A motto that I can drink to

'I couldn't imagine drinking more than a couple of glasses of wine a day, and here were people being warned to knock off at a litre'

Someone once advanced a strange theory to me. If you are told something when you are sober, he said, then you will remember it when you are sober, but if you learn something while you are drunk, you will only remember it when you are drunk again.

A moment's thought shows that this is untrue. Even when we are very drunk, we can remember who we are and where we live, which presumably we learnt while sober. And when you are sober you can remember things you learnt while drunk, such as never, never, never to go drinking with Jeffrey Bernard again.

(I use the name of the late Jeffrey Bernard as a substitute for people still living and within reach of the libel laws. I very seldom went drinking with Jeffrey Bernard, but I do remember once, when I had fixed to meet him for a drink, that I received a stern warning from a friend.

"I know a man who arranged to meet Jeffrey Bernard and Hugh McIlvanney for a drink once," he said. "And he went to meet them. And the next thing he remembered was waking up on Crewe Station three days later." )

Still, it's an attractive theory, even if dead wrong, and I think I have found a corollary to it, which is that at holiday time and probably only at holiday time, you suddenly get flashbacks to other, long-lost holidays.

Which is why the other day I had a nostalgic vision of driving past a sign saying, "You Are Now Entering Strong Country."

This happened in the 1950s, when I was very, very young. There were four of us, my mother and father in the front of the car, and me and my brother Stewart in the back, and we were driving down through the south of England, from our home in north Wales, going to Devon, I think, and there we were, being welcomed to Strong Country. What did it all mean?

My father knew everything. I asked him. "It's the local beer," he said. "Strong's Ales. Very big in this part of the south. Clever advertising, that: 'Welcome to Strong Country.' Good slogan."

My father was well-placed to say such things. He was a director of a small brewery in Wrexham called Border Breweries, which had managed to produce damned good beer but had never come up with a good slogan. Border Breweries must have agonised for years trying to work out a snappy motto, but all they ever came up with was "Order a Border". And "Border Ales, the Wine of Wales"...

I can remember consulting my father on strange drink names on other occasions. Once, I remember, we had ventured to Germany for a holiday (in the late 1950s) because Dad liked Germany and the Germans, and didn't think much of the French, and we moseyed up and down the Rhine and wound our way up and down the Mosel, and got as far as Schaffhausen, where there were some very impressive waterfalls, but all I can remember with certainty is a sign advertising Simba Kola.

I asked my father what that meant, because he knew everything.

"Well, Simba is 'lion' in Swahili," he said.

He knew that because he had lived for several years in Kenya before the War and spoke Swahili better even than he spoke German. He spoke no French at all, to show his contempt for the French. (He was privately grieved, I think, when I came to love French and be bored by German.) Sometimes he would meet old Kenya hands, and they would talk in rusty Swahili for a while, two middle-aged Englishmen going dewy-eyed over the Empire...

"...But why it's called Simba Kola I have no idea. I suppose it's some German imitation of Coca Cola trying to sound like it."

It does alarm me a little bit that all the memories of holidays I have are to do with drinking. Indeed, the great burning memory I have of the first time I spent time alone in Paris is of a drinking advertisement.

I was about 16, and had been educated by my father to drink moderately, but there were obviously those in Paris who drank too much because even then there was a campaign to cut down on excessive drinking in France, run by a bunch called Santé Sobriété. (Health-Sobriety.) Do you know what their slogan was?

I'll tell you.

"Jamais plus d'un litre de vin par jour." (Never more than a litre of wine a day.)

I couldn't imagine drinking more than a couple of glasses, and here were people being warned to knock off at the litre mark. What a target to aim at! As a slogan, it beats: "Ne buvez jamais avec Jeffrey Bernard." And it must have worked because – shall I be honest? – there are still some days, even today, when I don't get up to a litre of wine in one day.