I was away sometime early-ish last year in a hotel room for a few days and I found myself in the evening having a scan through Facebook. Maybe for an hour or so. And I was enjoying it much more than I would have been flicking through the channels on the TV. It might have been before going out. It might have been when I came home or whatever, and I was too tired to read but too awake to fall asleep. And I enjoyed reading articles about American politics and things like that. Even just listening to bits of music that I hadn’t heard in years. And I just thought Well, what can I do? I was back home and the Queen of England had been in Ireland, Obama arrived for less than 24 hours, and it made a huge impact. And I just thought I’ll write a little dialogue. Two lads in a bar talking about it. And I went to Google Images and I found—I’d never done this before—a photograph: two pints of Guinness. I uploaded it, then figured out how to add the dialogue. I’d written it in a document and cut and paste. There it was—sent it out. And the response was terrific. It was great fun. Great, great fun. So I did one a week later. I decided, well, that worked, I’ll do another. I think it was something about Gaddafi. I suppose I did roughly about one a week, but sometimes I did a few more. During the Olympics, for example, I did two in a row on Katie Taylor winning her gold in boxing, one after the other, semifinal and final. Other times I would have gone quite a while without doing any because there wasn’t anything going or I was too busy. […] But I was just doing this and enjoying it, really, to varying degrees. And then a man who runs a poetry house said he’d love to publish them. This would be last May. He said he’d love to publish them in book form, like a book of poetry almost.

— Roddy Doyle