Licence to chill on James Bond's playground

the holiday house that the James Bond creator Ian Fleming built It is just before 7pm, and as the sun sets, I wait by a massage table on the veranda of my beach villa at GoldenEye, panting slightly. Thanks to a delayed plane I arrived at Jamaica's new luxury resort only 20 minutes ago, and it has been all go ever since.
I'd pre-booked a 7pm anti-jet-lag massage, and it's been a rush, first to trudge along the superfine sand to my beach villa, then to quickly look around at the 20-foot pitched ceiling, outdoor garden bathroom, kitchen with blue Smeg refrigerator, big squashy sofa and flat screen television (pure tropical heaven), and then have a speedy pre-treatment shower. Hence the panting.
And now here comes my therapist, a large, serious-looking young Jamaican, padding up the wooden steps from the beach. "Ma'am, welcome," he says gently, softly shaking my hand. Hmm. I don't know if that softness bodes well for the kind of bone-grinding massage I like. I climb on to the massage table and stretch out, and within minutes have to twist around to see if the therapist has slipped on some sort of steel glove. I cannot believe the strength emanating from those hands. He laughs good-naturedly. "A good masseur uses their whole body weight. Hands are just a conduit."
At the end of the hour, my eyelids are drooping and I feel like purring. As he packs up, we chat, and I am touched to discover that my talented masseur was a maths wiz who left school wanting to become an accountant, but had to study massage instead because it was the only course his mother could afford. "Now every day I give thanks that I discovered my calling," he smiles. It can't be long before he is snapped up by some potentate to be his personal therapist, I think, as I pad inside, barefoot. In the meantime, what a delectable introduction to the resort.
The treatment works. I fall asleep listening to the sound of waves, and by nine next morning I am enthusiastically crunching muesli in the breezy restaurant at the end of the beach. French pop music plays in the background: old tapes from Radio Nova, a cult Riviera pirate radio station, apparently, in the 1970s. It is a novelty not to hear reggae in a Caribbean resort, and the unexpected soundtrack creates a buzzingly carefree mood. I linger over a pot of Blue Mountain coffee - almost as famous a Jamaican export as the reggae star Bob Marley. It was launched by the local entrepreneur who founded Island Records and owns GoldenEye, Chris Blackwell. I'm succumbing to my third slice of toast with the irresistible local Busha Browne marmalade when the Jamaican chef comes up. He looks like a schoolboy, blinking behind his glasses with the same unassuming manner as the massage therapist.
"Ma'am, we ask all new guests what they'd like to eat while they're with us," he says. Fish, vegetables, and absolutely nothing fattening, I tell him, swallowing my last mouthful of toast. Minutes later I am amending this list slightly, however, as he describes his desserts. It would be plain rude, surely, to say no to brownies with caramel sauce or coconut sorbet or mango crumble or burnt orange ice-cream. And when I hear that he learnt to cook from his grandmother as a schoolboy, then, at 19, went to try his luck in New York and ended up headhunted by Nobu, I feel I'm in promising hands. Idealistic hands, too. Most Jamaican resorts, he says, import 95 per cent of the food they serve, leaving poor local farmers out of the equation, but at GoldenEye the policy is to use as much Jamaican produce as possible.
"Mr Blackwell wants the resort to link up with the local community wherever we can. If we can give a local guy an undertaking to buy his fish each day, tell a collective of local women yes, we will buy as much chutney as you can make, that makes a real difference to the local economy. It means parents get to afford to send their kids to school in shoes," he says.