Not as often as it conjures up scepticism, that's for sure.

But kebab-loving Home Secretary Jacqui Smith led me down Nostalgia Lane last week.

Transported, I was, from a dark office in Halifax to a dark night in the small village that was home and hell and everything in between during my youth and, I suppose, still even now.

There were six of us camping in a secluded field that evening.

We'd saved pocket money and school dinner change to hand over to some older kid who, in return, furnished us with bottles of mysterious home-made brew.

Who knows what that moonshine was – probably low-count wine – but at the time it tasted like something that could melt solid concrete. It fizzed hideously on tongues, burned horribly in stomachs.

There was no bravado. We agreed it was vile. And, then, with gritted teeth, we drank it. We'd planned that military operation for too long to be put off by taste or rain or November chill. We were 14 and on a mission to be drunk for the first time.

And so, chalk me up as a mini-Earl of Rochester, I joined what today might be termed Jacqui's Feral 56.

That is, one of the 56 per cent of kids aged 14 who have – shock and horror, make sure you're sitting down, hold the front page – tasted alcohol.

What next? Amazing revelations that teenagers enjoy a fumble too?

Well, yes, actually. The Government says youngsters are now so sexually active doctors should encourage contraceptive implants. If education don't work, it seems, sterilisation will.

The youth of today, says Ms Smith, are at "tipping point". Maybe that's code for "my credibility's plunging as low as my neckline and I need a soundbite" or maybe she doesn't remember her own youth. Maybe she never had a cheeky glug of cider at some under-age party.

But she's plain wrong. Kids are like adults. They like booze and sex. Always have done, always will. My grandad told of drinking flagons on bales of hay. His grandfather had similar tales. Greek philosophers made regular reference to dissolute youth.

Forget "tipping points", Ms Smith should understand teenagers aren't there to be demonised, they're there to inherit the earth.

If they're getting drunk too often, it's because there's not enough to do. If they're hanging on street corners it's because there's no where else to go. And if a minority are becoming "feral" it's because society – the society created by Ms Smith's generation – has let them down.

She has a cheek to berate the generation that will have to face the consequences of her shortcomings.

When I was 16, I was spending my weekends falling in love and falling down drunk. Perhaps Ms Smith should spend hers solving real problems instead of echoing millenia-old cliches.