I had an audition yesterday. It was for a Brighton-based topical and satirical sketch show, which has been running for 24 years.

More on that in a bit.

Earlier in the week, I had my first coffee ‘n’ chat with Chris, a musician, writer and songwriter of significant repute. He is beta testing his plan to offer courses of “creativity counselling”.

I am one of his five willing guinea pigs, and over the past six months Chris will be helping me clarify what I want to achieve, creatively speaking, and how to go about it.

It was a really interesting chat, which lasted three hours.

To begin with, it was a case of him getting a sense of who I am, what I care about, and how serious I am about the things I say I would like to do.

I have serious imposter syndrome when it comes to taking any creative endeavour seriously. Heartfelt and sincere compliments from people I respect slide right off me like war crimes off a Tony Blair, and self-sabotage never feels far away.

None of this really came up in the session, but I suspect it will in future meetings. Chris is someone who likes my writing, and who can explain eloquently what is it about it he likes and why it’s good.

He likes my songs too, and offered to produce a future album if we can make it work. And we set useful, concrete goals that feel tangible and achievable over the next month.

So why did I spend the rest of the day feeling like I wanted to hide in a cave at the bottom of the ocean?

One very interesting part of the chat was attempting to delineate what *I* think counts as creative work and what counts as just doing things to facilitate the making of creative work.

And – this was trickier – how to separate what I want to do for myself, creatively, and what I want to do for and with other people.

I am an inveterate people pleaser.

There was also an enjoyable bit of the conversation whereby I talked about trying to do a poster for a night that wasn’t my own, and him writing “CONTROL FREAK” on his notepad in big letters, with my permission.

This brings me back to the audition.

I’ve never done an audition before, as such. All I needed to do was bring a “comedy speech” and a song to perform, and then act out a few sketches of their own material.

Half an hour before I needed to leave for the audition, I still hadn’t decided what I was going to perform.

Twenty minutes before my audition, I had decided what to perform.

I cycled through the wind and rain to the back room of a pub and performed a sketch written by Greg Davies, and two songs, one of which is funny (Freedom Isn’t Free, from Team America), and one that is bittersweet at best (The Book Of Love, by The Magnetic Fields).

“I’m doing two songs because I want to show off the full range of my voice”.

I actually said that.

All went well. I was then given a Richard Madley sketch to read out, like a monologue, which was a bit weird as I had no-one to riff off.

I then had to pretend to be a Russia Today newsreader, for which I went full Meercat.

And then, the test: read tbe Russia TV bit again, but then be told to change accent every few seconds.

American, RP, American south, Swedish.

That was fun. I wish we’d started with that, and I said so.

And then it was done. I have absolutely no idea if I was what they were looking for, and whether the floppy haired, fresh from theatre school guy who was going in after me would make more sense in a regular cast.

But I know I did pretty much as well as I could have, despite the lack of rehearsing or thinking about it.

And what does that say, given all the above?

Well. I’m thinking about it.

I’m thinking about “creative work for fun” versus “creative work to pay the bills”.

I’m thinking about the different types of creativity – does curating an interesting lineup of artists into a show count?

Does performing in a show that you haven’t written or arranged count, if your performance is good?

And at this point, “Control Freak” being written into a notebook appears unbidden in my mine’s eye.

Much more to ponder, many more blog posts available to get to the bottom of it all.