The name's Ronson, Jon Ronson

This is the centenary month of Ian Fleming's birth. Consequently, everyone is going Bond crazy. There's an exhibition at the Imperial War museum dedicated to Bond aesthetics, and so on. It's all a mystery to me. His expensive cars and elegant suits leave me cold. In fact, I've only ever been in a fancy James Bond-type car once, many years ago. It was a Porsche. The owner - the comedian Steve Coogan - wanted to demonstrate its brilliance to me. He pointed at a button. "Press that," he said. I did. The lid of the ashtray whirred gracefully open. "Did you see the smoothness of that action? Do you see how the ashtray just opened?" I looked mystified at him and at the ashtray.

Are all these Bond fans just empty-headed, or am I missing out on something? I hate not understanding things. And so I have an idea.

I phone Zoe Watkins at the Ian Fleming Centre, the literary estate. She's known within Bond circles for having an encyclopedic knowledge of the books.

"I want to recreate a great Bond journey," I say. "I want to take a passage from one of the novels and assiduously match Bond car for car, road for road, meal for meal, drink for drink, hotel for hotel."

"What a wonderful idea," she says. "But which journey do you want to recreate?"

"I dunno," I shrug. "One in Moonraker?"

"Moonraker is basically a drive from London to Margate," Zoe says. "Fleming's fans were disappointed by the absence of exotic locations."

"Goldfinger?" I say.

"Well," Zoe says, "in Goldfinger, Bond drove an Aston Martin DB3 from London to Geneva. He stopped at the Hôtel de la Gare in Orléans, had dinner, drank an awful lot, drove the next day to Geneva, checked into the Hôtel des Bergues, ate and drank an awful lot, and then the journey ended with him getting captured and tortured by Goldfinger's henchman, Oddjob, in a villa near the hotel."

"It's perfect!" I say.

"Great!" Zoe says. Then she turns serious. "For copyright reasons," she says, "it's essential you make it clear you're following in the footsteps of James Bond and you aren't actually James Bond."

There's a silence. "OK... I'll make that clear."