A great night out... bar nun

Ok everyone, let's give it up for our next singer - Alice!" bellows Champagne Charlie, the camp compère at the Cellar Door bar's open mic cabaret. Like its more wilfully amateur cousin, karaoke, open-mic nights - for every genre of music from rap and hip hop to blues and jazz - have become a popular fixture on London's nightlife scene. They offer an opportunity for show-offs and would-be stars to belt it out as best they can, and enjoy others doing the same.

I am at the Trash Tuesday night at the Cellar Door bar (which has the deliciously mysterious address of Zero Aldwych) and I've agreed to sing. The venue used to be a public convenience, and although it bears not a trace of its less-than-salubrious past, it hasn't been enlarged by much - this place is tiny. The crowd are incredibly friendly and a lot of them are actors or singers, which makes them particularly forgiving, so no one should feel frightened to take to the stage here.

But several glasses of Pinot Grigio and a few lines of the Cellar Door's famous chocolate snuff (they have a large array of this old-fashioned sniffing tobacco on offer here, which is a novel way to get around the smoking ban), have done nothing to dull the fear churning in my stomach. The previous performer, a regular named Cheryl, has just relinquished the microphone to a deafening round of applause after a polished performance which set the bar a little too high for my liking.

Grasping the microphone with a sweating hand, I swallow my fourth glass of wine in one long gulp and advise the audience to do the same for their own sakes. They titter but fail to follow suit. They will come to regret that, I think as the resident pianist plonks expertly through the first few bars of my sheet music.

"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens," I start tentatively. My singing is best seen and not heard and, to add to my discomfort, I had misunderstood when f licking through Time Out, the usual style of Trash Tuesdays.

I thought it was a karaoke night where people sang songs from musicals and had picked a cheery Julie Andrews tune; everyone else seemed to be singing moody jazz.

Fortunately for me, however, anything goes at this open mic night and the audience seems to be in a forgiving mood, smiling encouragingly as I fumble clumsily through my intro.

Gaining momentum as the most recent glass of wine kicks in, I grab the compère and a volunteer from the audience to be my backing nuns and toss them a couple of wimples that I found in a party shop at the weekend.

To my intense relief, the audience seems to warm to my "the-atrics", so I do a couple of rock star poses and flip my micro-phone around a bit to get them going. It works, but at the cost of my losing my place on the song sheet.

My backing nuns giggle help-lessly as my performance deteriorates by the second, but I don't care. Suddenly, I am enjoying myself and the audience seem to be loving it too!