A Flanders & Swann fan? From childhood! We used to stomp around singing "Mud, mud, glorious mud!" and "G'no, g'no, g'no, I'm a gnu!" until our parents considered feeding us the record player.

One of the pleasures of growing up was the slow process of deciphering the irony of songs like "The Reluctant Cannibal," at the same time as beginning to get half the jokes in Pogo.

And every now and then, when a Tom-Lehrer-fan friend starts to sing me "The Elements," I respond with the steam-train rhythm "Work is heat and heat is work!" from "The First and Second Laws."