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I was walking my dog when a WhatsApp message and photo came through from Simon, an old school friend of more than 50 years. His kids had sent him a picture of a man who had turned up unexpectedly at the family home. The accompanying message said simply: ‘Your friend Andrew from Epsom College is here?’ Simon, who was out shopping, didn’t recognise him. Did I? No, I replied, but he looks familiar. But then again he was white, rotund and greying and thus a 99 per cent DNA match for one of our social circle: i.e. a well-fed 60-something with a 20-something handicap. The more I studied the photo

I have been having a John le Carré holiday. Five years after the great master of the spy thriller went to his final safe house in the sky, I spent chunks of the festive season watching two of his series on TV, and reading a slim volume called The Secret Life of John le Carré by his biographer Adam Sisman. BBC1 and Amazon Prime’s big New Year drama offering is The Night Manager, a sequel series to one of le Carré’s later stories, and simultaneously BBC4 has been re-running le Carré’s 1970s masterpiece, the seven-part mole hunt Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, starring the late, great Alec Guinness as spymaster George

‘Evidence-based policy-making’ is very much in vogue – until, that is, the evidence doesn’t quite support what the government wants to do. Then governments tend to plough on ahead anyway, evidence or not. Just why is the government proposing to lower the drink-driving limit in England from 80mg/100ml to 50mg/100ml? To many people, government ministers included, it just feels the right thing to do. England does, after all, look a bit of an outlier in Europe, where most countries have a 50mg limit. And then there was a 2010 study by Sir Peter North which concluded that lowering the blood-alcohol limit from 80mg to 50mg would save between 43 and

The only time I ever saw David Bowie live was at a ropey festival in an old airfield near Stratford-upon-Avon in the latter half of the 1990s. Frankly, I thought he was pretty awful. It was the peak of Britpop, electronica and trip hop were in the ascendency and the campsite and smaller stages that weekend were fervent with fast beats, French crops and chemical ingestion. Bowie, to my late-teenage eyes and ears, seemed like an embarrassing dad, attempting to remain ‘with it’ via his recent drum and bass-infused song ‘Little Wonder’. I sloped off before the end to go and watch Goldie instead. I’ve listened to much more Bowie

With the cold snap likely to play havoc with the weekend race cards in Britain, it seems more sensible for me to take an early look at the Cheltenham Festival from an ante-post point of view. It is stating the obvious but the number one rule of ante-post betting is to do all you can to back a horse that is going to run in your chosen race – in this case one of the contests at the Cotswolds racecourse in two months’ time. For me that rules out most of the high-class novice hurdles and novice chasers in which Irish trainer Willie Mullins and other top yards like to