Remind me not to go to Greenwich for the foreseeable future. I was just on a walk over there, and even on a Sunday afternoon, the place is bedlam. However, as often happens, while I was on my walk I got round to doing some thinking, and began to mull over something which I think I’ll sketch out here. I was pondering the Olympic opening ceremony, and the sketch with the queen and James Bond. When you think about it, some quite interesting things are going on there: we all know that James bond is a fictional character, created by Ian Flemming in 1952. Yet last week we saw him interacting with a real person, the queen, at a real event. Of course, it is testimony of the impact of the Bond Phenomenon on our entire culture that they chose to use this particular character in such a prominent way, but on another level something weird is going on. The queen is real, and she addressed bond as if he were a real person. Does this mean that bond is a real person too? If that is so, why would the queen need escorting to the Olympics by such a highly trained government assassin? Why would they film such an event, presumably breaking his cover? Most worryingly, if bond were real and double o agents do exist, then that implies this country has a highly secret group of government assassins running about the place who are above the law – something totally undemocratic and very, very scary. On the other hand, if bond is indeed fiction, would that not imply that her majesty is fictional too? The only things which usually interact with fictional characters are other fictional characters, after all. Yet if that is so, it implies that the Olympics is not real either, at that was the event this entire sketch was a precursor to. When you think about it, there are some very complex rhetorical structures in play here.

What we have, then, is a strange postmodern blurring of fiction and reality, where real people have entered fictional spaces and fictional characters are treated as if they were real at the highest level. Does that not strike anyone else as odd? I might be slightly crazy, but it fascinates me. As I say, I’ve sketched out the bones of the debate here, but I think I’ll continue to ponder this and return to it in other entries. I wonder if there are any other instances of such blurring. I’m sure there probably are, but has such a device ever been used at such a high level, and what does it say about British culture, royalty, power, the bond franchise, and everything else?