I can't say I've ever really been a 'bloke' - you know, the sort who goes out every Saturday night with other blokes and fills himself to overflowing with Brains SA.

There are two reasons for this: first, I was married young and needed every penny my first employers reluctantly dropped into my palm; and second, I have a stomach the size of a deflated balloon.

Sad, isn't it? The tight-fistedness of my early bosses, I mean. One just has to live with intestinal anomalies, though they have never stopped me finishing every square meal I've ever been served and hoovering up the leftovers of others.

Not boozing at every opportunity was once a shortcoming in a journalist. Like most other aspects of his work the capacity for alcohol is usually mythical.

The secret of most drinkers who like it to be known that they can handle a few is to make their drinks last while others give the appearance of keeping up with them.

It also helps if they can slur their speech within ten minutes of entering a pub and sniffing a soaked beer mat. Add a voice increasing in volume and outrageousness and you have the makings of a legend.

The problem with lunchtime drinking is that you have to return to work and give an impression of sobriety. I've known reporters who, in the days when you had to put your index finger into dial holes in order to telephone a number, gave up and read the Daily Express sports pages again.

In my case, it did not help any inclination to merriment to have started work at a place where men rarely outnumbered women. With few exceptions, women are decorous drinkers, watching their male counterparts descend into senseless stupor and physical deformity in the gut region.

In any case, I've always believed that individuals of talent and promise do themselves no favours in gaining reputations as boozers. Dylan Thomas might not have written better poetry if he hadn't necked the ale at every opportunity but there would have been more of it - verse and beer, that is.

I wouldn't like to parade as too much of a goody, despite this aversion to Dutch courage and an upbringing in Capel Sion, the slightly pejorative term that now passes for Welsh Non-Conformism.

It was in chapel that I first heard and sung lusty hymns, my first introduction to the power of music, and heard it said by an elder that a pack of cards comprised the 52 apostles of the Devil. Strong drink, of course, was strictly out of bounds.

You don't forget these lessons easily. It was much better, though, when you began to see through it all and could study the fascinating conditions of ignorance and hypocrisy. But the perils of drink never faded. It's only later that you realise your capacity is not so minuscule after all, when the grand imbibers are exposed as tippling shams and your admittedly small tummy finally decides it can cope with more than it previously accommodated.

To wit, my sterling performance on my son's stag night, that odyssey through Newport's monochrome fleshpots on which I was introduced to the sustaining properties of Double Vodka and Red Bull and the protection of people much younger than my good self.

Nothing so encourages a 62-year-old in his pretensions to invincibility than being bought a drink by an anonymous young blonde woman from Lliswerry without having to do anything in return, such as dance to a Gerri Haliwell tune.

It is a matter of record that, having drunk as much as anyone else in the party, I was one of the few still standing (just) in the early hours.

My second stag night - or, rather - weekend, was last month in London, specifically Soho, a place not as it was in the Fifties.

Soho's seediness is of recent origin and has been more or less removed. There are now more restaurants and cafs than houses of ill-repute in Soho, indicating the triumph of the stomach over the loins, though it cannot be long before the two are combined in some enlightened and risk-assessed establishment endorsed by the government.

The dangers in Soho today are the same as those in your typical Welsh city pub, and emanate from groups of boorish young men who cannot hold their drink. In Soho, as in France, harmless revellers ultimately nod off after talking themselves silly; here, their more vicious brethren threaten you just for standing next to them.

But at least they are usually on the move, as we were on our tour of sundry bars at the Dog and Duck, the Three Greyhounds, the Marquis of Granby, the Porcupine, the Argyll Arms and several others too blurred to mention.

As for stag celebrations for the over-50s, it's safe to say that age wearies us in a way that it doesn't weary dead heroes. It beckons us towards a Michelin-starred restaurant in Marylebone rather than an unwelcoming doorway in Frith Street.

Still, we were awarded tasteful T-shirts for completing our lurch. Civilised Welshmen abroad, no less. And born-again boozers.