I'm almost sure it was World Book Day . . . I was asked to read to a group of people in the public library in Greystones. I almost choked when I read a report of the event in the Wicklow People a week later, quoting a member of the library staff as saying, "He had time for everyone. He's just like an ordinary person really."

I say I almost choked because at the time I happened to be eating beluga caviar out of Katy French's navel in the penthouse suite of the Merrion Hotel.

"An ordinary person?" Katy raged, flinging the newspaper across the room. "You'll sue, I presume."

"No, " I said, enigmatically. "People love that kind of thingf" Sorry, I'm inclined to slip into character from time to time. An occupational hazard when you're. . .well, what exactly?

A few months back, in the small morning hours of a drunken Saturday night, I was wrapping my face around a bacon and sausage pastie in the Spar on Upper Baggot Street, when I noticed a young man, in full rugby regimentals . . .dubes, chinos, sailing jacket . . . giving me the evil eye across the HB fridge.

It turned out his name was Ross.

"Dude, " he said, jabbing a finger at me, "those books of yours ruined my focking life."

Dude, I said, they ruined mine too. Or didn't ruin it . . . just changed it. Made it seem silly.

Because a couple of days earlier, I'd had a long telephone conversation with the man who was translating one of the early Ross books into Russian. We spent the most bizarre 45 minutes of either of our lives trying to come up with a variation of the term "one-eyed zipperfish" that the kids in Ul'yanovsk would understand.

And naturally I got to thinking . . .
how did this become my job?

I've got the first Ross O'Carroll Kelly column I ever wrote in front of me. It was in January 1998. The opening line is, "The schools cup is, like, only two weeks away, roysh, and my mind is, like, totally fried" It's seven paragraphs long and it's pretty awful and, reading it now, the wonder is that the Sunday Tribune agreed to publish the second one.

But they did and then an odd thing happened. Readers started to feel the urge to communicate with the character.

When you're a sportswriter . . .which I was then . . . the only time anyone writes to you is to accuse you of being "anti the League of Ireland" or to tell you that the correct Shakespeare quote is "all that glistersf" and not "glitters".

But after the first four or five Ross columns appeared, I started to get letters. Admittedly, some were written in green ink . . . one informing me that I was a "mutant waste of protoplasm" . . . but others I didn't have to pass on to gardai at Harcourt Terrace for the purposes of psychological profiling.

Schoolkids wrote to me . . . first letters, later e-mails and texts . . . telling me about friends who were SUCH Ross O'Carroll-Kellys and . . .

OH! MY! GOD! . . . you have got them, like, SO spot-on. Mums and dads rang to tell me about daughters who were dating big thick rugby jock-types and they'd read the column out over Sunday breakfast, hoping it might somehow break the spell.

Teachers in some of Dublin's elite, fee-paying schools rang, urging me to keep it up, even weighing in with storyline ideas.

For the first year or so, the column was written by committee. I didn't go to a south Dublin rugby-playing school and would have been lost but for the hilariously acerbic orientation offered to me by Michael Ross and Peter O'Reilly, a couple of sports department colleagues who did. The former helped me pen a song called 'Castlerock Uber Alles', which became the character's school anthem.

A friend of mine . . . who has a university education and knows a lot of things . . . informed me recently that, with Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, I caught the prevailing wind of the cultural zeitgeist. I knew that, of course. I even remember the day that happened. Opposite the Tribune office in Dublin, there was a newsagent called Jones's, which sold black water that smelt vaguely of coffee for fifty old pence a cup.

I arrived in to work one Saturday morning and to discover that, overnight, Jones's had become Bon Espresso and Patisserie . . . and that a cup of coffee cost two pounds eighty.

Bottom lip quivering, I asked Ger Siggins, the paper's chief sub (who incidentally came up with the name Ross O'Carroll-Kelly), "What's going on?"

"They're calling it the Celtic Tiger, " he said.

We got under our desks and waited for it to pass.

It was during the early years of the economic boom, probably around the year 2000, that I finally found a voice for Ross and started to think of the column as a means of reflecting some of the pretentiousness and downright ridiculousness that came hand in hand with the new prosperity.

When I was growing up, coleslaw was considered cosmopolitan and foccacia was something you got at a stag weekend that would clear up if you applied cream to the infected area and abstained from alcohol for a month.

Suddenly, we had a few quid more than we could spend, and people were talking about sundried tomatoes and organic goat's cheese like we all grew up in Puerta Banus.

I remember some friends of mine at school had weekend jobs stacking shelves in Superquinn, where only very, very posh women would shop. They'd come in to school on Monday morning, talking mistily about caraway seed bread and Wensleydale with apricots.

Suddenly, words like "frittata" and "torte" were tripping off everyone's lips and every cafe owner in the country discovered that people would eat shit once it was wrapped in parma ham and cost at least 15.

Alongside the food snobbery, there were other changes. Language changed. Accents changed.

I spent a lot of time earwigging people on buses and trains and noticed how Americanised our youth was becoming. I was especially interested in the repeated use of the linguistic crutch "like" and the habit they had of, like, raising the intonation of their voices at the end of their, like, sentences, so that everything sounds like a question?

Young people seemed suddenly more confident . . . even more obnoxious . . . and both seemed to grow in direct proportion to the proliferation of mobile phones. When the first few arrived, you'd hear people on buses and trains answering them in an embarrassed whisper:

"Can't talk. . . on the bus."

Then one day I heard a girl . . . no more than sixteen . . . announce at the top of her voice, "People who fail their Leaving Cert should be sterilised. All these people have, like, medical cords . . . they should do it without telling them next time they go in for an operation. . ."

South Dublin was the centre of a new world. It seemed to me to be a sovereign state unto itself, with its own language, rituals and rummy little pretensions that were ripe for satire.

Paddy Keogh from the RTE Guide asked me last week whether I had a chip on my shoulder about being . . . yes, it's true . . . working class and whether that was the true inspiration for the character. I wish my answer had been as good as the question but I had never thought about it that way. But having just read back through the first 15 or so columns, the answer is yes. The chip was so big it's a wonder I didn't herniate myself.

There's an anger and bitterness in those early pieces. I set out to create a hateful character who was the incarnation of everything I unthinkingly hated about that world . . . privilege, acquisitiveness, entitlement.

Sharing champagne baths with Rosanna Davison has helped me see life from a different perspective, though.

I learned over time that you don't need a sledgehammer to make your point. Then, despite myself, I began to warm to the character. And around him I constructed a whole world, circumscribed by Kiely's, Shanahan's on the Green and visits to Donnybrook to watch Leinster, the official team of Celtic Tiger Ireland.

What I really wanted to do was emulate Damon Runyon, who also started out as a sports journalist, but then started writing short stories based on the characters he observed at racetracks and ballgames and fights. I set out to create a similar world, though not so much Guys and Dolls as Goys and Birds.

I wanted to create characters as colourful as Sky Masterson and Harry the Horse and the incredible pie-eating woman at Mindy's. I scoured the births column in the Irish Times for appropriate names to hang on them . . . Orphas and Oisinns and Sorchas and Fiachras and Jessicas.

People ask me all the time who individual characters are based on and it's true that most of them were inspired by real people. I created Charles and Fionnuala . . . the parents Ross casually despises . . . after overhearing a senior schools cup player say to his dad, "I don't give a fock how well you think I played . . . crack open the wallet."

Sorcha is a tree-hugging, SUVdriving fond amalgam of every girlfriend I've had since I was about 16.

Ronan was inspired by a wonderfully precocious eight-year-old boy I know, who turned to me once as we happened to be passing a methadone clinic and said, "Another few years and I'll be in there . . .getting me 'script."

There are at least three people out there who claim I based Ross on them . . . and, as it happens, they're all right. But I also regularly ransack the lives and vocabularies of my friends for material . . . especially a very funny man called Paul Wallace, who's writing a memoir of being Ross O'CarrollKelly's best mate called Who's The Other Guy? , a question a bouncer asked one night as he let us into the the VIP bar in Renards.

Almost ten years since I first conceived of Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, I'm enjoying writing his adventures more than ever. Sometimes, though, I feel like I've surrendered my own identity to him.

A couple of months ago, RTE News asked to interview me about the Ireland rugby team having to play their matches "away from home" in Croke Park. When I met the reporter, she asked me to do the funny voice.

"Funny voice?" I said, crankily. "I don't do funny voices. I'm a writer."

She stared right through me, unimpressed.

"Why don't you ring up Roddy Doyle, " I said, "and ask him to do it as Charlo Spencer?

"Go on, " she said, like she was dispatching an errant child, "just do the voice."

When strangers come up and high-five me in the street . . . oh yeah, regularly . . . they always address me as Ross and I think it'd be simpler all round if I changed my name by deed poll.

Someone asked me recently whether I was perhaps letting the Celtic Tiger generation off too lightly by presenting them in a warmly humorous way. But I've no great socio-political message I want to get across and I never intended Ross O'Carroll-Kelly to be an indictment of the times in which we live. Looking back all I wanted to do, like any satirist, was to hold up a mirror to people and say, "Look how silly you look, " and in the process maybe pick up Glenda Gilson's phone number, a BMW and a Starbucks franchise for my kitchen.