**cringe**

Tonight I went to London Cringe, which is essentially a night where people read from their teenage diaries and MY GOD it is brilliant. The majority of the readers are women, which is unsurprising. Two of the three male readers were of the port out starboard home variety, and the other a gay Geordie. Talk about transcending the class divide in Britain. One read about his boarding school experience and eventual first girlfriend at Uppingham, the other provided insight into the teenage male psyche with readings from a diary that was 80% football statistics, 14% schoolyard football victories, 3% girls and 3% friends. The forty year old Geordie took us back to when skin tight canvas trousers were the in thing and told of how he had proudly left the house in them only to find they were so tight he couldn't get his bus money out of the pocket.

Two girls from Norwich opened the night, and I actually recognised one of the characters in their tale as a friend of a guy I dated, Aaron. God, I wonder what became of him. He was sweet. I realise that's akin to saying he was damned. Still. Nervy. I asked her after and she didn't know what had become of him. I wonder if this is the beginnings of a facebook stalk. Tricky since I no longer remember his last name. Shocking.

Most of the stories read were fron when people were thirteen or so. I fancy that my diaries of the time would have been somewhat different. In my warped recollection, 1993 was not a great year for me. I had just started secondary school and felt like a perpetual failure. I wasn't pretty enough, or cool (enough or at all). It was actually my make or break year. That year I went on the Creative Arts Programme, and was tasked with writing something to include the immortal lines "and it was a chicken". Most people wrote haikus or plays. Syntaxfree and I wrote an immensely sexualised epic poem that I think we actually submitted. It featured cameos from every A lister at the time (I distinctly remember a Keanu Reeves/Speed reference). The year after that I got streamed into the dumber-kids class at school and decided academics weren't my future.

Anyhow, the readers last night were aged between 25 and 40. The direct quotes from their teenage diaries included lines like, "Connecting sex and love, that's where all the problems start", "What's the difference between a dick and a vagina?" (from a 13 year old Catholic school girl) and "he was so sexy, a mix of X, X, X and Alan Johnson". There was the Bromley love story, on which a date involved simulated rape in bushes, and a birthday party where someone was given six beers (a six-pack, then?). I can't possibly do it enough justice here, since so much of the humour lay in the horror and self depreciation of the readers, but it was absolutely brilliant. Even better, it was free! Who says a good time can't be had for the price of a beer in London?!