Andy Richardson: The Twilight Zone

The word 'seriously' doesn't cover it. Nothing enthrals me more than putting words in an order that makes perfect sense. Writing sentences that resonate with readers is manna from heaven, a celestial gift.

Give me pen and paper and I'm a non-league football fan with the FA Cup, an underachieving kid acing his exams, a going-nowhere-fast singer catapulted into the charts. Only this father's love for his son makes me happier than writing words for others.

Interviews are an equally serious preoccupation. Before breaking bread with a singer, actor, sportsman or comic, I want to know every little detail of their life. If Paul Weller asks me what the B-side was to When You're Young, I need to be able to say Smithers-Jones; if David Walliams asks me which book came between Mr Stink and Gangsta Granny, I need to be able to say Billionaire Boy; if Geoffrey Boycott asks me whether he knows how many test runs he scored, I need to be able to say 8,114.

And then I want to tell him that they were scored at an average of 47.72 and included 22 100s, 42 50s and featured a top score of 246 not out. And, should he ask, I need to be able to tell him that his 246 not out was made against India, at Headingley, in 1967. And then I want to be able to remind him that, remarkably, he was dropped for the next match because the England selectors thought he'd scored too slowly.

Obsessive doesn't cover it. It's like living in The Twilight Zone.

If I'm writing more than a standard 1,500-word interview, I go into overdrive. Writing books, for instance, is an epic pursuit. It's the Marathon des Sables, the Race Across America, the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Challenge. I'm the fact detective, the sentence inspector and the word police all rolled into one. There are times when my addiction to doing the best job possible has unintended consequences.

More from Andy:

• Work to do... but first a game of ping pong

• Feet are itching, passport is ready

• Kanye for a day

Two years ago, for instance, I spent weekends and evenings with a guy who'd won a staggering 34 gold medals at European, World and Paralympic level, making him the most successful equestrian athlete ever. He told me about the disability that had afflicted him from birth – arthrogryposis multiplex congenita, since you ask – and I worked hard to understand it, all the better to ghostwrite his autobiography.

On my second visit to his home, I unintentionally walked on to an unsecured manhole cover at the top of his drive, plunging 75cm into the void. My trailing foot scraped on the metal cover, mangling my metatarsal like aluminium through a roller. As pain seared from foot to brain, I suddenly understood what it was the Paralympian had been talking about. Everything made perfect sense. And the book was all the better for it.

My latest assignment is a little less painful. The person I've been working with has a penchant for Twiglets, the none-more-Marmite-flavoured wheaty snack with a distinctive knobbly shape. My favourite Twiglet story had previously been about Mr Bean, who upon running out of Twiglets at a New Year's Eve party substituted Marmite-coated twigs for the Jacob's original snack. That tale has been outgunned by her's.

Her rock star memoir contains an hilarious episode that we'll call Twigletgate. While touring the world for two years and becoming embroiled in the madness of life on the road, her return ticket to sanity was a daily packet of Twiglets.

Each evening, her rock star rider would feature the usual – wine, fruit, beer, small Japanese teddy bears (I'm joking about that bit) – and, most importantly of all, a packet of Twiglets. They gave her something to look forward to, a little piece of home while on the road in Rotterdam, Berlin, New York and Los Angeles.

Until the inevitable happened and her behemoth band and its 50-strong entourage arrived at some cavernous arena only to find the management had forgotten her Twiglets. They'd tried to cover their tracks by buying a mountainous quantity of cheese and onion crisps – and you can understand their thinking. Cheese and onion are almost on the same scale as Twiglets. Except, of course, they're not what the rock star wanted.

"Where's my Twiglets?" she screeched, probably throwing the cheese and onion crisps around the room in a unique and ever-so-Spinal-Tap-esque episode of SnackRage. It didn't happen again.

And so, on my present weekends-and-holidays project, I'm trying to understand the orgastic properties of Twiglets. Morning, noon and night, I cram their knurled shapes into my gullet, all the better to divine how their absence might lead to catatonic meltdown.

My home-from-home has changed. I'm no longer in the Twilight Zone – these days it's The Twiglet Zone.