Cringe at your teenage diaries

Cringe, the latest social trend to cross the Atlantic, may seem an unlikely way to spend an evening: a group of strangers read aloud their hormonally charged teenage diaries, poems and songs for the entertainment of others.

But the effect is strangely inclusive, cathartic and frequently hilarious, like free therapy. Anyone can come along, although baring your teenage soul is, thankfully, optional.

Cringe started in New York in 2005, in Brooklyn, a neighbourhood full of young and trendy urban professionals, and is the brainchild of writer Sarah Brown, 32, who came across her teenage diaries when her parents were moving house.

"I realised they were so awful that I had to get someone to witness how bad they were," she says. "I showed them to a friend and then thought, 'Why not share them with others?'"

So she took over the back room of her local bar, with just friends and colleagues as the audience. Cringe quickly became a regular event and Brown has now collected some of the best readings in a book.

While on holiday here last year Brown decided to do a London Cringe and it was so successful - in more ways than one - that she has launched a London version.

One of that night's readers, Nick, is now her fiancé and she has moved to the UK. "When he started reading I thought: he's interesting," says Brown.

"But that's the way with Cringe readings. You can be chatting with someone quite normally and then they get up to the microphone and you realise that they're funny and willing to humiliate themselves to make others laugh, and those are very attractive qualities."

There was a 2:1 female to male ratio at the New York events and about the same at the inaugural London Cringe evening I attended in November.

Most of the 70-odd people gathered in the bar (at the George pub, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand) were professionals in their twenties or early thirties - it could have been an upmarket singles night.