Shared Opinion

6 September 2008

A new cold war means spies. But what can Russia offer Oxbridge graduates these days?

The old USSR was like Hugo Drax, my favourite Bond villain. That was Moonraker, you’ll remember, the last film with Jaws. There were some differences: the Soviets wanted workers of the world to unite, Drax wanted to kill everybody from space and repopulate the planet with his own handpicked master race. Mere details. The point is, despite each being bonkers and dangerous and wrong about almost everything, each also believed themselves to be a force for moral good.

You could respect a Hugo Drax. You might shoot him with a strange wrist dart and send him spiralling off into space, but at least you felt he was a man with a sense of his- tory. Putin’s Russia is more like your standard Goldfinger clone, who just wants to hold the world to ransom again. That’s why Oddjob was in it for the money and wound up dead, whereas Jaws was allowed on the spaceship with that girl with the pigtails. Dolly, I think she was called.

As is traditional for a columnist on holiday, I found myself last week adding a new item to my wobbly, eclectic list of ‘things that make me feel very British’. Americans and their lack of kettles, Europeans and their lack of toasters. That sort of thing. This time, I was near St Tropez, and I had just paid €19 to sit on a beach.

They also gave me a lounger to sit on and a parasol to sit beneath, so it is not the price, particularly, which I am moaning about. Elsewhere in St Tropez, after all, you would be hard pressed to get a sandwich for that. Still, the idea of somebody charging me in order to sit on a beach seemed... strange. No. Scratch that. It seemed more than strange. It seemed morally wrong. In Britain, I was always told, land between low tide and high tide is the property of the crown. In practice, that means it is everybody’s and nobody’s all at once.

Stand in a British park, even, and you are dimly aware of being on land owned by somebody or something. A British beach, though, feels like un-space. You can walk along it, as far as you are able, and you won’t be trespassing. Is that right? It feels right. It feels important, too. A little nugget of reassurance, connecting man with land.

It’s certainly not like that in France. Lay down your towel on the wrong bit of beach, and officious little people can come up to you and tell you to go away. And they do. Unless you pay €19.

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.