What does your perfect day look like?
For twelve years in a row during January and February and a bit of March, Ian Fleming flew off to his Jamaican hideaway, a beach house called Goldeneye, near to a little banana port called Oracabessa, to write a James Bond novel.
Recently, I was reading about Fleming’s daily routine.
And I have to admit, it’s a thing of beauty.
I’ve typed it out below:
I get up with the birds, which is to say about half past seven, because they wake one up, and then I go and bathe in the ocean before breakfast. We don’t have to wear a swimsuit there, because it’s so private; my wife and I bathe and swim a hundred yards or so and come back and have a marvelous proper breakfast with some splendid scrambled eggs made by my housekeeper, who’s particularly good at them, and then I sit out in the garden to get a sunburn until about ten.
Only then do I set to work. I sit in my bedroom and type about fifteen hundred words straightaway, without looking back on what I wrote the day before. Then about a quarter past twelve, I chuck that and go down, with a snorkel and spear, around the reefs looking for lobsters or whatever there may be, sometimes find them, sometimes don’t, and then I come back, I have a couple of pink gins, and we have a very good lunch, ordinary Jamaican food, and I have a siesta from about half-past two until four.
Then I sit again in the garden for about an hour or so, have another swim, and then I spend from six to seven – the dusk comes very suddenly in Jamaica; at six o’clock it suddenly gets very dark – doing another five hundred words. I then number the pages, of which by that time there are about seven, put them away in a folder, and have a couple of powerful drinks, then dinner, occasionally a game of Scrabble with my wife – at which she thinks she is very much better than I am, but I know I’m the best – and straight off to bed and into a dead sleep.”
There are three lessons here:
1. Cultivate the pleasures of eating, sleeping and drinking
2. Get some sun on your balls
2. Consistency is key
The text is an extract from an interview Fleming did with Playboy, just a few months before his death in 1964.
Playboy re-published the interview in 2012. It contains a host of wisdom and insight, as well as knowledge about 007 you won’t find anywhere else.
In fact, the magazine has re-published a lot of their old interviews as a big Kindle book. Worth checking out.