Nothing has been touched or improved in this room for decades. Nothing has been added or taken away. There is the bare minimum of furniture and nothing on the walls. John Pawson would be proud of me.

I do watch satellite television: I had one installed in the communal sitting room of the retreat. I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the documentary on the Prince of Wales the other night on UK TV. 

He is a wonderful and infuriating man. The royals have that extraordinary attention to detail. When the prince pinned a medal on a soldier’s chest, the details of the citation were clear in the royal mind. When he spoke to the soldier, it was as a father, a commander, an awe-struck fan - and almost as a priest. Charles was the state personified. And one realises that such moments are repeated day in day out.

Charles also embodies a perfect oddity in the human spirit. He could charter a large and rather vulgar yacht for a royal visit to the Caribbean and seem no more or less out of place on it than he did discussing the classically rustic hermitage to which he daily retreats when he is at home in Highgrove.

He and I could not be more different, of course. But we share a taste in boats and cells. 

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. 

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.

It’s an abiding mystery that the very rich don’t feel the pinches that the ordinary rich do. Sunseeker, the yachtmaker, said the other day that their multi-million speedboats were keeping the business afloat even as the bottom end of their market was feeling the pinch. There will always be plenty of multi-millionaires to buy Hirst, even in the depth of a recession.

In Hirts’s case, we have all the conundrums that art always presents. After all, we have no idea whether his pieces will grow more valuable as works of art, or be stripped down for whatever their raw materials are worth. In short, his works may be thought risible quite soon. Or not.

Then there’s the intriguing business of what Hirst will do with his loot. He might just become an ordinarily rich person. But it is just as likely that his wealth will be folded back to us all as his audience. Perhaps he’ll start a gallery or a foundation. Whatever.

Roughly speaking, the problem is this. Capitalism is prone to bubbles, but they really do differ in degree and kind.

Here’s a morphology.

(1) Stock Bubbles
At their most pure (The South Sea Bubble, the 1717 Mississippi Company), these are stock schemes in which there is no actual economic activity. But these readily get confused with, say, the 1990s Internet Bubble - in which there probably was a real business. Greed and irrationality underlies bubbles, but at least in the Internet case, people were aware that something big and real was happening. Tulipmania sits somewhere between the two, as does the art market. Will Damien Hirst’s productions get melted down for their gold?

(2) New instruments
John Law, who was behind the Mississippi Company, also came a cropper when he tried to engineer a new currency for France. But he wasn’t operating as a crook when he did the latter: he was inventing new approaches to currency and was - hardly surprisingly - out of his depth. 

This is a little like the muddle modern banking has got into as it recently sliced and diced sub-prime debt.

Indeed, many of these dramas turn out to be schemes which are crucial to capitalism’s future - it’s just that the pioneers don’t post large enough warnings as to the riskiness of innovation.

(3) Straight frauds
Some bubbles and some new instruments are introduced as straight frauds, or as screens behind which straight frauds can be perpetrated. Thus, Enron’s crime was very like the fraud perpetrated by Jabez Balfour in the late 19th Century. Enron was playing with energy futures and other devices which few people understood, just as Jabez was playing with new schemes for insurance and housing.

Enron and Jabez were developing schemes which in non-criminal hands would turn out to be valuable.

In conclusion…..
Many capitalist pioneers turn out to be crooks. Or, many crooks turn out to be pioneers. It’s spotting the difference which makes for entertainment.

Anyway, there are no signs of crookedness in the present crisis. Regulators encouraged bankers to get careless as they invented new wheezes. The bankers overdid it. The bubble burst.

The books excerpted in the R4 series
The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D Wattles
The Moneymaker by Janet Gleeson
Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
Metamorphoses XI by Ovid 
Tulipmania by Anne Goldgar
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
The Reformation of Manners by Daniel Defoe
The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
The South Sea Bubble by John Carswell
Tulipmania by Anne Goldgar
The South Sea Bubble by John Carswell
Extraordinary Popular Delusions by Charles Mackay
The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan
A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith

I would add:

Millionaire: The philandere, gambler and duelist who invented modern finance, by janet Gleeson
Jabez by David McKie

When the bodies of her crew were found floating off the island, it was never seemed likely that The Ouzo just sank of her own accord. It turned out that the regular run of a P&O ferry, the Pride of Bilbao, took it to the very near vicinity at the probable time of the accident, whatever it was.There is much speculation as to whether it was involved. In the ensuing inquiries and court cases, the bridge officers of the ferry were accused of being less than thorough and thoughtful in their response to what they admit was a close encounter with a yacht (which they claimed to believe had probably passed safely by). One officer was tried for manslaughter and aquitted.

Oddly perhaps, I find my sympathies going to the crew of the ferry. Of course the families of the yacht’s crew have suffered a terrible loss. And the ferry’s officers may not have behaved brilliantly. I am emboldenedin my view partly because I have often been on the Pride of Bilbao and anyway feel a quite undeserved connection with people who make their living on the sea.

By default, not liking to criticise the Ouzo’s crew leaves the blame to drift inexorably to the larger ship. This seems a little unfair.

I am also drawn to the wide range of technological solutions available to yachtsmen as they take their cockleshells out into commercial waters. Here are some of the devices and tricks which would have diminished the chances of such an accident happening being fatal (in no particular order):

(a) Stay out of shipping lanes at night;
(b) When a ship is near, shine a beam alternately at the sails and the ship’s bridge;
(c) Have an AIS ship-ID and course-plotting radio (£500);
(d) Have a watertight radio receiver and transmitter to hand;
(e) Have a watertight mobile phone to hand (£16 sachet);
(f) Wear a crotch-strap on one’s life jacket;
(g) Have a strong watertight cockpit door and shut it;
(h) Have an emergency position transmitter on one’s lifejacket;
(i) Fit an active radar signal enhancer (£500). 

So far as I can see, a small selection of these items (culled from sailing blogs) would have been very helpful.

I shall now go and do some of my very timid Mediterranean sailing, and probably cock it up.

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.