Fuck me sideways with Eminen’s rusty old chainsaw, but it’s been a rollercoaster of a fortnight for that lean, mean, shagging-machine affectionately known to his many friends and fans – not to mention his own personal bevy of Swedish masseuses – as Samuel J. Snort (i.e. moi).

On the upside, thanks to some extremely crafty manoeuvering on my part, I am now the proud owner of Michael Jackson’s rollercoaster from Neverland. Looking out the window into the vast gardens surrounding Snort Towers, I can watch as it is assembled by a team of Foghat’s roadies. They assure me that it’ll be up, running, twisting and turning by the end of next week. I told them for fuck’s sake to make sure that they didn’t trample on the grass, and so far they haven’t – though for some reason, they look a little smaller than before the job started.
On the downside, The Boss is dead. But we’ll come to that in moment. First, I want to explain why I am inviting Shayne Ward around to Snort Towers. Ah, yes, Shayne with a ‘y’. No, I am most certainly not asking him along to join me for a spot of group sex with the aforesaid masseuses but rather to thoroughly test my latest acquisition (no offence to Foghat’s roadies, but they can barely construct a decent joint). Once I know the roller-coaster safe to ride, I’ll set the hounds on bounder. And if it isn’t safe, and he kills himself, I’ll be onto ebay straight away top see how much I can get for the personally autographed mint condition copy of the CD Shayne gave me as a token of his gratitude for the fact that I actually spoke to him once. But I digress...
So how the hell did I manage to become the proud owner of the Neverland rollercoaster? Easy. I got somebody else to buy it for me.
I had, in my usual sensitive way, been thinking about how I might cheer my old buddy Paul McCartney up. He’s been feeling a little low these days with all that messy – and much worse costly – divorce business in the air. Plus, he’s still a wee bit sore about Jacko buying up the rights to the Beatles back catalogue (pipping his Apple, so to speak).
So it was that at his recent 64th birthday party, I whispered in Paul’s ear (the one he can still hear with) that, with the contents of Neverland up for sale thanks largely to the work of Martin Bashir, it would really piss Michael off if his beloved rollercoaster wound up being owned by a journalist (even the most famous rock journalist in the world).
Having toked on the massive spliff I’d just handed him, Macca chuckled demonically and immediately wrote me a cheque – a ticket to ride, as it were. “Thanks, Sam,” he said. “That’ll really piss him off. The dirty royalty-stealing little fucker!”
Although very happy to put one over Jacko, just a few moments later Macca was back, moaning about the soon-to-be-ex wife. To wish him a happy birthday, one of the tabloids had just run some old photographs of his missus being spanked by someone who looked like Michael Flatley’s younger brother.
(In actual fact, it was yours truly, but he won’t have known that as I was wearing a fetching Def Leppard-style mullet wig as a disguise for the porn shoot in question).
I tried to cheer Sir Paul up, by reminding him about all of his achievements. “Come on, Paul,” I said. “Think about all that you’ve done in your life. You’ve sold millions of albums, appeared in The Simpsons and got to meet Yoko Ono. You’ve even been knighted by the Queen! Tell me – do you think you’ll ever go down on one-knee again?”
Macca got a bit pissed off at that. “Sam, even if she is a silly cow, I’d much rather you called her Heather,” he snapped.
Still, I walked off with the cheque, and am now the proud owner of a rollercoaster.

Actually, while I’ll admit that a rollercoaster is among the more unusual bungs I’ve received for the greatly prized endorsement of a five star Sam Snort review, rock stars are always buying things for yours truly. Just the other night in Renard’s, Bono bought me a pint of Wild Turkey. “Thanks, B,” I said. “Long time no see. You busy these days?”
“Not really,” Bono sighed. “24 hours ago, I presented a lifetime achievement award to Britney Spears in the North Pole. Then I flew to Nelson’s place for a quick breakfast and discussion about South African AIDS policies. I had brunch with Brad, Angelina and the nipper in Namibia, before doing a quick whistle-stop tour of Ethiopian villages with Bob, Bush and Blair.
“After that, I was best man at a traveller’s wedding in Mullingar, before I had to head off to open an exhibition of photographs of myself in Paris. It dragged on a while, what with Chirac and Johnny Depp being there, but I still made it over to Arkansas in time for dinner with Bill. For obvious reasons, we skipped the after-dinner cigar and I just got back on time for last orders here. So it’s really been pretty quiet of late.”
“Yeah, sounds that way,” I mused. “Actually, I ran into Adam, Edge and Larry the other week. They were asking for you.”
“Oh yeah, those guys,” Bono nodded. “What are they up to these days?”

But what’s really been bugging Sam this week is the sad fact that The Boss is no more. We had an agreement that I wouldn’t go public on our 30-year association until after his death. But now that he’s gone, I suppose the time to reveal all has come.
Bruce Springsteen came to visit me in Snort Towers after his recent Dublin show. “Sam, I’d prefer if you kept a lid on the fact that I’ve been here,” he told me. But I’m not talking about Bruce. I’m talking about The Boss, which is a horse of a different colour.
The Boss. The Man. Is Dead.
It was a business relationship that we had, but I guess it was also much more than that. It’d turn your pubes grey to hear the shit we pulled together, down through the years, me and The Boss. But I’m keeping schtum. For the moment. Stories about Sam Snort and The Boss will go exclusively to the highest bidder.
We were laughing about it, me and the Boss, just a few weeks before he broke on through to the other side. “Those fucking fools!” he laughed, shaking his head. “Always with the questions about where all my money came from! Where’d you get your money? Where’d you get your money? It’s been right under their noses the whole time!”
“Yeah – literally!” I quipped, taking another long snort of Bolivian marching powder from the solid gold bowl that’s actually an exact replica of Margaret Thatcher’s left tit (I never really wanted to know the details, but I always suspected that the Boss was nearly as much of a hammer man as Sam).
“I mean, the fact that I own my own island might have been a bit of a giveaway!” he guffawed. “Then there’s the yachts, the helicopters, the diplomatic bags, the trips abroad. Ha, ha!”
“Yeah,” I smiled. “And there’s also the fact that you’re actually called Charlie!”
“Exactly!” he roared. “Ha, ha! How could they not have suspected that I was a drugs baron! The fucking fools! I should slit their throats and shove them off a cliff! Ha, ha!” He doubled over in mirth and actually went purple in the face (it’s only now that I realise this was probably an early warning sign of the stroke which was to kill him just a few days later). Eventually he recovered enough to ask, “By the way, Sam, did that Jamaican load get through?”
“It did, yeah – no problem,” I assured him. “It came in the day Charlie Haughey died.”
And then The Boss told me a few stories about our illustrious former Taoiseach. But that’s another pay cheque, so I’m saying nothing for now.