One of the first times someone called me a racist was because of James Bond. When you've been a Bond fan as long and lovingly as me, you become accustomed to certain cycles in the public life of 007, and one is that every decade or so the current Bond will quit and newspapers will start speculating about the new one.Most media groups don't actually have a dedicated embedded Bond correspondent (I know this because I have made enough inquiries, with CV and motivating letter attached), so this speculation is largely balderdash and horsefeathers and exists principally for the purpose of promoting the brand, filling column space and getting suckers like you and me worked up over something that doesn't yet exist and doesn't matter in the slightest.Roger Moore held onto the job longer than most, but near the end of his run - when his run was more like a stiff-legged saunter to the breakfast buffet - the release of each new movie elicited a rustle of replacement rumours, some no doubt planted by publicists looking to secure airtime for their client. At one point local radio DJ Kevin Savage was allegedly on the short-list, raising the unsettling spectre of the world's first moustachioed Bond. Then a few years later it was Eddie Murphy.I was a fellow of strong opinions back in the late 1980s, and one of the strongest was that Eddie Murphy could, should, must never be James Bond. It would be sacrilege, a crime against the laws of God and Nature. That's when someone called me racist.I thought about that. Maybe it was true.My interrogator persisted. Could I really not imagine a black superspy?Huh? Black? My objection wasn't that he was black. It was that he was American.For me what set the Moore-era Bond aside from other action heroes was a certain imaginary Englishness: good manners and clean shirts; occasional cravats; a way with cufflinks. My father, who despised the English, loved Bond for his Englishness. Roger Moore wasn't the Bond of the books but he was the Bond of my childhood and that's what mattered: children revere continuity and tradition far more than adults should.This week saw fresh waves of blather about who will replace the surly Daniel Craig. Idris Elba? Or maybe Gillian Anderson? Will it be, ridiculously, that kid from Billy Elliot?I think as a teenager I would have been exasperated by the suggestion of Gillian Anderson, and incredulous at the amount of tinkering you'd have to do to his backstory. Bond attended Eton. Girls can't go to Eton, can they? I might have agreed that other than enroll in Eton, women can do pretty much anything men can, even be superspies, but then why not be their own superspies? Isn't it, I would have wondered, weirdly unfeminist for a female superspy to take James Bond's name in order to be validated? Surely the master's gadgets will never dismantle the master's tricked-out Aston Martin?Okay, Bond could be a woman, but then would she still be Bond? But that was before I realised that a childhood attachment to Bond has nothing to do with Bond and everything to do with childhood. The only Bond that actually matters to an adult is the one they grew up watching, because it's not the dude on screen, it's the complicated residual feelings of being 10 years old.I still lie to myself that I care about Bond, even though I've pretty much stopped watching him. My Bond is English and dapper and witty, not fox-faced (Timothy Dalton) or Irish (Pierce Brosnan) or short, dour and depressed (this latest one). But so what? Ian Fleming himself thought Bond should look like Hoagy Carmichael.When I think of the moments in my life that Bond films have been most meaningful - when I had my wisdom teeth out and my friend Miri came around with two-minute noodles and From Russia With Love; the time I was feverish in a hotel room in Mauritius but Dr No came on TV and cured me; the day my dad died and my mom sent me with Rod Murray to watch For Your Eyes Only - they were moments of literal childishness: of feeling small and lost and needing comfort, needing that feeling of being five and sitting beside my dad in the dark at the Embassy Cinema in Durban, watching Roger Moore skydive off a cliff in The Spy Who Loved Me, holding my breath then cheering when the Union Jack parachute unfurled from his backpack.Who cares who the new James Bond is? If you're a white male adult, maybe you should consider not caring quite so much. We've already had our Bonds; let other people have a chance. Just not that kid from Billy Elliot...