As I write this week’s column I take no pleasure in telling you that I am currently exiting a hangover.

I didn’t wake up until 11.15am and then have spent the rest of the day breathing shallowly and moaning quietly to myself.

Luckily for me, I was off work - so you can’t make any wisecracks about me being indistinguishable from other staff in the Examiner office.

Being hungover does many things to me including that banging headache, sick feeling and randomly sore shoulders and neck.

It also cuts off my creativity so I can only think of one thing - which makes writing a column in this state quite difficult.

However, I also adhere to the theory of ‘What makes you bad makes you better’ but in this case I’ll talk about booze rather than simply knocking one back.

First bit of booze news is how tastes have changed in what we drink.

I don’t mean the rise of alcopops or microbreweries but rather the actual taste.

A few years ago a shipwreck was discovered off Finland which contained 168 bottle of 170 year old champagne.

You would think champagne has always tasted the same but apparently not. In the olden days champagne seems to have been a lot sweeter.

When I say a lot - I mean 30 times. Which is very sweet indeed.

Apparently Russian champagne quaffers in the royal Russian court enjoyed really sweet champagne - but in Germany they liked it only half as sugary.

But that’s still 15 times sweeter than the stuff racing drivers chuck over each other.

It turns out that the folk who were going to knock back this brew also liked a less alcoholic mix - with it being only 9.5% rather than the 11 or 12% you get today.

The best bit of the whole affair is the descriptions of the drink - proper Jilly Goolden territory.

Experts say the drink has “animal notes” and “wet hair” but after it was swirled about in a glass for a while it was said to have a taste that brings to mind “spicy” and “leathery”.

To be honest if I wanted something that tastes of leather I’d eat my shoes. And I’d need to have been drinking something that was stronger than 9.5%.

My other news is about not drinking. I don’t mean alcohol, I mean anything.

A new scientific study has reported that being dehydrated can be as dangerous behind the wheel as someone driving who’s had a drink.

In tests drivers who were given only 25% of a normal fluid intake committed more than double the number of faults that drivers who were properly hydrated did.

There were 12 men in the tests so the results are from such a small group that it’s hard to swear by them.

I said there were 12 people in the group - but there were actually only 11 results. Why?

It turns out one of the people doing it fell asleep at the wheel of the simulator, which begs more questions than it answers.

Maybe he’d had one too many waters the night before too?