Catherine Zeta-Jones, an actress who has famously made the transformation from up-for-it Welsh lass to Hollywood sophisticate, is apparently missing some things about home. "The problem with Hollywood is that everyone has to be so well-behaved all the time. Everyone is either not drinking alcohol because of their diet, or a reformed alcoholic, or in rehab," she says. And it's not the casual social drinkers CZJ hankers for, but the [...]

As of now, the holiday season starts in earnest. Normally cautious people will have made a last-minute dash to the sales and spent their hard-earned cash on diaphanous dresses and unsuitable shorts, all in preparation for transforming themselves into someone else for a week or two. Holidays abroad give us a change of scene, time to relax, dependable sunshine but - above all - the chance to take a break [...]

Recently, I have taken to smoking the occasional cigarette, despite having been nicotine-free for five years. The reason - I can only assume - is because cigarettes are once again the symbol of rebellion that they were when I was 11. Like most smokers, it took me about 25 years to get over that association, and by then I was living in a world that had started to pity smokers [...]

When coffee was first introduced to English society it was considered correct to take it using a provang. This was a three-foot-long section of pliable whalebone which, as Antony Wild tells us, was "inserted into the stomach sword-swallower fashion, via the throat" after the victim had drunk a mixture of butter, honey, sallet oil and coffee grounds. If this sounds a long way from Starbucks, it is because coffee was [...]

I'm sad to say that this is my last column for the New Statesman. I don't want you to fall into bad habits when I've gone, so I thought I'd bow out with my ten pet drinking commandments.

1. Always buy mini-cans of tonic. It's the only way to be sure of having fully fizzing tonic available at all times. G&T with even the slightest suspicion of flatness is so [...]

How to afford to stock our cellar so we can drink in style is a question that vexes, well, some of us. One possibility is to get married. Sounds a bit drastic? Not when you consider the benefits. Placing your wedding list with a wine merchant will set you up with the foundations for a lifetime of good drinking. As Patrick Sandeman of Lea & Sandeman says: "It's certainly more [...]

It hardly seems fair that Prosecco is so often considered a poor man's champagne. Thought of this way, as something to be drunk in straitened circumstances by unhappy mouths seeking and lamenting the absence of French depth and complexity, it will always taste as miserable as the bland sugar-water that typifies the worst of its kind.

Prosecco is a very unloved drink. In my edition (1998) of Christie's World Encyclopedia [...]

Heaven knows where Angus got the bottle of Chateau Senejac, Cru Bourgeois, Haut Medoc 1992 that he presented my boyfriend with for Christmas, but I do wish he hadn't given it to him. It ended up costing me a fortune. Two days after unwrapping it we visited my parents. Mum had cooked a rib of beef, an unauthorised purchase by dad from the butcher in Bedale where he goes to [...]

Those of us who drank so much cider, aged 15, that we feel it rightly belongs only in the era evoked by Peter Kay stand-up routines will probably not have touched a drop since the 1980s.

I remember how groovesome it seemed back then. Not just when we were buying (under-age) pints in Bingley pubs and swilling down to Pizza Hut for an all-you-can-pile-into-a-bowl salad (building the dish sides upwards, [...]

Bee Wilson, whose food columns used to grace these pages, has been writing a book on bees and honey, and she very kindly invited me to assist her research by joining her to taste mead.

When Bee first mentioned this, I was not entirely sure what I thought of mead. Somewhere in my head it was categorised alongside the black-pudding soup that's served at a restaurant in Burgos, in Spain, [...]