Welcome to the broom cupboard,” Aaron Wood says to his 20-strong audience at one of the Apex conference centre’s six “amazing performance spaces”, as the four-star Apex Hotel on The Grassmarket prefers to call them.

Wood, 28, grew up on a “scary” council estate in Stockport and now lives with his girlfriend in Hyde in Greater Manchester. His was conceived in the back of a Ford Explorer, he tells us, and his father left before he was born. While he had “blind optimism as a kid” and misses his naivety –  “I think social media’s done it” – now he has compassion. 

As he races along, we learn he went to 19 schools, including several specialist ones for autistic children after he was diagnosed with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Cue a tale about a sleepover as a 12-year-old “at Matt’s house” in which they were playing the video game Fifa. Aaron scored and was celebrating. “Matt was less happy. He was just breathing on the bed and then head-butted the mirror.” The sleepover was terminated.

In another tale, he recalls being burgled at night while sleeping naked with his girlfriend and riffs on the dilemmas for his “little pecker” who normally gets “very excited” but on this occasion looked “like a slug”. By the time he got downstairs, with his girlfriend telling him to take a bat and Wood slightly more concerned with what was going on downstairs personally, the burglar had gone. “We’ve got fuck-all worth stealing,” he explains.

Happily, there was an up-for-anything female group from Belfast in the front two rows and, though Wood couldn’t always work out what they laughing at or in some cases saying, he was canny enough to bag it as a positive sign. That said, he did also tell the audience it had been “a bit clunky”, though it was his first performance of 24.

“I’m trying to figure out my life; that’s the point of this show. I need to get out,” he says, almost in a confessional way. “My therapist says I need to travel more; get out the house more.”

There was a good running joke about a pet hamster, which seemed to fit in well with Wood’s idiosyncratic way of looking at things, and his largely absent father periodically reappeared in anecdotes, though none remotely favourably. There was a sense that the show could have done with a bit more structure, though, there again, perhaps that was the point: that in a way it reflected his somewhat chaotic, every-shifting upbringing and enabled his impulsivity to shine through.

Wood also works for his disabled mother during the day and in what was a fluid, unfiltered performance it would have been good to have heard more about his relationship with her and how autism has affected him, as he does not present as autistic, but maybe that’s for another day.

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