I occasionally sing with a crib, but I've never sung from the words except in church. But I know I've got an unusually retentive memory for song lyrics - if I like a song the words seem to stick, and by and large they stay stuck. The second verse comes after the first one, and the rest of the song comes along behind. (I thought I'd forgotten The Cruel Ship's Carpenter the other day, but I realised I'd only forgotten the first line - once that came back to me, the rest of the song was there waiting.) If singarounds were restricted to people who learn songs as easily as me, they'd be a lot more thinly attended and I'd get a lot more songs. So it wouldn't be all bad.

Having said that, I did 'dry' a couple of weeks ago, when I got a bit too confident - I'd come prepared to do Randy Dandy-O and decided at the last minute to do Oak, Ash and Thorn instead. Verse one was fine, but where the hell was verse two? It was on somebody's smartphone, that's where, for which I'm eternally grateful. "Oak of the clay lived many's the day"... and we were off again.

Don't ban cribs. Do encourage learning. And the best way to encourage it is to show that it makes the songs better.