You don’t need me to tell you that there is a surfeit of news about. Your correspondent is eating tinned soup whilst ‘doomscrolling’ an assortment of feeds covering a smorgasbord of disasters: the terrorist attack in Vienna, Covid restrictions and government by headless chicken at Westminster, and – of course – the presidential election in the USA. Furthermore, domestic refurbishment has left my kitchen in pieces with no end in sight. If I seem a bit distracted today I think I may be cut some slack.
However, in a bid to offer some elegiac light relief, the clip above features the late Sean Connery as James Bond in Goldfinger, Guy Hamilton’s 1964 adaptation of Ian Fleming’s novel. This particular scene offers Bond the chance to offer some random insights into the mysteries of the distilling process, and acts as a knowing send-up of the 007 project as a whole. I offer this to mark the passing of Sir Sean and the passing of an era. I have been working on a dissection of Fleming and the Bond phenomenon but I will leave that for another time; to be honest, I’m finding it hard to concentrate at all, and I’ve just discovered that my boiler has packed up. And the latest news is that John Sessions has died of a heart attack … I will conclude this short and sad entry with this clip featuring the man in his element, telling a quick and dirty joke. RIP.