When Clinton was in office he was asked when he would be commenting on two bills before the Senate regarding alcohol and tobacco. "The President is upstairs enjoying a decent malt and a fine cigar and will be down shortly."

Quite.

People have been making and drinking Scotch for 500 years, solving and creating life's problems, and lending reckless bravery to karaoke singers. Love may make the world go round, but whisky makes it go round twice as fast. And let's not forget, a fifth of humanity was ruled from an upstairs window in a building in Simla, India, by British administrators who loved a Scotch and soda.

The longest-living people on this planet come from the Carpathian mountains. They make love a great deal - the best proven exercise for the circulation on earth. They smoke disgusting cheroots, which may clog the arteries, but also drink copious amounts of vodka to open them up.

Millions of Russians think that a person is irreligious if they don't drink. But they are usually out of their tree when they slur this. Vodka has taken 800 years to perfect. It's made out of glaciers, diesel fuel, potatoes and mashed dissidents. Most people just want to be liked and made to feel important. If they are denied either, some are apt to turn to drink - or revolution.

For millions, life is still hard and short. For millions, the future doesn't look hopeful; it doesn't look like anything. Stimulants and alcohol offer brief moments outside time and pain. Denied one drug, we find another. Some people become addicted, many do not. Most people like to drink just enough to change the room temperature in their brain. If they want to re-arrange the furniture they turn to less mainstream substances.

But why do some drink more than others? In a word, expense. Alcohol kills far more people than crack or smack and promotes more benevolence than religion. Above all, the existence of drunken unreality makes reality, with its dullness, unhappiness, stress and a certain end, almost tolerable, even enjoyable. As always, moderation is the key. But it's also the lock, because when many people drink they don't want to be moderate. They drink to enhance life - or drink to forget it. That's the whole point.

I know someone who has just spent a month at a health farm where the fees were so breathtakingly rude, the bill should have been delivered by a priest. Two weeks later she told me: "Okay, so I gave up smoking and drinking but now I'm inhaling pizza and taking Prozac and my God, you look terrible."

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Professor Cary Cooper, of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, said: "In the City the coping strategies for stress are to work harder and to drink more. If you are looking for a safe investment, buy shares in a City wine bar."

The late and much lamented English columnist Jeffrey Bernard, who suffered from a lifelong weakness for horses, women and drink - and it was the alcohol that killed him - sent a letter to The Times which read: " I have been asked to write my autobiography and would grateful if anyone could tell me what the f**k I was doing between 1960 and 1974."

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"What is the point," said an exasperated sub-editor, "of getting ministers to declare their assets if they don't include what they have given to their maids, elder children and god knows who else? It's a pointless exercise. How come the wives have got so much money? Where did it come from? It's not what they declare, it's how they got it that should be declared." It's okay - he's new. But he has a point.

The upcoming trials will be full of politicians who are unexceptional in most things but blessed with an uncanny ability to remember every wrong ever done to them and to bring them all up on the very rare occasions when they are obliged to defend themselves. I see entertainment ahead, and catastrophe. Worse, I see lawyers.

Actress Sophie Marceau said that all French films follow a basic formula. "Husband sleeps with Jeanne because Bernadette had gone off and slept with Christopher, and in the end they all go to a restaurant." She also shows a wonderful insight in to how Thai politics work.

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"The walk from the plane to immigration was so long I almost lost the will the live." - A British Airways passenger arriving at King Power Airport.

Notice on the wall of jockey cum crime novelist Dick Francis' Florida home: "I've been reading so much about the bad effects of smoking, drinking, overeating and sex, that I've decided to give up reading."

"Ingenuity can get you through times of no money, but money cannot get you through times of no ingenuity." - Author Terry Pratchett.

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A two-bedroom terrace in Glastonbury, England, is advertised as "having all the charm and poise of a vicar on crack" and at £155,000 is said to be "suitable for a midget". - Mr Bending, who runs Ralph Bending Estate Agents in Glastonbury, telling it like it is.

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The Duke of Wellington on the British Army: "People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling - all stuff - no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children - some for minor offences - many more for drink."

As the day dawned on the June 19, 1815, on the morning after the battle of Waterloo, to reveal over 55,000 men lying dead or dying in only two square miles of blood-stained rye and mud, the Belgian peasants stole out to the battlefield to loot the dead, even wrenching out teeth to sell for dentures - known for years afterwards as "Waterloos".

Many of Wellington's frontline troops had been fortified with drink; and many had started the battle on oatmeal mixed with rum.

One of the heroes of the slaughter, Corporal Shaw, who was cut down by at least nine French cavalrymen, was said to be drinking heavily all day and to be utterly rat-arsed on gin by the early afternoon. If you were hit by grapeshot it was lethal - and better and easier to take the whole limb off. There was no anaesthetic. Well-off officers did have a way of dulling the pain: drink a bottle of Champagne very fast.

One amputee was so sozzled and outraged at the wailing of a French prisoner being treated nearby, he used his recently amputated limb as a club to hit him. Drink does have its uses.