We all saw just how cold it got in the US last month. ‘Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey,’ as the old naval saying goes. And for a prison escapee in Kentucky, the thought of a warm prison cell was preferable to freedom in the icy weather outside.

42-year-old Robert Vick decided that his stay at the minimum-security Blackburn Correctional Complex, located in Lexington, Kentucky, was at an end. So, at 8.35pm on a Sunday he wandered away to freedom. Unfortunately, he decided to do this wearing normal trousers, shirt and a jacket. Such clothing might have sufficed had the outside temperatures not been around -20C with biting winds of 19kmh taking the windchill temperature even lower.

To his credit, Vick did manage to stay at liberty for around 20 hours before walking into the Sunset Motel and asking the clerk at the desk to call the police, preferring to go back to the prison and serve the rest of his six-year sentence for burglary and possession of a forged instrument (whatever the hell that is!), rather than spend a moment longer in the freezing temperatures.

Such a pity he wasn’t in prison serving time for espionage… then he could have been ‘The Spy That Came in From the Cold’. Sorry, it sounded better in my head than it looks on the page.

News, World