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.

In good times, I argued that one had to find grace in advantage. One had to become worth the good fortune that had been heaped on one. In bad times, one has to find grace in adversity.

Indeed, I am old school. I believe that the surest way to grace is through humiliation. Not everyone makes it by any means. Lots of people, faced with adversity, find only bitterness. That’s why we seek to diminish adversity: we’d prefer the problems it brings.

I’m not at all sure that one either is or is not tough enough for grace. I think many people can produce spiritual toughness. It’s like running - or what I’m told running is like. There’s pain and then pleasure, but the pain is manageable for most people, and the pleasure very real. Spirituality is like that.

I didn’t wish this recession on people, and I worry about those who won’t survive it. But then I accept that grace and spirituality - like toughness and courage - are not give to everyone. For the weak, only being loved by the tough is any use.

 It’s not a good business model to have one’s services in great demand, but from people who expect help without having the means to pay for it. Of course, in my case it doesn’t make much difference to my personal circumstances since I give most of my income to my old monastery and to other charities. Still, I’d rather have kept the accustomed flow in decent health.

That’s how it is. High-end spiritual and business consultancy is much more profitable in good times, when firms are free to blow some marginal cash on feel-good stuff such as my own offer. Now, I am getting an increasing number of cries for help from individuals who’ve squirreled away my email address during encounters in happier times. I am not yet in the position of Ringo Starr, who has said he’ll no longer respond to requests to be in touch by strangers.

But I am close to it. I was very happy to spend lots of time with consultees when we all got something useful from the experience. I got income for the needy and the pleasure of being with interesting people. The consultees got - well they got whatever they got. It was their choice. But consulting by email for no fee, well, that’s a very small pleasure to me. In fact it’s a chore. I’m not going to persist with it for much longer.

I am inclined to think that it is old-fashioned to obsess on the physical remains of the dead. The soul - whatever that is - has moved on and the rest is just, well, gristle. So I was a bit suspicious when I heard that the New York authorities were trawling through twenty-some thousand human remains - some of them beyond vestigial - and attempting to identify them. Put it another way: it seemed odd to reunite the bereaved with the remains of their loved-ones, again however vestigial.

The testimony of Shiya Ribowsky (not least in his book, Dead Center), the senior coroner leading the project, put me right. A devout orthodox Jew, he clearly believes there is meaning in his work and he has the kind of manner which puts second-guessing at a discount. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.

His work is of course driven by technological capability. Since we can now interrogate the merest smudge of human remains, we are bound to. Mourning a representative “unknown soldier” was a moving thought, but it doesn’t survive our ability to identify the remains of all the fallen.

I think the point of the post-mortem forensic DNA work is that it is an attempt to overcome the randomness of the 9/11 slaughter. We have to accept the Humpty-Dumpty nature of the world: we can’t unstir custard. But what terrorists can blast into anonymity, we can to some small extent put together and are bound to want to.

I am growing in sympathy for adopted people who want to know who their biological parents were. A M Homes found herself recognising her biological father’s backside, as she writes in her A Mistress’s Daughter. Not all of it, just aspects. She felt herself connected to this man even though she had reason to resent him. We will never know the precise role of genes and biology in our make-up, and not least because it almost certainly is not remotely precise. I did think she was a bit self-obsessed about her quest for identity. But then - I realised - it is never quite fair to accuse good writers of being self-absorbed. It is in a very real sense what good writers do. What’s interesting about Homes’s case is that she is aware of the modernity of her quest: we may not what genes and DNA do exactly, but we know that we are somehow code-bearers. Homes writes very well about the degree to which bits of her biological parents stick to her, and even of her irritation that she can’t choose those parts, though her four parents variously chose her and chose to abandon her.

The case of the remains of John Henry Newman, the brilliant 19th century English Roman Catholic, reminds us how peculiar and enduring the thread of human remains can be. The Catholic church wanted to relocate Newman’s remains as a precursor to their being the object of veneration and his possibly becoming a saint. God is assumed to transmit his grace through shards of human remains. Or is it that saintly remains hold a remnant of his grace, rather as material may hold radioactivity? The point is especially well made granted that in the absence of remains of the Cardinal’s body in his grave, the church is having to make do with a few threads of clothing which have survived there.

For some years I made repeated if half-hearted attempts to become an advisor to Tony Blair. I dared to imagine that I could help him wrestle with the problem of reconciling his urges to be a warrior and a Christian. Anyway, he - or his people - didn’t bite. When I read The Ghost, I found myself missing the essential dilemma in describing (or satirising) Blair. Harris does describe how one never knows whether Blair actually had any conviction or was merely an actor. But Harris avoids altogether the greater piquancy, which is whether Blair had a rather barmy religious conviction about his higher purposes. What’s interesting about Blair is not only whether he had convictions but on what he based whatever convictions he had. Anyway Blair is much more interesting than Lang is.  

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.

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.