Cleverly using his own Bond-mania to underscore the hold that 007 exerted over male Britons of a certain age, Winder recalls preparing for his first real job as a bookseller abroad: rushing to a gentlemen's clothing store called Tropiccadilly, which specialized in "late imperial nonsense" like "bewildering hats" and "devastating tropical weight sand-drill suits," to purchase Bond-inspired gear.
Thinking back now, he writes, "a tiny voice says, 'You looked like a moron,"' but at the time, he adds, "I felt great and hardly noticed the gap between Bond's own sex-and-murder-themed foreign travels and my own mission to sell disturbingly out-of-date computer textbooks to Cameroon schools." The young Winder also did his best to emulate Bond's self-possessed knowledge of "where to go, whom to tip, how to behave" as he "hailed airport taxis, stalked into lobbies, inspected hotel suites, erratically tipped ('It will do very well — keep this'), ordered drinks."
In real life, James Bond would be in his 80s now, but he is one of those literary characters like Peter Pan who never age and never change. Just as the books and movies follow a familiar formula, so Bond himself, as Winder writes, is at his most reassuring when "like a hamster with his wheel, he performs the same narrow set of functions over and over — the scenario, the seduction, the foiling of the plot, the killing of the villains."
For Winder, Bond, like the queen, remains a curious "fossil remnant" of an imperial attitude that has long since vanished from the rest of Britain.
"The queen must presumably spend some part of the day," he writes, "moping about how her dad had been king-emperor, had the allegiance of a quarter of the planet and had been treated in some quarters as a god, whereas she has to wander around the streets expressing interest in the lives of ladies holding plastic flags with ice cream dripping down their fronts. Bond shows no such introspection or reskilling. It is a very odd aspect of contemporary Britain that a country which is almost unrecognizable from the one which nurtured Fleming (aside, of course, from the occasional survival, such as a seemingly unstoppable urge to despoil Iraq) should still, for so much of the world, remain the country of James Bond."
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