I am thinking seriously of buying some chewing gum. This follows an article in The Times last week revealing that a good chomp on it can help drive from the mind those irritating songs that lodge there.

Science editor Tom Whipple reported on research at Reading University, involving a song called Play Hard by David Guetta (me neither), which showed gum lessened a test group’s recollection of it by about a third.

This interested me as someone who was troubled on a recent holiday by occasional irruptions into my brain of Shirley Bassey’s 1959 hit Kiss Me, Honey Honey, Kiss Me.

But more persistent in the Greek sunshine was the close companionship of the late W.H. Auden. For some days before leaving home, I had been satisfying my craving for his work with regular playing from a ‘greatest hits’ tape that he recorded in New York in 1953.

Many of my favourite poems are on it, including As I Walked Out One Evening, which was usually given in recitals by the admiring Dylan Thomas, and In Memory of W.B Yeats. They receive a measured, portentous delivery from the poet.

Haunting passages from In Praise of Limestone (1948) sprang most readily to my mind in Greece, including the gloomy “In so far as we have to look/Forward to death as a fact, no doubt we are right”.

So shall it be gum? No, just read more cheerful poems, I think, including those of Ogden Nash. Here is one of his with an opening couplet offering sage caution in the circumstances: “There are several differences between me and Samuel Taylor Coleridge whose bust I stand admiringly beneath;/He found solace in opium, I found it in Godman’s Bayberry Chewing Gum – at least until it started loosening my teeth.”