During my first year as a student in Edinburgh I used to slip out of my dormitory room every Thursday night at 9 p.m. and make my way to the administration building, Pollock Hall, a fine neo-Gothic Victorian manse in whose basement there was a television that the great mass of soccer and rugby TV-watchers didn't seem aware of. I would tune the set to BBC2 and with bated breath (there was always the danger of a telltale clattering of footsteps down the stairs, a rugby or soccer match on another channel) await the magic moment of 9:20, when the words "Monty Python's...Floying...CirCUS" boomed out and I could settle in for half an hour of congenial idiocy. When I first saw the show I was, like many, confused but obscurely delighted that there appeared to be someone out there with the same upside-down, not unintelligent but thoroughly schoolboyish sense of the world as I had. Soon, of course, I was an addict and well on the way to becoming one of those multitudinous Python bores who, even to this day, nigh on 40 years since the dawn, will still come out with "nudge nudge wink wink" and "I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK" and "Payning for the fjords?" Actually, since you ask, my all-time favorite sketch--well, all right, the cheese shop was a classic--oh, I don't know...Angus Podgorny, the kilt salesman? Ken Buddha and his inflatable knees? Mr. Hilter and the Minehead by-election ("Mine Head" being the sequel to "Mein Kampf")? No, worthy as these all are of accolades, the one I put on a pedestal--indeed, that inspired a good deal of my own silly maunderings--was The Poet Ewan McTeagle and his immortal verse. Examples include "If you could see your way to lending me sixpence"; "Lend us a couple of bob until Thursday, I'm absolutely skint"; "Can I have fifty pounds to mend the shed?" and, the masterpiece of his mature period, "Och gie me a shillin' for some fags and I'll pay ye back on Thursday." Odd how life imitates art; I found myself paraphrasing the great McTeagle to my better-off classmates about once every two weeks, on average, usually after I'd spent my monthly stipend in the pub.