After 33 years of marriage my wife says it’s quite hard to think of anything to buy me for Christmas or on my birthday.

Nevertheless, she is quite inventive when it comes to presents. Last Christmas, for example, she enrolled me on a one day forage and food course so we could go foraging for wild edibles followed by a wild food lunch.

I’m not best placed to comment on the atmosphere at the Conservative Party conference because I was only in Manchester for 24 hours.

Nevertheless, here are some thoughts on CPC25 and Forest’s fringe event in the TPA Think Tent.

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill will move to the committee stage in the House of Lords on Monday October 27.

Over the summer Forest commissioned a series of polls. Conducted by Yonder Consulting, the results were the usual mixed bag. Nevertheless they tell a significantly different story to the claim that 68% support the Government’s ‘smokefree generation’ policy.

British American Tobacco has launched a new campaign – Vapers Deserve Better.

According to company, ‘Like you, we share the ambition for the UK to be smoke-free by 2030.’ I’m not sure who ‘you’ is, but I do know that adults who enjoy smoking (and don’t want to quit) deserve better from the world’s second largest tobacco company.

On this day 20 years ago Britain's greatest living artist attended a fringe event hosted by Forest at the Labour Party conference in Brighton.

I’ve told the story before (several times!) but it was the best day of my working life so forgive me if I write about it again …

Smoking on beaches has been back in the news recently.

Two weeks ago it was reported that trial bans are to be imposed on two beaches in East Sussex. This week environmental campaigners called for a ban on smoking on beaches in Guernsey.

I have just finished a rather good book.

Written by journalist Tom McTague (The Atlantic, UnHerd, and now the New Statesman), Between The Waves: The hidden history of a very British revolution (1943-2016) covers Britain’s post-war relationship with Europe, and the events that led up to Brexit.

Sir Robert Worcester, the American-born pollster who founded Mori, died last week, aged 91.

I interviewed him once, for a feature called ‘Me and my books’. “Books,” he told me, “give insight and cause for reflection. Relatively few magazines, newspaper articles or television programmes, and virtually nothing on the net, challenges you.”