It is a little known fact that before he became the wisest fool in Christendom,
King of England, and all that nonsense, James VI was also the drunkest
undergraduate in Christendom. He did not merely get paralytic and collapse
unremarkably, flattening an ash tray. No, our Jim would insist that he was ferfectly
pine and not in the slightest need of a taxi. Goldly would he bo.
His copious drinking companions (when you are that rich and that drunk, you always
have copious drinking companions, and they always seem to have left their wallets
on top of the fridge), being less well educated and apt to mix their Latin and Greek,
referred to this state as `cranolithic', because, before too long, James's head would
have bounced off the concrete, rendering him conveniently unconscious.
James VI's drinking exploits were so notorious that the city fathers, egged on by some of the great king's more waggish drinking chums, decided to commemorate each of these famous occasions with a bold inscription embedded in the very spot the lights went out. See how many you can find around the town.
And yes, the roof of Waverley station really is held up by sticks of celery.