Have you ever been a situation where you know you shouldn't be laughing, but you just can't help yourself? And the fact that you shouldn't be laughing makes the fact that you are laughing even funnier than the thing you were originally laughing at, so you end up laughing harder? And your brain becomes more humour-sensitive, so that people's reactions to your laughter are funnier than they would otherwise be? Yes, I know you have.

This is what I did yesterday in a very serious meeting with some very serious people.

Not good.

I was fine until one of the very seriously-besuited gentlemen started yabbering on about "leveraging intellectual capital" and "thinking beyond the paradigm", which is the sort of talk that usually makes my fists itch. But he was saying it in this really earnest way, as if he believed every word of his presentation with every fibre of his pinstripe-clad being, and was trying to convey his message of hope to us infidels with the zeal of a missionary. His hands were waving about like an Italian football manager. At one point I swear there was a tiny tear in the corner of his eye. And this situation was just getting funnier and funnier, and I started smiling, which just made him even more earnest and heartfelt and made him use phrases like "team execution" and "emotional buy-in".

So I got a very serious attack of the gigglesnorts.

I tried swallowing huge gulps of the brackish water stagnating in the polystyrene cup next to my chair, which nearly drowned me, which in turn was (of course) highly amusing. I tried covering my face with both hands and pretending to be coughing, which only made a sort of chicken-being-decapitated "kerHAAARRG" noise, which only made things worse. In desperation, I tried thinking about Margaret Thatcher on the toilet, which is a technique usually guaranteed to sober up any normal man under any circumstances, even if it does necessitate a month of therapy afterwards. No use; the fact that I was desperate enough to use the Maggie-on-the-bog trick was, frankly, hilarious.

It took me a full, agonising minute to calm down properly, and apologise to the other participants. Inexplicably, I have not been invited to attend the follow-up meeting next week.

P.S. What exactly is a gigglesnort, and which emergency service should I call if I run into one? Discuss.