only really felt the defeat which nestled within it. In 1972, he had an enemy Congress. (”So that’s how they’ll piss on this thing”, he said, or words to that effect.)

This business of making the lower orders vote for capitalism has usually had an element of patriotism to it. That’s the ancient conservative game when it comes to making poor people vote against their own interests. or to be more subtle about it: conservatives have to persuade poor people that preserving the rich is the only way to banish poverty. The flag shoos in the waverers. Nixon succeeded by dissing the peace movement and offering peace.

The right often wins by seeming economically capable, even if it means the rich can’t be squeezed until the pips squeak. But they need populism to pull the rick off. Reagan did it by being a down home boy who offered economic vitality to all. Margaret Thatcher did it by being the anti-establishment provincial promising that she could snatch power for the people from the unions. David Cameron seems determined to go back to Peel’s old formula: a Tory delivering enough Whig policy to be very attractive.

So as we look at McCain vs Obama, do we think Perlstein’s thesis is at work? In all the endless discussion of Obama vs Clinton, Obama was more liberal-elite than Clinton, and had plenty of black appeal too. Wow. No-one could have predicted the first bit of that equation. That left Clinton, the entitlement, establishment candidate trying to look hard hat. It wasn’t easy. And then there was the internet, bringing cash and support from quarters no-one had ever tapped.

In all, it seems as though Perlsetin may be describing a politics which is largely dead. America’s choice is – as usual – tricky. The Republicans are offering experience, volatilty, courage and a big dollop of liberalism (that is, leftish policy). Oh, and a candidate the most active Republicans don’t like. The Democrats are offering blackness, youth, vigour, vagueness, the internet, inexperience and a big dollop of liberalism.

If that picture’s right, then Perlstein story of paranaoia, fear and one great cultural divide has shattered into a far more complicated and nuanced picture. But also a much more relaxed one.

A lot of people who have come to me for spiritual counselling have wanted to talk about their sex lives. So you may gather I am a bit of an expert in the field. The first thing I’d say is that you can never predict from appearances who likes to use prostitutes. The second thing is that it’s impossible to predict what fantasy will turn on whom. So when we come to the Max Mosley case against The News of the World, I have views:

It wouldn’t be his fault if Nazism looms large in his life
Everyone knows the Nazis were sexy – all that leather and doing the dark thing
One can do Nazi sex fantasy without being a Nazi
Anyone can do Nazi sex fantasy without having a fascist father
Doing a Nazi fantasy is nobody’s business but one’s own
Newspapers shouldn’t be allowed to prey on Nazi fantasists
He wasn’t doing anything even like full-on Nazi fantasy

On the other hand, it may not matter if Max loses because:

He could go on leading Formula One without difficulty
It’ll give us all a chance to show we don’t give a damn
It’ll remind us that all our games may become public and none of it matters

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.