I was bored one May evening in 2009, so I thought I’d investigate this “Twitter” phenomenon I’d been hearing about. I knew it was a mini-blog site for anyone who possessed fingers and what passed for a brain. I’d also heard that famous people like Stephen Fry, Demi Moore and Britney Sucks Cocks were on it, so I was curious. So I duly set up a twitter account and I was ready to tweet! Let’s be honest, I didn’t know why or what I was going to tweet, but the idea of conveying the shit in my head to a possibly large audience excited me. However, after having blocked all the suggested followers, I didn’t have an audience.

The fact I had no followers, didn’t deter me however and I began my frenzied tweets of sexual innuendo, stories about chimps and rants. Within a week or so I had gained about 5 new followers, one of which seemed to be a sewage company. I was still blissfully unaware that some of my very funny tweets were being completely ignored and forgotten.

My early days of twitter coincided with me trying to become a stand up comedian, I’d only done one open-mic, but the joke material was flowing and I was on a comedic high. However, as the twitter days progressed, my jokes dwindled – I had become incapable of writing punchlines! But, like a crazed alcoholic, who sees their life crumbling before them but continues their love affair with the bottle, I too continued my love affair with Twitter. What to tweet was on my mind 24 hours a day. Yes, I even dreamt tweets, this loyalty laughable as I still only had about 10 followers.

Early tweets, now distant memories, were some of my best ones: they had a uniqueness, weren’t particularly funny and were like the proverbial tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it. There was the Balalaika song, my obsession with Samuel Pepys’ shins, and house-trained chimps eating custard creams. When I had an audience of about 100, I began to take on characters: Jason King (sexy supersleuth from the 1970s), Fanny Craddock and Nell Gwynne, to name a few. I began to make up my own characters too, Botztxip, my friendly pal from various dimensions, Goo Goo, a sex mad Neanderthaless and, my favourite, the very bossy, Donna Kerr-Babb, who was my spokeswoman on twitter, when I was unavailable (on the loo etc).

The tweets were right, but I was still not getting the kind of followers I needed in the numbers I needed. This is where my twitter crusade became anal. I would block straightaway, anybody who wasn’t “normal” and follow people I liked en masse, this would take about an hour or so, and then a day later if they weren’t following me back, I would hit the unfollow button and make a Nazi salute (I am not a Nazi). I would always make sure my last tweet before retiring to bed would be a good one and... hang on a minute, all this is meant to be secret! Anyway to cut a tedious story short, within only a few months I had amassed over 1,000 followers, many of whom are quality personalities, at least in my opinion.

Why do I have the urge to have lots of followers? Oh, there’s a bit of competition in there, a bit of geeky collecting and just wanting to share my cerebral rubbish with other people – that’s all. And by share, I don’t mean “chat”. I don’t mind chatting a bit, but I prefer the face-to-face kind of chat over a pint. I don’t even get off on people mentioning/responding to my tweets. That’s not why I tweet, and often engaging with them about a certain tweet can ruin my train of thought. That’s why I always appear to be ignoring people, which, I suppose you could say, I am! My aim, really, apart from the occasional rant when I have an irrepressible urge to diss everybody I know, IS primarily to entertain and to allow people to see my kind of humour. Yes, it’s often sexual or toilet based, but that’s what makes me laugh. I certainly don’t do it for the shock value or cheap laughs.

So, you can see I love twitter and am ruled by twitter. It is my primary form of entertainment. The television is never on. I tweet alone in the kitchen and twitter is my television. I don’t need to watch television anyway now, my followers often tweet in great detail about the programmes they are watching, so best of both worlds, I'd say. People (Todd Brunner) might say this is odd. Why? I am entertaining and being entertained at the same time, I’m being constructive and I’m doing something. Watching television aint doing nothing!

A tweet too far? Not yet, darlings. J’adore Twitter!