During my late teens and early twenties my tipple of choice was cider. Normally most people have grown out of this drink by the age of 17, due to a vomit-related incident, but I was immature, not only mentally, but also taste buddelly.

During the years 17 to 21 I hit the cider pretty hard, or at least it felt pretty hard for a shortarse soft lad student ponce. Anyway, after 5 years of hammering the cider, I found I had built up a measure of resistance, being unable to get as totally pissed as I would like to be, even on super strength Frosty Jack and its stomach-rotting stable-mates in the white cider market.

I therefore turned to drinking sherry. Sherry is stronger than cider (typically 15% compared to a maximum of 8.4%) and hence it is possible to get equally pissed by drinking a smaller volume, but I generally drank the same volume, hence generally getting too drunk to see. Result!

Not only was sherry strong, it was also cheap, provided you shopped at budget supermarkets and purchased brands made in Eastern European break-away republics. Whilst mingling with the wino's one day in the booze section of Chorley's Aldi supermarket, I came across a rather lively sherry by the name of "Nobility". It was only £1.69 a bottle and I was a happy man.

My father however was less keen on my sherry drinking antics. He had grown accustomed to my drinking of cider in the streets, his only stipulation being that it should not take place within 100 metres of our house, but the sherry was a different matter.

"Son," he said to me one day as I drank sherry from the bottle in lounge, ready for another night of liver annihilation. "The sherry son, it doesn't look good. If people see you in the streets and they'll think you're a wino."

I tried to reason with my father, pointing out the price, the percentage alcohol content and other factors in favour of Nobility Medium Sweet, but for some reason I failed to convince him of the drink's merits.

In true rebellious young man fashion, I ignored his advice and continued to drink a bottle of sherry before I went to the pub at night, and it was only a four hour session of eye-popping stomach-straining vomit-thru-the-nose experience around the pubs of Liverpool which taught me the error of my ways.

I now prefer to drink water or coffee.

"Desperate to be able to impress young ladies in nightclubs with tales of adventure and a tan he set of to India in 1994. Upon arriving he singularly failed to embrace foreign cultures and narrow mindedly took to muttering about damn Ken Boons and their dirty habits. No longer able to rely upon his social crutch of cider he was soon refusing to leave his sleeping bag claiming to have an upset stomach. Abandoning the pretence of being a back-packinging traveller he promptly caught a plane back to Dehli and then back home to daddy. At UK customs he was stopped and interrogated as why he was trying to bring hundreds of cheap Indian condoms into the country. Despite wild stories of adventures that never happened and pitifully attempting to enhance his tan by wearing only white shirts for months he still utterly failed to get any play from the ladies." - by Nigel Deacon.