Free Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Orléans, had dinner, drove the next day to Geneva, checked into the Hotel des Bergues, and then the journey ended with him getting captured and tortured by Goldfinger’s henchman, Oddjob, in a villa near the hotel.”
    “It’s perfect!” I say.
    “Great!” Zoe says. Then she turns serious. “For copyright reasons,” she says, “it’s essential you make it clear you’re following in the footsteps of James Bond and you aren’t actually James Bond.”
    “I’ll make that clear,” I say.
    I buy the novel. The journey seems even better once I read the ins and outs. Bond was trailing Goldfinger and had planted a tracking device in the boot of his Rolls-Royce. So Bond’s life was out of his hands. He had to go wherever Goldfinger went. This frustrated Bond, especially when he spotted a pretty woman in a passing Triumph. Under normal circumstances, Fleming wrote, Bond would have pulled her over to have sex with her, but he couldn’t because “today was for Goldfinger, not for love.”
    My journey, too, will be out of my hands. I’ll have to go wherever Bond went. I wonder how many passing women I’ll decide not to have sex with en route to Geneva. Probably loads.
    I telephone Aston Martin. They enthusiastically offer me an Aston Martin Vantage for three days. They love the Bond association.
    “How much would the car normally cost?” I ask Matthew, Aston Martin’s press officer.
    “Eighty-two thousand pounds,” he replies. “Plus I’ve put in about nine thousand pounds of extras.”
    “Like an ejector seat?” I say.
    “Extra-soft leather,” he replies. “And a connection to plug in your iPod.”
    “Oh, REALLY?” I say. “An iPod connection?”
    The Aston Martin was Bond’s car of choice because he knew that if he lost Goldfinger’s scent, “he’d have to do some fast motoring to catch up again. The DB3 would look after that. It was going to be fun playing hare and hounds across Europe.”
    On Wednesday a very elegant man called Hugh delivers the gleaming silver Aston Martin to my house. “Wow!” I say, politely. But I don’t feel it. I’m like a sociopath when it comes to expensive cars. I feel no emotion.
    Hugh shows me the interior. The leather is soft and red and hand-stitched. The dials are silver. The speedometer goes up to 220 mph. And there’s the connection for the iPod! I’m going to really catch up on podcasts on this journey, I think.
    Hugh is like Q, running through the gadgets. He shows me the button that turns on the sensor that bleeps when you’re reversing and you’re about to hit something. Then he shows me the button that turns the sensor off “if it gets annoying.”
    “How would that ever get annoying?” I wonder. “Unless you’re reversing for miles. But who does that?” And suddenly I feel ever so slightly Bond-like. These gadgets are mine now. According to Aston Martin’s website, it took one hundred people one hundred days to build this car. There’s a gang of boys watching us. I only half notice them because I’m lost in my unexpected Bond reverie. But then one of them crosses the road and leans in through the window. He looks about twelve.
    “Do you know what happens to people who drive cars like that around here?” he says.
    “I have no idea,” I reply in a voice that sounds half Bond-like and half petrified. “Why don’t you tell me?”
    “They get hurt,” he says.
    There’s a silence. “Oh, really?” I say.
    “Yes,” he says.
    I turn away from his stare and look straight ahead.
    “What would Bond do in a situation like this?” I think. He’d probably stab him in the face.
    “That was a terrible indictment of our country,” Hugh says, after the boy leaves.
    “Wasn’t it?” I say. And then—with a roar of the engine—I set off for Dover and the P&O ferry.
    James Bond did not take the car ferry to France. This is the one part of the journey where my plans must diverge from his. He headed instead for Lydd Ferryfield Airport, in Kent,