James Bond’s ski club celebrates 100 years of racing – and partying

In the usually sleepy Swiss village of Mürren, the pioneering Kandahar Club is gearing up for its centenary. “I’ve got about five Bond girls’ numbers in my phone,” says Alan Ramsay, as we glide up the mountain in the gloom of pre-dawn. “But they’re all over 70.” Despite the early hour, the Scottish-born honorary Mürrenian is already on form. He’s not wearing his kilt – an outfit he’s been known to sport when skiing the Inferno, billed as the world’s craziest amateur ski race, of which more later. Today, he’s settled for the understated elegance of bright-red tartan ski trousers. We’re heading up to the summit of the Schilthorn, and the revolving restaurant immortalised in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Back in the late 1960s Mürren desperately needed financing to get the final, most ambitious leg of its wildly over-budget cable car project finished, while the Bond producers needed a mountaintop lair from which Telly Savalas’s Blofeld could stroke his white Persian and...