I remember she cried again the day I told her - just for the crack - that he was back in again. "It was just on Sky News, " I went. "The poor focker's staring down the barrel of a ten-stretch."

When I delivered the punchline - "crimes against men's fashion" - she kicked me so hard that when my left knacker finally reappeared I barely focking recognised it.

But that, it has to be said, was a rare error of judgement on my port. I didn't become the most prolific womaniser in the history of Ireland without knowing a thing or two about birds and what winds their clocks. And probably the most important thing I know, roysh, is that birds actually care about shit that goes in the world.

I remember the first time I ever asked Sorcha out on a date. I walked up to her and I was like, "Do you fancy a coffee after the Institute on Saturday?" playing it too cool for school.

She went, "Okay - do you know the Amnesty International Shop and Freedom Café on Fleet Street?" and how I didn't crack up laughing in her Ricky Gervais, I will never know.

I think if you can keep a straight face in a situation like that, you could probably withstand anything they could do to you in Guantánamo.

I was there, "I do know it actually, " thoroughly ashamed of myself, of course.

"What time are your French grinds over?" and she was like, "One, " and I went, "See you in there at half-one then."

Until that day, roysh, I have to admit that I was sort of, like, skeptical - if that's the word - about all that human rights, stop the killing bullshit. I always figured that if some focking shit-stirrer in some country I can't even pronounce is about to swing, it's probably for a good reason.

But that day brought about what would have to be described as a political awakening in me. The Freedom Café was, like, wall-to-wall BlankersKoen - and no hounds either. We're talking the best from, like, Mount Anville, Alex, Holy Child Killiney, Loreto Foxrock, all sitting around, crapping on about the terrible things happening in Bosnia and Mosnia and all the other places you'd never go on your holidays.

"Did you see my badge, " Sorcha went and I looked at this little thing she had pinned to her Euro900 Prada jacket. I was, like, cracking on to be really interested, which is another thing birds love.

She was like, "It's a white handkerchief. It's the symbol of the Mothers of the Disappeared.

They're campaigning to find out the fate of their sons and daughters who disappeared during the rule of the military junta in Argentina."

To which there's no answer, of course, though I did resist the urge to say the first thing that came into my head, roysh, which was, 'What a waste of focking money.'

I was only, like, 15 at the time but I remember going home and getting on the Wolfe straight away to JP.

I was like, "Dude, I've just discovered the most important thing we need to know about birds, " and he was there, "More important that how to give one an orgasm?" and of course I was like, "Sorry, how is that important? No, no, no - the thing is, roysh, we've got to try to be intelligent and sensitive. We've basically got to join Amnesty International."

And that's what we did - we're talking me, JP, Christian, Fionn and Oisínn. Every month that newsletter would drop through the letterbox, roysh, and me and the goys would, like, read it from cover to cover, memorising lines that we'd then, like, drop into conversations with birds in Wes.

The best chat-up line I ever used wasn't, "I'm new around here - could you give me directions to your place?" or, "Hey, I'm suffering from amnesia - do I come here often?" or even, "That dress would go very well with the corpet in my bedroom."

It was, "Jesus, I'm pretty wrecked today actually - I was up half the night trying to get through Human Rights Are Women's Rights, " which, it has to be said, never failed.

It'd be fair to say, roysh, that without those newsletters - and obviously all those extrajudicial killings, political assassinations, disappearances, prisoners of conscience, torture victims and people displaced by war and famine - I might have reached my eighteenth birthday still a plastic surgeon.

Instead, when it was bad news for Angola, East Timor, Iraq, Rwanda, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, it was good news for me and the goys.

Like Oisínn used to say, it's an ill wind that blows for no one.

Wherever there was hatred, we sowed love.

I remember getting a lot of action in particular around the time of the Myanmar crisis. I provided a shoulder for a lot of grief stricken Mounties when 10,000 Mon civilians were forcibly returned from Thailand and I was like a rock when the abuses of labourers working on the Ye-Dawei Railway were revealed.

I also remember reading about Kim Sun-maong, the world's longest-held political prisoner, who'd been in the clink from the end of the Second World War to, like, the mid 1990s or some shit. I remember telling this bird Melanie, whose Alan Whickers I was trying to get into at the time, that I was going to, like, write to the South Korean government and let my views be known. Of course I wouldn't have written my focking name to save his orse but by some totally freakish coincidence they let the focker out two weeks later and Melanie rings me, going, "I don't know what you said in that letter but - OH! MY! GOD! - it worked."

Thick as a focking tuna sandwich she was but let's just say she was very grateful to me for intervening in the case.

See, when it comes to connecting with birds, knowing all about all the sad shit doing down in the world is even more important than knowing your way around the chick-flicks of the 1980s and 1990s.

If Kim Sun-maong was the Sleepless in Seattle of Amnesty campaigns, then Ken Saro-Wiwa was the You've Got Mail.

I got on board early with Ken and I knew from the stort that I'd picked a winner. I remember collecting signatures with, like, thirty or forty birds, outside the Bank of Ireland in College Green, under a humungous banner that I made, which said - Shell Oils The Wheels Of Nigeria's Dictatorship.

I ripped it off from an Amnesty poster I saw somewhere and then passed it off as my own.

There's a hell of a lot of birds in South Dublin who would name that was the day they fell in love with Ross O'Carroll-Kelly.

It certainly screwed the nut where Sorcha was concerned. I remember her turning to me, just as I was storting up a chant of, "What do we want? Ken Saro-Wiwa to be let off! When do we want it?

Basically now!"

She went, "You've invested so much of yourself in this campaign, Ross. I just hope you're not going to be disappointed."

And of course I was like, "I won't, Babes. I can guarantee you of that."