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REXCaught snoozing in the bed department store
One of them, I'm almost ashamed to say, is Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West) - "He tempted her with his treacle tarts and his tasty wholemeal bread" - but I can also do Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and at a karaoke evening, in Nice of all places, I once managed to get right to the end of another Elton hit, Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting).
The piece I would love to learn, though is by Gilbert & Sullivan, The Lord Chancellor's Nightmare song. It's from Iolanthe but I first heard it performed by American rock musician Todd Rundgren, who recorded it back in the 1970s.
Todd delivers it, I assume correctly, at an absolute gallop, each line almost tripping over the next as the poor Chancellor, racked by the pain of unrequited love, tosses and turns in his bed.
The speed at which it is sung is obviously a challenge but the real reason I'd love to crack it is that its descriptions of a hopelessly restless night are so hilariously accurate: "First your counter-pane goes and uncovers your toes, and your sheet slips demurely from under you Then the blanketing tickles, you feel like mixed pickles, so terribly sharp is the pricking And you're hot and you're cross and you tumble and toss till there's nothing 'twixt you and the ticking."
Although I can't remember the whole thing, I often find myself crooning snippets of it in the shower and at various intervals during the day.
I also found it unfurling in my brain almost in its entirety a few weeks back when my wife and I went in search of a new mattress.
The song is probably not much of an advert for a bed company - with its talk of tangled sheets and pillows which "politely decline to remain at their usual angle" - but as the accompaniment to an afternoon of trying out mattresses in department stores, it stayed in my head and refused to budge.
My wife and I both grew up in homes where mattresses lasted for decades, providing the battered and gradually sagging platform for a whole parade of births, deaths, consummations and illnesses.
We had no idea that buying a new one was such a complicated and expensive business.
I had assumed, for no reason other than that a mattress is just basically a big stuffed cushion rather than a whole bed, that they were priced in the hundreds rather than thousands of pounds.
Some are, of course. But the "best" mattresses, it turned out, were so costly that it would be cheaper to buy a small car and sleep in that.
More significantly, price is no guarantee of perfect comfort because each of us has a different idea of how the ideal mattress should feel.
Cue the basic problem for me, because just about every time I laid down on one, I found myself drifting off, instantly, to sleep. I can't remember a time when my wife's elbow has been so busy nudging me in the side.
Charles Dickens makes a canny observation, in David Copperfield, about how strangely guilty we all feel when we're "caught" snoozing in a public place.
So as soon as I was jerked awake I would look around me, anxiously, to see if my surreptitious snooze had been spotted by any of the staff.
Fortunately I think bed department staff are specially trained to turn a blind eye to such things.
Top mattresses are so costly it would be cheaper to buy a small car and sleep in that
My wife insisted that there were huge differences between mattresses and would lie on each one for a minute or so making the sort of "mmm, ah" noises usually uttered by wine connoisseurs as they gargle their way through clarets.
Unlike wine experts, however, who have a whole vocabulary of ludicrous descriptions to describe the flavour of the grape, from "a hint of fruit" to a "touch of Tarmac", all you can really say about a mattress is that it's too soft or too hard.
After a while I was almost expecting the three bears to come strolling around the corner.
In the end, totally flummoxed, we simply bought a mattress that had been reduced in price because it was the end of a line.
"Hmm, it sits a bit high on the bed," said my wife after it had been delivered.
She was not wrong. I felt a bit like one of those chain-mailed knights you see lying, arms crossed, on stone platforms in cathedrals.
"There's also a funny ridge down the middle," I pointed out, giving it a critical pat.
The Lord Chancellor's Nightmare Song began to play in my head. How did we not spot any of those problems? But you don't spot anything in the shop.
Mattresses are the mermaids of department stores, they lure you in with the siren call which is the promise of sleep in the middle of the day.
"Oh well, I suppose we are stuck with it," said my wife, in a voice that seemed strangely distant and echoey.
For she was already and quite happily slipping away...
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