mostly david ephgrave

I attended Katie Coxall's funeral online today and was glad to be a part of it. She died suddenly of cancer on 7th May at just fifty and had such vibrant energy it's hard to process she's gone. Just the loss of her on Twitter is akin to that of a Trump-like silence, only shit. And that's as far as the two can be compared in the same sentence. Katie's tweets had an intelligent bluntness the Great Orange One could only dream of (if a brain that compromised can even dream in the first place). Katie's talent was as vast and keen-eyed as her dark sense of humour. She was a creature of many hats (if creatures wear hats): an inspired illustrator with an instantly recognisable and brilliantly unique style, who was also a fantastic comic poet. Her sets at Mostly Comedy as mushybees back in the day were tear-streamingly funny. An audience member would hold a large pad aloft and turn the pages at her instruction to reveal a macabre illustration of a celebrity to which Kati...

Today, I nipped to Letchworth to meet with illustrator (and one-time - two-time - comedy poet) Mushybees, to discuss an event Mostly Comedy will act as surrogate parents to as part of Letchworth’s Arts Takeover in a couple of weeks. Months ago he got into contact to see if we’d be up for co-organising a comedy stage as part of Letchworth’s weekend of arts-based attractions in July; something I’d provisionally said yes to, before things got hectic in the lead-up to Edinburgh and we didn’t take it any further. Despite not getting down to the nitty-gritty straight away, we managed to pull a line-up together in a back-and-forth of emails yesterday, leading to me getting Glyn’s blessing and us deciding we’d officially go ahead with it (whatever ‘officially’ means in this context). In reality, it’s not complicated: from 12pm until 6pm-ish on the 22 nd July, Glyn, Mushybees and I will host four Edinburgh previews from four acts (including me), before Nor...