I never forget a fess – Rob Manuel with his Fesshole manual

“ABOUT an hour after breakfast I saw a bit of marmalade on my jumper. I picked it off and put it in my mouth. Sadly, it was jelly from the cat food.”

Thus begins the cooking section of Rob Manuel’s new collection of confessions, dedicated to “Pope Francis and Simon le Bon.”

This is just one of the many “fesses” to be submitted to Mr Manuel’s hugely successful Twitter bot, Fesshole.

The account invites people to “confess your sins anonymously” via an online form, which are then posted to the account’s 600,000-plus followers.

Fesshole was designed and launched in Tufnell Park, where Mr Manuel lived until recently.

“It was obvious from the word go there was legs on it. I’ve done a lot of internet projects and it’s obvious from the reaction if things are working or not,” Mr Manuel said.

Mr Manuel has spent “20-odd years” designing “interactive web projects”, from the early-internet message board b3ta.com to @clickbaitrobot that invents clickbait headlines (“19 Sheds That Look Like Darth Vader”) to @yorecomputer, a bot that publishes a random selection of pages from old British computer magazines.

But Fesshole is Mr Manuel’s runaway success. He spends several hours a day moderating the confessions, sometimes doing “light rewriting” to improve the “comedy timing” of the confessions. “It takes quite a lot of time,” he said. “I’m selective.”

“I’ve just mistaken a Dreamy for a stray crisp and eaten it. They aren’t as tasty as cats make them out to be,” one fess reads.

His editorial philosophy is informed by the old newspaper adage: “funny or interesting”, and he generally – although not always – steers clear of publishing libellous material.

He said the bot attracts “mostly British” anonymous confessions. “It’s a celebration of the British public being funny. It’s one of my minor source of complaints with the world that we have a sort of pyramid structure where it’s only these people at the top who are the funny comedians. Loads of people are really funny,” he said.

His new book, The Very Best of Fesshole, is published later this month. He has revisited many of the bot’s top “fesses” in the process of producing the book.

One of his favourites reads: “My teacher always told me ‘you won’t get a job staring out the window all day’, I work as a tube driver now on 68k a year and literally stare out the window all day.”

Another is: “When visiting New York the wife and I had a routine each night when we ate out, I’d ‘propose’ to her and she’d tearfully accept, Americans being Americans would woop and cheer and occasionally the restaurant let us eat for free. We’d been married 8 years.”

Mr Manuel said the spirit of the bot, and the book, is summarised in the epigraph, taken from an essay by George Orwell: “On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”