I also came down the Acorn route, but didn't find out about (Corel) Xara until much later.

I had an Acorn A3000 back in the early nineties and played around with !Draw lots (I was only about 13 at the time) and stumbled across a demo of Artworks on the cover disc of an Archimedes World magazine. It had a couple of demo pictures with it - one was the green apple with the water droplets dripping down, another was the blue MG and the other one I remember was a train of some sort. They were amazing at the time.

Then, about 7 years later, a couple of guys I was working with had CorelXara and showed me it. I had a play and discovered some of the same clip art from Artworks. It was still as good as I remembered it.

And now I've finally got myself a copy of XaraX for doing web work.

James