Pear cider, Yuri Gagarin and flouting the law.

To celebrate Yuri Gagarin bursting my birthday balloon all those years ago I am drinking a bottle of Magners pear cider. It is very fizzy.

In my youth this stuff was called Babycham and came in tiny nip sized bottles. I can remember bringing home as 'carry-outs' from my under-age sorties to the village pub a bottle of Babycham for my mother and a bottle of barley-wine for the old man.

It was considered infra dig (for a teenager in those days) not to flout the drinking laws in rural England. It was OK though because the pub landlord was also the village bobby and would monitor proceedings.

It was a good system, as systems go, and as good systems go... It went*. Now kids have to make do with buying bottles of Diamond White to skulkily consume on the street.

* Apologies to 'Saki' H. H. Munro.