So Boris Johnson has come clean about his youthful experiments with drugs. "I took cocaine and smoked a few joints," he told GQ magazine's interviewer Piers Morgan. Goodness me! And is 'Lord' Archer pleased with himself and Russell Brand really not a virgin? Frankly, I would have been flabbergasted to learn that the MP for Henley had not sampled blow and coke: drug-taking is the sort of thing you expect from chaps of his age, background and means. Intelligence, too - for is it not sensible to find out about something that gives so many people so much pleasure?

Boris's admission to being "a self-confessed speed-freak" in Monday's Daily Telegraph could have been more of a surprise, however, had it not been made at once clear that his reference was to cars and not the markedly non-U amphetamines. The boy racer has a new book coming out called Life in the Fast Lane: The Johnson Guide to Cars, in which is laid bare his Toad-like devotion to rapid motion on four wheels. This, as it happens, contains a revelation perhaps more likely to shock the law-abiding. In the introduction, which the Telegraph printed in abridged form, Johnson puts his hand up to offences that some may view with far greater seriousness than his brief flirtation with drugs. I refer to parking offences.

The scapegrace politician admits that when he was up at Oxford (as a Balliol classicist) he paid no regard to the law in the matter of where he left his ancient Fiat 128, which he called the Italian Stallion. "Before traffic wardens became bonus-hungry maniacs, and when it was still rare for a student to own any kind of car at all was this really the case, by the way?, I parked all over the place, my favourite spot in Oxford being the yellow lines by the squash court at Jowett Walk. Sometimes, it is true, I got a ticket. But what did I care? The Italian Stallion had . . . Belgian plates . . . I snapped my fingers at the parking tickets. I let them pile in drifts against the windscreen until - in the days before they were even sheathed in plastic - the fines just disintegrated in the rain."

My first reaction on reading this was to break out into the harrumphing we columnists are expected to indulge in over such flagrant law-breaking. And then I looked at the considerably larger mote in my own eye in the matter of youthful driving offences. Though I don't often care to think about it, my first few weeks on the road were shameful and stupid in the extreme. I often drove unaccompanied without possessing a full licence. Having failed two driving tests, I deduced that the only way I would gain the experience to impress the examiners was by taking to the road at every opportunity, with or without supervision.

Planning a long summer holiday in North Norfolk with a friend already qualified to drive, I used him as my 'cover' to take off in my car, which had been bought in anticipation of earlier test success. Both my pal and the L plates were often left behind as the weeks in the sunshine passed. How foolish this seems now, when I recognise that I was, of course, uninsured. I confess, too, that my journeys were very often to pubs - the Jolly Sailors at Brancaster, the Lifeboat at Thornham - where pints were sunk with no regard for my need to stay sober. (This was 1969, two years after the introduction of the breathalyser.) Very fortunately, the whole disgraceful episode passed off without incident - and I did pass my test as soon as I returned home.

Like Boris, I have fond memories of my first car, the one involved in these misadventures. It was a Ford Anglia 100E very similar to the one on the left, except that it was slightly older - as would have been recognisable from differences in the radiator grille and the rear light 'cluster' (less a cluster than a single light). It was the same shade of green, but with darker green paintwork on the roof. It had only three gears (no synchromesh on first), which were controlled by a very long lever. The windscreen wipers worked by compressed air; they ceased to work at all, for some reason, when the engine was revving hard - climbing a hill, say. This did not make for reassuring travel in poor weather.

As with every car I have owned - not very many, actually -I remember perfectly how it felt to drive it. With eyes closed, I can experience again the 'play' on the cream plastic steering wheel, the wobble of the front wheels, the imprecise motions of that gear lever reminiscent of those hand-operated washing tubs which - astonishingly - were still in use at that time.

Is this feeling shared by many (all?) of my readers? This is a subject to which I might well return.