Silly, but not too silly, to consider over weekly vodka martinis, they have proved a precious refuge and may yet see my group of
Friends through until we can see No Time to Die
Back in March, just after the first lockdown was declared, I started going to the virtual pub every Saturday night with a group of six schoolmates. Most of us hadn’t spoken regularly for many years, so our weekly Zoom sessions were a precious opportunity to share our thoughts on work and parenthood, to swap anecdotes from our schooldays, and to confess our hopes and fears for the future.
We didn’t want to discuss our situations, it turned out. We wanted to escape from them. Within a month, real life was confined to the opening minutes of every conversation, and bonding over Bond accounted for the rest. Within two months, we were assigning ourselves homework. Every week we would watch a Bond movie, and then debate its merits over beers and vodka martinis. At first, we tried to vary the programme with non-Bond films – all right, then, Carry On Cowboy – but this initiative was killed off as quickly as the untrustworthy Spectre lieutenant in Thunderball.