Tall tales: Dear diary

The Writing Of The Diary is an annual teenage ritual, as much a part of traditional New Year celebrations as an inept midnight fumble and too much Bacardi. The first day of each new year brings with it a crisp blank page which begs to be covered with the tear-stained inky scrawls of adolescent angst and heartbreak. While boredom thankfully leads most to abandon the practice sometime around noon on 3 January, a few die-hard chroniclers continue their wordy reflections year round, barely pausing to refill their pen amid the unending horror of hormones, unrequited love and (incredibly) bad poetry.

Unfortunately, I was a fully paid-up, card-carrying member of the would-be creative adolescents, and fell into the latter camp. Somewhat more fortunately, my reams of self-absorbed ramblings remain firmly hidden under lock and key and I have wrung promises from my nearest and dearest that they will swiftly destroy every single volume should I expire before being able to ceremonially burn them myself. But when Sarah Brown, a writer from Brooklyn, reread her teenage journals as an adult, she decided they were just too awful to be left to fester, and should instead be read aloud. To an audience.

It sounds like the stuff of nightmares, but the readings became a huge comic hit, and suddenly other ex-teenage diarists wanted a go, too. So 'Cringe' nights were born, where a group of complete strangers gather to share their most humiliating anecdotes, as written by their pubescent selves. The concept quickly spread, and the London 'Cringe' contingent hold an open-mic night - participation is strictly optional - each month in a small, tightly packed room above The George pub on the Strand.

After experiencing a night at Cringe, I am fairly confident that even the best comic writers would have a hard time competing with the musings of a socially awkward teenager. Rereading my own diary still makes me want to curl up with shame, but listening to someone else share their own extracts, such as the poetic 'I feel as if I am an actor, in the cruelest tragedy known to man', and watching them squirm, makes for a hilarious evening.

But Cringe isn't (just) about laughing at the misspent youth of others. The nights unintentionally seem to work on a more altruistic level as a form of free therapy, and not just for the reader: the realization that even the glamorous, confident blonde on stage was once a miserable, self-conscious teenager is peculiarly comforting. But most of all, you leave Cringe with an overwhelming feeling of gratitude that those dark days are over, and a new found appreciation for life on the other side of 19. (queserasera.org/cringe.html)