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      I must admit, I gave them quite a few bullets in those early days, and I’ll probably be best remembered for my famous washing machine story, which happened just before I played my first home game for England. A journalist came to interview me a few days before and said, ‘You must be so proud to play for England, to be running out at Twickenham.’

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am proud.’

      ‘How proud?’ he asked.

      ‘Oh, well – really proud, you know. Really proud.’

      The journalist was determined to get a nice colourful quote from me about just how much playing for England meant to me, but I had no idea how to explain to him in words that he could print, just what it meant. How can you describe something like pride? All you can do is compare it to proud moments that have gone before, and I was certainly prouder when I heard I’d be playing for England at Twickenham than I had ever been before. How do you put it into words? I had no idea, but this reporter just kept on asking and asking me and I just kept saying, ‘Look, I was very proud. Very proud. That’s all – just very proud.’

      So the reporter changed his approach a little and started asking more specific questions.

      ‘What’s it like running out at Twickenham in front of an international crowd wearing a shirt bearing the England red rose?’ he asked.

      ‘It’s great,’ I replied again. I was starting to feel a bit guilty at not being much help, but I didn’t know what to say. Eventually, I added, ‘When you run out there, you feel pumped up, you feel ten foot tall, you’re running on air.’

      ‘Great,’ said the reporter. ‘Now, tell me more about that shirt and what it means to you.’

      ‘Oh God, I don’t know. It just makes me proud.’

      ‘How proud?’

      ‘Really proud.’

      ‘Yeah, but how proud are you?’

      ‘As proud as you can be.’

      ‘How proud is that? Tell me again how proud you are of the shirt.’

      By this stage I’d had enough and I just gave a flippant answer to shut him up, so he’d stop asking a question that is nigh on impossible to answer.

      ‘I’m so proud that when I put my England kit in the washing machine, I watch it going round and round because I’m that proud of it.’

      I said it in such a silly, sarcastic voice that the reporter knew that I was taking the piss, and actually laughed at it as he said ‘OK’, and moved on to talk about something else. But when the article came out the next day, he had included my comment and treated it as if I had been serious. It had this huge headline on it which said I was so proud that I watched my shirts go round and round. Because the England team were all in camp at the Petersham Hotel at the time, I knew that I would be in for some big stick from the boys. And I was!

      When I walked into the breakfast room on the morning that the article appeared, they all just looked at me, moving their heads round and round as if they were watching a shirt in a washing machine. They wouldn’t speak, they just kept moving their heads round and round. ‘I was being sarcastic,’ I said. ‘I was just joking. The reporter knew that I was just joking. I—’ but it was no good. They just stared at me without commenting, their heads rolling round and round as they did so.

      As the years have gone by, so this little story has gone into folklore, and people tend to quote it as proof of my devotion to the England cause. I’m as dedicated as the next bloke, but I’m not stark, raving nuts, and the truth is that I don’t even know how to operate a washing machine!

      The one thing that I learned from the whole episode was never, ever to be sarcastic to a journalist because once something appears in print, you’re stuck with it for life. The washing-machine story has found its way into every national newspaper at one stage or another, it’s been repeated in books, on television and by countless individuals. What made the whole thing so much worse was the fact that, at the time, the England team was full of jokers with biting wits, so one false move and you were suddenly the butt of everyone’s jokes – as I was.

      The banter in the group was so strong at the time that some players would not talk for days at a time for fear of opening their mouths and saying something that the other players might tear apart. I can still remember that awful feeling now. The feeling you’d get when you said something in all innocence and someone in the group would say, ‘Hold on a second. What are you talking about?’ and you’d know that a barrage of abuse was coming your way.

      Obviously, being the new kid on the block, I got slaughtered and ripped to pieces whenever I gave them any opportunity, so I had to be particularly on my guard. It was experiences like that which taught me that I had to be extremely careful about what I said and how I behaved. I learned very quickly that it’s not what 99.9 per cent of the population thinks that matters, it’s what the guys in the squad overhear or hear about that counts.

      I bore this in mind when, just before the 1999 World Cup, I was asked to star in an advertisement for the television programme Zena – Warrior Princess. They wanted me to run on dressed as Xena, to promote the new series. When they first approached me with the idea, I immediately turned it down because I just knew how much abuse I’d get. But they raised their offer. I turned it down again, and so the amount of money rose once more. It kept going up and up and up until they were offering me more for five minutes work than I’d get in three months of rugby, but I knew that I couldn’t possibly go near it. Can you imagine the abuse I would have got? I would have been called Xena for the rest of my rugby playing days for starters! I can live with being called Fun Bus, but not Xena!

      The ‘grounding’ I received at Barking rugby club prepared me pretty well for the hustle and bustle of life off the field as an international rugby player. They used to rib me mercilessly about everything at Barking – particularly my eating, and the fact that I am so accident prone.

      My propensity to get into minor skirmishes with motor vehicles is now legendary. It started when I was just ten years old sitting on the kerb, and I was reversed over by a Transit van from a carpet company. The driver was so sorry and so worried about the injury that he might have caused me that he gave Mum and Dad enough free carpet to cover the entire house.

      On that occasion, I’m convinced that it was the driver’s fault, so he was right to compensate Mum in that generous fashion. The same cannot be said of the time that I rode my bicycle straight at two nuns, with one friend on the handlebars and another behind me on the saddle. I did shout at the nuns to move, but I think they objected to the colourful language and chose to ignore me completely. When I realized that I was about to hit them, I panicked and promptly rode the bike straight into the road where I was hit by a car.

      My love of food is equally legendary and the boys at Barking love telling the story of the time that a group of us went away on holiday to Corfu. When we went to a night-club one evening my friends noticed that I kept disappearing all the time – I’d go, then 15–20 minutes later, I’d be back. They thought I must be up to no good, the way I kept sneaking off, so they followed me, only to realize that I was going to the chicken vender just outside the club where I’d tear through a chicken or two, then come back inside the night club and carry on, hoping no one had noticed that I was missing!

      My mate Dean Cutting says that he always thought his house was haunted when I was staying over, because at about 4 every morning, he’d hear sounds downstairs. He’d peer round the banisters and see a light on, but be too worried to investigate any further. Then, a few days later, his wife would say to him, ‘Where on earth has all the food gone? I bought loads and it’s disappeared.’ That’s when he’d realize that the noises he’d heard were me, eating my way through the contents of his kitchen after a night on the beer. If I’m honest, there are quite a few old Barking mates who I owe a fridge full of food to.

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