Where 007 is really buried

It's 2nd April this year, and I'm on the north Cornwall coast at Boscastle. I'm in the churchyard. And a gravestone catches my eye: James Bond. 

So this is where the famous secret agent, aka 007, the man licenced to kill, has ended up! 

Not really, of course. It's another chap named James Bond, a local man I'm guessing, and the gravestone says he was a devoted husband and father, not a spy. Born in 1915, died in 1981. 

The James Bond of the books by author Ian Fleming was, in World War II, a very young commander in the Royal Navy (which is why he is sometimes referred to as 'Commander Bond' in both the books and the early films starring Sean Connery. I have a book published in 1964 by O F Snelling called 007 James Bond - a Report, a very good read if you can find a copy, in which the writer analyses the appeal of the man by looking at his predecessors, his image, his women, his adversaries, and his future (Mr Snelling writer couldn't of course possibly have guessed what was in store, and would - like Ian Fleming - be utterly astonished how 'James Bond' has become a worldwide myth, the universal symbol of the sophisticated man of action, even today). 

Mr Snelling made a very close study of what Ian Fleming wrote, and deduced that in 1945, when the War ended, the James Bond of the books must have been in his mid twenties, which put him in his early thirties for the first book, Casino Royale, published in 1953. (Which makes the James Bond of Boscastle too old to fit the fictional Bond's shoes, as he would have been forty-two in 1953)

Snelling himself was an interesting man. You can look him up in Wikipedia, and discover that he actually had connections with the spying world. He also knew Ian Fleming. 

My Dad was an avid reader of the Bond books from 1962, when Dr No, the first Bond film appeared and the whole country suddenly took an interest. I too quickly became enthralled by them, as they offered a glimpse of a glamorous world hitherto unknown to me, including exotic ladies like Pussy Galore in Goldfinger. It's no great exaggeration to say that I went from Beatrix Potter to Ian Fleming in almost one leap. In between were insipid school stories that bored me. I remember receiving a school prize around 1960, a book for young girls called The Mad Martins, unbelievably juvenile and dull. It was so bad I thought they must have handed me the wrong prize by mistake. But Bond was not juvenile, nor dull. Bond was grown up, a state I yearned with all my heart to enjoy in 1962, when unfortunately I was only ten. I had a long wait ahead. I speak from my personal experience, and nothing more, but childhood for me was a long, mostly boring, wait until I could escape into the adult world. Something to endure, like time in prison, and not a lot to cherish. 

Did I later regret not having a successful childhood? I do think now that I ought to have got much more out of it. But I didn't know how. I can say with conviction that I've never regretted getting out into the wider world and discovering so many things that were hidden from children of my generation. 

Is access to the Internet detrimental to a child's mind? Well, I can only say that I would have avoided so many worries and misunderstandings if I could have found proper answers online. I could have discreetly looked up the many things that puzzled me, and the knowledge gained would have quelled unnecessary anxieties and boosted my self-confidence. I would surely have aimed higher than I did. I would have been stronger, and not so compliant with the expectations of my parents and others. Being a naturally solitary person, I wouldn't have become a social media junkie, nor a social media victim. I'd only want to know about things, and develop my own ways of thinking. 

So I believe you can't have enough knowledge. Ignorance is not bliss. It's a trap.