I’ve been a James Bond fan for years. When I was growing up I used to love watching the movies on the TV and as I got older I started going to see them on the big screen. I’ve seen Bond films in English, Italian, Spanish and French – and even if the dubbing was dodgy at times I still enjoyed the films.

Since then I’ve acquired a few first editions of the Ian Fleming novels (Jonathan Cape editions) and even one or two props from the films (all small low value stuff) and my sitting room is dominated by one of the posters.

A couple of years ago the Imperial War Museum in London held an exhibition to celebrate the life of Ian Fleming. I managed to orchestrate a few things so that I could get over to London to see it.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the Bond movie franchise (SkyFall is coming out in October) and the Barbican is holding an exhibition on the iconic design of the Bond universe. So this time round I’m not making any excuses – I’ve simply decided to head over to London for the weekend to see it. I’ll probably do a couple of other things and catch up with a few people over there at the same time, but the main reason for my trip is the exhibition. (And as a sidenote, the Barbican’s customer service team have been wonderful to deal with when I ran into issues booking tickets online)

I’ve been reading some of the press coverage of the exhibition and it sounds amazing. Their press release covers a lot of the highlights and here’s a video that shows even more:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/NTcB49fXNZM[/youtube]

I’m really looking forward to it!