mostly david ephgrave

As I walked into town today, I passed the former premises of my favourite bookshop, Eric T Moore, to see a builder chipping off its awning with a chisel. This made me reflect with sadness at the amount of independent businesses that have closed nearby in recent months. Three shops have gone on the same street alone, with a number of others about the town following suit. The card shop I’d frequented for years (not wanting to fall for that Simply Clintons bullshit) shut its doors for the final time not so long ago, leaving me at a loss as to where to buy something other than the Forever Friends and comic-sans-fonted-yet-not-comic-in-content fare that's on sale everywhere else; people who once said how nice the cards I gave them were will probably now receive the selfsame design they gave me on the previous equivalent holiday; we may as well communicate by round-robin. This is a pattern that's reflected up and down the country, as more and more small businesses strug...

Tonight, I did a spot in the Bath New Act competition, as it felt like a thing to do while I'm here...and still on the fringes of being able to describe myself as a ‘new’ act. It was a nice room and a great line-up of a very high standard. I was on first, which can be a bit of a poisoned chalice, as the room aren't sufficiently warmed up, and you can easily get forgotten in the stream of other acts. That said, I quite like getting it over and done with, rather than having to keep my brain firing asI wait to go on. That said, my set went well and the audience were pretty responsive, which was good, as I took a bit of a risk and did mostly new material, in a slightly different format to what I've done in the past. I didn't get through to the final, which was a shame, but to be honest, it wasn't what it was about for me (but I would say that). I see every gig as a chance to bed in new stuff and settle into working alone again, as I gradually build up my stamina and c...

I exorcised a few demons tonight.  I took part in the first heat of So You Think Your Funny, which was a surprisingly enjoyable experience. This wasn't the source of the demon exorcising, incidentally; I'll get to that. Competing in a comedy competition is something I never thought I'd do; SYTYF in particular. I remember attending a semi-final with Glyn and our fellow cast member Calogero Tumminello, when we took our play the Balloon Debate to Edinburgh in 2008, and us all remarking as we sat in the audience how the idea of being part of an event with that name was terrifying. It sounded like a taunt. To make it worse, the applicants performed between two free-standing screens bearing the So You Think Your Funny legend; those five accusitory words boreing into them from both sides. It may as well have been called 'PROVE YOURSELF'.  Tonight, seven years later, I stood between those free-standing screens myself. I didn't see that coming. Back in 200...