The open mike night rolled around again on Tuesday. After my triumphant featured set at the last gig I was looking forward to playing again, even if it was only at the open mike section. I had three songs lined up and ready to go. At 8 PM I would head down to the Crown and rock the crowd once more.

At quarter past seven I got a phone call from my sister telling me to phone my good friend Lord Tankington-Smythe, one of the two organisers of the open mike night. And by the way, would I like a lift? Yes I would, says I, so we arranged for me to be picked up in fifteen minutes.

While I waited for my lift to arrive I gave Lord Tankington-Smyte a quick phonecall. He had some bad news: all of the featured acts for that night had dropped out one after the other, and he had noone to take their place. Would I mind doing a longer set?

Now I don't know if it was pity for a friend that made me say yes, or if it was some kind of idiotic hubris, some mis-placed belief that I could actually pull it off, but I agreed. I agreed to play a thirty minute set. In fact, I agreed to play the thirty minute headline set at the end of the night. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake.

After getting off the phone I realised that I was being picked up in ten minutes. Ten minutes to gather my instrument, get my gear together and somehow expand a nine minute set into a thirty minute set with no way to work out which songs would flow well together and no way to practise. Suffice to say, I spent most of those ten minutes worrying about how I could never do all of the things I needed to do in ten minutes.

So, I arrive at the pub thoroughly unprepared and order a drink. And then, since I'm not on till last, I systematically order several more drinks. By the time I take to the stage I'm half-terrified, half-drunk and half-stupidly optimistic, which according to my maths makes one-and-a-half idiots. First I play two of the songs I'd originally planned for my three song set. Then I realise I've forgotten what the third song in the set was going to be, so I start making up the set list as I go along. I make it three quarters of the way through a cover before realising that somehow I've ended up in entirely the wrong key. I proudly announce that my next song is one of my own composing, play the opening chords and realise that I don't know the words. After that I realise that I've forgotten how to play all of the songs I'm supposed to know how to play, so in desperation I um and ah and then I ask the audience if they have any requests.

Thankfully crowds love a well-meaning idiot, so they don't do the obvious thing and kindly request that I get the hell off the stage.

And here's the problem: I was awful. I was too drunk and too scared and too unprepared to be good. But people were still telling me that they enjoyed it and that I was great. But I wasn't. I was bad.

So, if people said I was good when I know I was bad, how can I trust that they were being honest when they said I was good before? Have they just been patronising me all along? Or, by some miracle, did I actually manage to pull this gig out of the bag by sheer dint of admitting my mistakes and making a joke out of them?

Oh, how I love existential doubt.