From Russia With Love

I remember a house on stilts. A sidewalk. Really stiff grass. (It hurt when I crawled on it). And bugs. Big bugs. If one got in a shoe, the shoe would move across the room. There's not much else unless I watch the home movies my father use to shoot. I'm not sure if you can remember anything before you're five. Maybe even six. I know I don't. If I didn't have those home movies I wouldn't believe I was from Panama. In one of the movies there's a guy called Uncle Ian. He's holding a long silver stem with a cigarette attached to the end. Turns out that Uncle Ian was Ian Fleming. The creator of James Bond. My mother says she knew him from her time working for Joseph Kennedy in London just after World War Two. They reconnected in Jamaica where Fleming owned a large property called Golden Eye. I was at the "Eye" when I was four. If I try to regress there's something about being underwater. The memory of the "being" isn't really clear. Maybe this is where I get my attachment for desert island cartoons. Fleming's first book Casino Royal was published in 1952. It's hard to find in decent condition. A fine copy goes for four figures. I've got an inscribed copy to Alan Turing. The guy who helped break the enigma code and enable the British Navy to keep up with the whereabouts of Nazi submarines. When books are inscribed to friends or family, fellow authors or well known people... they're called "association" copies. There are degrees of associations. If you got the one that's inscribed to the person the book is dedicated to... you've got the top, the best, the one and only. To the mother or father, son, daughter... the second best. Premium association copies are what book collectors are after. I like to think of my Casino Royale copy as something that might or might not exist. You've heard about it, but you don't believe it. I mean really... from Ian Fleming to guy who broke the enigma code...?