I’m hoping it’s the way you tell ’em, but I suspect it’s the way you read it. Please take a look at the following sentence, which is the sole thing I remember from an entire night of nightmares.

“I’m tired of boring people.”

Now, maybe it also depends how nice you are. I would like to think that you read that as meaning I, me, this fella right here in front of you, is weary of some other people who have in some way been continuously boring.

Except I read it as I, me, this guy, is weary of how much he bores everyone.

I did tell you it was a nightmare. I didn’t tell you it was five nights ago and I won’t tell you that I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time since thinking about it. But you can possibly guess.

As a result of spending a ridiculous amount of time thinking about it, though, I can definitively say that I’ve now thought back through everybody I’ve ever met. And there was only one man, a councillor I interviewed in Redditch, who was boring. Give him credit, he was clearly practicing to become boring professionally and I am certain he will have made it to the top.

Everybody is interesting. Everything is interesting, absolutely everything.

(Except football.)

But everything else, absolutely everything else is so interesting that I can’t get enough of it.

Apparently I also can’t shut up about it either. For it turns out that this is the 702nd Self Distract I’ve written to you.

I’m not sure how I missed that I’d got to 700, but then I’m equally unsure how in the world I got to 700. I will say, mind, that for the first while, Self Distract was less a letter to you and more some plugging of whatever work I’d just done on Radio Times or BBC Ceefax or BBC News Online or UK DVD Review.

Let’s rule out those few dull ones, then, and call this the 3rd Self Distract.

Or perhaps you and I can think of it as the first since BBC Radio 4 commissioned a play of mine. It’s less a play, more a sacred trust, and I’ve only wanted it for so many years that if they found out, they’d conclude I was a rubbish scriptwriter and take it back.

But while I can’t yet tell you, not even you, what the play is truly about, I can say that it’s based on an archive of letters. Even more letters than there have been Self Distracts, which appears to be saying something.

I think that’s interesting.