I received an email a few weeks ago.

It was simple enough – would I be kind enough to do an interview?

I was in a good mood at the time so I agreed, despite the fact that I invariably decline such requests.  I am learning that a lot of my problems stem from agreeing to something while in a good mood, so from now on, good moods are out.

Naturally I asked what the interview was about and the answer was rather vague.  It was to be about my general attitude to life and stuff I write about, which is about as vague as anyone can get.

Now I hadn't used Skype on this laptop before.  On previous laptops I just slotted in my microphone and my earphones and away I went.  It transpires [and I never noticed this before] that there is only one little socket.  After a bit of exploring I realised that the socket combined microphone and earphones so how the fuck do I put two plugs into one socket?  In the end, I used the fiddley little  thing that came with my mobile phone.  It worked, but the little bean things I had to stick in my ears kept falling out.

Anyhows, I got Skype working and we started the interview.

He launched straight into a piece I had scribbled about being a discriminated smoker.

The feeling I got was that I had been invited to play a game.  Only when I got onto the pitch, was I told the game was soccer.  OK, that's fine, but a couple of minutes later I'm told that the game is actually cricket so I have to do a rapid adjustment.  Two minutes later I find myself playing rugby, followed buy American football followed by tiddlywinks.  To say it was confusing was putting it very mildly.

What made things even worse was that William [the interviewer] not only knew exactly what he was going to ask next but the little sleeveen had researched each one.  When I call him a sleeveen, I am being very polite; God knows why?

Things weren't helped by the hangover and the fact that the little beans kept falling out of my ear. 

I got another email when I got back on Monday.  I had hoped he had forgotten all about the interview and had moved on to better things, but the email informed me that he hadn't.  He had published it.

You can find the original here.

However, I have done a bit of editing [if he can do it then so can I] and have removed half an hour of politicians [oh that I could do that in real life] and here is the result –