There was one occasion, and it must have been over 35 years ago when I willingly drank liquor and enjoyed it as well. We had been driving to Washington, D.C., and stopped over for the night at a small town in West Virginia that was undergoing reconstruction as a tourist site, focusing on its heritage value, in an attempt to restore the downtown core. We were in a very attractive restaurant, seated at a table beside a large window overlooking a stone-walled garden.

My husband had gone over to use the telephone and I looked over at the drink he had ordered, a Margarita. I was very thirsty, it was early spring and when we'd left Ottawa it was extremely cool, becoming progressively warmer the further south we drove. I lifted the drink and tentatively smelled it, tasted it, and in short order, downed it all before my husband's return to the table.

I don't like alcohol. At gatherings when others were comfortable holding a drink, I never was at ease. I don't like tobacco. As a child I detested the tobacco odour that always lingered on my father. I thought his tobacco-stained fingers were dreadful looking, and I hated the smell of tobacco that infiltrated the house. His smoking habit led him to an early death but that's another matter altogether.

Tobacco was his only vice. There was never any alcohol in our home. I seemed to instinctively view alcoholic drinks with disfavour, recoiled from the smell of beer, and wanted nothing, ever, to do with drink. My husband is an inveterate wine drinker; he enjoys a glass of wine at many evening meals. I think it's rather civilized, myself, although I prefer never to partake of it myself. As a child I was introduced to the use of wine during Passover Seders that took place at my uncle's house.

There's a kind of social snobbery in viewing the alcoholic "choice of the people" as askance as I do, I know. When I become aware that someone of my acquaintance is given to beer drinking, my estimation of their intelligence and their system of values instantly plummets. That's my problem, certainly not theirs. I do, eventually, overlook it. But the prejudice is there, alive and well.

And when I read, in yesterday's paper, about the new-reigning oldest woman in Canada, born in 1900 and just recently celebrated her 113 birthday the very same month that my own 77th birthday came around, it was interesting. But the photograph that accompanied the story evoked great revulsion in me. "Really classy" was my reaction.

(Photograph: Lyle Stafford, Times Colonist) Merle Barwis enjoys a beer on her 111th birthday in 2011