Though I don’t actually play poker — too many vices already — I am not averse to watching it or reading about it. One place I have watched a game recently is my local pub on Osney, The Punter — soon to be ‘starring’ in the TV series Lewis, as reported today in our news pages. This seemed the ideal venue (easy-peasy for me) to meet a man who has provided my latest reading on the subject.

Tom Campbell is the author of a highly entertaining first novel called Fold (Bloomsbury, £11.99). It focuses on a quintet of men of markedly different characters who meet up in each other’s homes — all in Reading — for card games that eventually turn acrimonious.

It came out to warm reviews in July and has sold well. Tom, whom I have known since he was a toddler, kindly sent me a copy. I am glad I am able to repay this kindness by saying I greatly enjoyed the book for its robust humour and keen social observation. Other people, I feel sure, will enjoy it too, even if they know nothing of the rules of poker which can be gathered painlessly as the narrative proceeds.

Tom was also glad that we met in The Punter and that his father, Bob, an old friend of mine, came with him. Now the senior publisher with Blackwells, Bob was for many years head of the company’s science division whose offices were on a prominent site (now in University use) on Osney Mead. In those days he lunched regularly at what was then The Waterman’s Arms. Tom used it too, coming to be aware of its literary associations.

The novelist and one-time Oxford Professor of Poetry John Wain was a regular customer. He went on to introduce the pub into his fiction — under yet another name, The Bargeman — as the home of the hero of Where the Rivers Meet and its two Oxford-based sequels. Tom, like me, is an admirer of the books.

It was around the time the first came out (1988) that Tom, then a pupil at Wheatley Park School, came for work experience at Newspaper House. He recalled with amusement that a certain senior journalist, whom I shall not name, was nursing too thick a head on the first day to venture from the office on reporting duties with him and he went instead to the Crown Court with his aunt, my colleague Nicky Kirkwood.

As Rosemarie dug out her mobile phone at my request to take the picture you can see above, I told my companions that this was a far cry indeed in terms of sophistication from the elaborate preparations when The New York Times dispatched a photographer to snap John Wain. So many lights, so many white umbrellas, so many hours getting exactly the right pose —John, a man not much given to fuss, could not believe all the rigmarole. It was a woman behind the lens. I have wondered since whether it might not have been Annie Leibovitz.

There were days of even more significant press interest at the pub during the summer floods of 2007 and in 1986 at the time of the death of student Olivia Channon who lived a couple of doors away from where I am in Osney. Tom, as it happens, knows what it is himself to be the subject of press interest.

In an unguarded and jocularly meant interview with the Evening Standard shortly before his novel came out, he said: “I have a rule. If I ever go into a chain store or a chain place for lunch I always have to steal something . . . It’s a little team rule so they don’t make a profit out of me. I always steal the pudding or the soup or something.”

This injudicious observation cost him his £45,000-a-year job as London Mayor Boris Johnson’s cultural strategy manager whose job was to organise the Cultural Olympiad and attract international businesses to invest in the arts in London.

Boris, who can’t be said not to have made any errors in life himself, remains on friendly terms. Spotting Tom in the street after Fold appeared, he leapt off his bike and gave him a congratulatory hug.

Much of the book had been written in lunchbreaks during his civil service days after his sisters, Nancy and Chloe, who are both in publishing, recognised the quality of some short stories he had penned.

‘I chose the subject because lots and lots of people play poker. But where the game crops up in books it tends to be James Bond, Monte Carlo, ludicrous hands and bags of money. I wanted a setting in more humble surroundings.”

Taught the game by his father, Tom says of poker: “It’s all about conflict, bluffing, lying and, of course, money, if not in bags. All are ideal subjects for a novel.”

As he has shown.