Learning to sit still again

© Simon Poulter 2017

Holidays. You wait, impatiently, all year long for them to come around, and then once they arrive, you can't decide what to do. Well, at least I can't. Some can pitch up at their hotel, unpack and then flop onto a sunbed for the whole fortnight (or four weeks if you're French), headphones clamped to ears, a couple of airport paperbacks to thumb through to keep boredom at bay. Me, I'm a restless soul before I've even touched down. In fact, I need to unwind before I can unwind.

I've never been one to spend a couple of weeks just basting in Factor 50. The holiday hire car provides me with the mechanism to escape that. On my last Italian holiday - to the baroque south-east corner of Sicily - I had 'Montalbano Country' to explore, the comuni of Ragusa, Modica, Scicli, Donnalucata and Punta Secca that aggregate to form the fictional Vigatà depicted by Italian TV's Il Commissario Montalbano. Indeed such is my slavish exploration of pop culture while on holiday that I've spent vast chunks of trips to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami behind the wheel, nerdishly looking for filming locations for The Rockford Files, Bullitt and Miami Vice. I once spent a wet Sunday morning traipsing around a suburb of Seattle in search of Jimi Hendrix's grave. You've got to be in it to win it.

For this year's 'summer' holiday I have consciously stayed clear of America (largely to avoid Trump's increasingly divided and, frankly, insane territory) and returned to Italy. Specifically, Sardinia. Having spent so much time in my beloved Sicily I decided to break 'new' ground. All I knew about this island was that it has exceptional beaches, is expensive, wealthy Italians from the mainland like it very much (along with the megayacht-owning classes), and The Spy Who Loved Me was partially filmed here. Actually, that was all I needed to know.

In fact, it was a charity screening of the film, following Sir Roger Moore's death in May, that drew me to Sardinia: TSWLM was the first Bond film I was taken to see at the cinema (the Granada in Kingston) and it has stuck with me - despite there being better Bond outings - as quintessential to the oeuvre. From the pre-title sequence and 007's apparent Union Flag parachute departure to its denouement within villain Stromberg's aquatic lair, its final third revolved around what appeared to be a landscape of exotic European beaches, all budgie-smuggling posing pouches and leathery overtanned skin.

Here marks the aspirational aspects of Bond: yes, his lifestyle is one few can afford, let alone sustain, but if you squint very hard, you, too, can visit the same locations and at least imagine you're 007. Even if you're driving a rented hatchback, rather than a gleaming white Lotus Esprit S1 armed with anti-aircraft missiles, mines, torpedoes and a cement sprayer. Oh, and which converts into a submarine.

(Top) Q hands over the Lotus to Bond at the quayside at Palau
(Bottom) Porto di Palau today
© Simon Poulter 2017

Inevitably, then, before I could settle in to my holiday and devour a pile of rock biographies under a withering sun, I had to satisfy my craving for film trivia. First, this entailed a long drive up the thrilling coastal road near Sassari along which Bond and his Russian counterpart Anya Amasova (Barbara Bach) in the Lotus are chased by, respectively, a motorbike and rocket-as-sidecar combination, the steel-gummed Jaws and cronies in a Ford Cortina, and then Navy's Rum girl Caroline Munro apparently flying a Bell Jet Ranger with machine guns.

It's hard not to hear TSWLM's mid-70s synth soundtrack in your head as you swoop and swerve around bends in the road which look uncannily familiar. But, of course, instead of assassins and helicopter gunships, the most daunting challenge you actually face are the endless platoons of Dutch and German motorhomes clogging the island's coast roads.

Most of the film's Sardinian scenes were shot in and around the Costa Smeralda, which draws a pretty wealthy (some might say Eurotrash) crowd each summer. It is prime Bond territory, adorned with well healed tourists dressed atrociously but expensively, and who are not afraid to stock up on more atrocious and expensive garb in the exotic shops of Porto Cervo, a town seemingly purpose-built to serve yachtists. Not for nothing are there branches of Louis Vuitton and Gucci right smack in its centre. Which is about all the town has going for it. If you like expensive sterility combined with an architectural similarity to The Flintstones' Bedrock, then Porto Cervo is for you.

© Simon Poulter 2017

Around the coast - whose principle interest is a series of absolutely stunning beaches - is Cala di Volpe and another TSWLM location, the Hotel Cala Di Volpe used by Bond and Amasova as a staging point before heading out into the Mediterranean to visit Stromberg in his giant submersible. The hotel is über-glamourous, but with rooms starting at Eur 300 a night, and a bottle of San Pellegrino water in the lobby bar going for Eur 15, you can see why it would have appealed to Bond's somewhat stratospheric tastes.

But with Bond interiors mainly shot on the giant 007 soundstage at Pinewood Studios, it is somewhat mad to walk through the hotel and realise that you're actually in a James Bond set.

More insanity follows when you sit down with your expensive bottle of water in the lobby bar itself, looking out onto the hotel's private bay, and discover that you're right in front of where Bond first meets Munro's saucy 'Naomi', as she takes him out to Stromberg's lair under the disguise of being a marine biologist.

(Top) The Hotel Cala Di Volpe's private jetty © Simon Poulter 2017
(Bottom) Bond is met by Naomi as she whisks him off to Stromberg's submersible

There is one more must-see port-of-call on this Bond pilgrimage, just around the coast from the hotel, and that is the beach at Romazzino where Bond and Amasova emerge implausibly from the sea in the Lotus, having out-manoeuvred Stromberg's undersea soldiers and reconverted the vehicle back from submarine and into a mid-1970s British sports car. You can tell it's era simply by the fact it shared its door handles with the Austin Allegro. Not for nothing was this marque known in the motor trade by the acronym Lots Of Trouble Usually Serious, which means the idea of a Lotus of that era being capable of travelling on land, let alone under water, without something going wrong was a true stretch of the concept of suspension-of-disbelief. Still, the scene in TSWLM is one of the most memorable of any Bond film, and Moore's incongruous ejection of a sizeable fish out of the window as it emerges from the turquoise waters was brilliantly in keeping with the somewhat camp humour that marked his period as 007.

(Top) The beach at Romazzino where (Bottom) Bond and Amasova emerge from the sea in the Lotus Esprit
© Simon Poulter 2017

Sardinia certainly provided TSWLM director Lewis Gilbert and his location scouts with some glorious settings. Indeed, if you simply associated the Costa Smeralda with the word 'beach' you probably wouldn't need to think of anything else. No wonder it draws hordes of German holidaymakers here. On roads like the SS125 that snakes through this northern tip of the island, every third car seems to have a German number plate. You notice that on the way to your hotel from the airport at Olbia, a warning sign that any time spent around the hotel pool will require a tolerance of that age-old Teutonic custom of grabbing sunbeds with dawn-defying enthusiasm. Yes, I know, hoary-old stereotype, but not without merit. It would appear that customs honed on the beaches and at the hotel pools of the Costas, the Balearics and the myriad Greek islands are equally exportable here.

Sardinia is a big island, probably as large as Sicily, and therefore from experience one you'll never cover in two weeks, not if you want to spend some time, at least, reading a book and dialling out the crap you have to deal with for the other 50 weeks of the year. And just like Sicily, where I have split my visits according to whether I fly into Palermo in the north-west or Catania (or, more recently Comiso) in the south-east, Sardinia is a choice between the Galluran north or the south around the island's capital, Cagliari. For my Sardinian debut I'm glad to have taken the northern choice. With its myriad coves and exquisite, alabaster-white beaches, each with dreamily romantic restaurants and cafes looking out onto implausibly warm, azure waters, you can't help feeling that, even if you're not traipsing around churches, museums and ancient burial grounds, you're not entirely denigrating the island's culture. Or its geography.

Sicily is an enchanting island, with an interior of dramatic mountains with towns bewilderingly stuck to them like limpets on a seashore rock. Sardinia possesses a similarly dramatic volcanic interior, but the landscape is gentler, even more welcoming. Driving up into the hills, or hopping from coastal town to coastal town, grabbing a caffè here or a panino there, is as relaxing as lying next to the pool for a solid two weeks plodding through the latest Grisham (especially if, as I tend to do, you've got a fully-loaded iPod to plug into the car's Bluetooth audio system). Indeed Sardinia's roads are the closest you can get to flying your own plane without a pilot's licence (or...er...a plane) - bends that require your absolute concentration, but with a rhythm to the steering and gear changing that becomes both exhilarating and relaxing at the same time.

As you drive, towns you wouldn't expect to hold any interest do so. The port town of Palau - visited as part of my absurd Bond obsession - is actually a very pleasant place to stroll. Further north, Santa Teresa Gallura - the gateway port to Corsica, a mere 11km across the water - is a picturesque gathering of pastel-shaded houses below a main square with its cafes and easy-going restaurants.

© Simon Poulter 2017

It's one of those quintessential towns you probably only ever visit on a Mediterranean holiday: wander away from the tourist crowds on a hot afternoon and you wonder where life itself has gone to.  Siesta time, even in this corner of Italy, is one of stillness and shuttered calm. It's the sort of environment that draws the romantic to dream about buying holiday homes (just don't - however TV's Homes Under The Sun depicts it, it never turns out as you'd imagine it to be...). Wandering around deserted streets like these, finding shade when you can, is another part of satisfying the restlessness spirit I take with me on holiday, that prevents me from just chilling out poolside. Exploration like this might not come to anything - no souvenirs bought, no locals engaged in conversation - but it still draws me far closer to the place I've come to stay in than occasionally ordering a cappuccino from the pool waiter, and then trudging off out each evening to eat pizza. Nice as such holidays are for some, such excursions here in Sardinia have done what any holiday should do in resetting and recharging, and providing fresh perspective on the daily routine and doldrums that, after two weeks, you inevitably have to return to. You know, bills to pay and all that.