Garden City Comedy.

Tonight, I moseyed - yes: "moseyed" - along to watch a couple of Edinburgh previews performed as part of a new weekly comedy venture run by the excellent illustrator and poet Mushybees at the Dot to Dot gallery in Letchworth; how's that for a long and winding sentence?

I had a great time. The evening started in a slightly surreal way, after meeting with our IYIE co-host Stephen outside the station, when we walked into town to get something to eat at the Cultiva Lounge; a bar with an artsy, opium den air, that happens to be housed at the site of a former Argos, where I worked as a cash-strapped teenager. 

(They strapped me with cash.)

"That was where the stock room used to be," I said to Stephen (and to the guy behind the bar), "and there used to be an old-fashioned lift there at the back". 

Steve was interested; the barman looked bemused, wondering why I felt the need to tell him in the first place. Didn't he care that I worked there nearly twenty years ago? Are we living in the future?

The venue - a lovely little art gallery on The Wynd - made for a comfy low-fi place for a gig. The audience were small, but receptive, and the shows were great. I felt self-conscious at first - when don't I? - but a glass of red wine in the interval eased me in.

With a bit of luck, the gig will continue, and with a little more luck, I'll do a preview there myself in a few weeks. I wish Mushybees the best with the venture; now, I intend to wind down with a cup of tea and look over a script for a casting tomorrow; it's been a while. 

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