I found the Thursday night clapping a little bit awkward, because the houses on our road are quite spread out and it was just us on the doorstep and the distant sound of others doing the same, in that very polite English fashion. You could tell people wanted to cheer and shout but they were too English to really show how appreciative they were. But it was also quite moving. I’m not a very emotional person but I’d watch or read a story about doctors and nurses putting their lives at risks to save others and find myself welling up a little bit. That sort of heroism blows my mind and makes me feel quite insignificant by comparison. It’s the closest thing most of us will see to soldiers going off to war to fight on our behalf and I can’t even begin to comprehend what they went through. God knows how they felt when they saw pictures of people having picnics and barbecues in the park when they were supposed to be indoors, but I hope that those clapping sessions made them feel a little bit more appreciated.
I think there’s been a big shift in terms of how people view who is and who isn’t vital for society. But while clapping is nice, I hope there will be correction in terms of how much they’re paid. That would happen in a fair, sane society. But I’m not holding my breath. I suspect that as soon as everything is back to normal again, whenever that is and whatever normal will look like, everyone will have a big party, get smashed, wake up the next morning and think, ‘Bloody hell, that coronavirus was hard work. But might as well crack on.’ People will thank their lucky stars they’re not nurses or carers, those key workers will be forgotten about again and some people will be even hungrier to earn their next million. While some idealistic people will say that coronavirus will make people rethink the importance of money, I think it might have the opposite effect.
I get the argument that coronavirus has shown that health is more important than money, but real life is a lot more complicated than that. The importance of having money became abundantly clear during the pandemic, because without money, it was a lot harder to ride it out. People with decent jobs were able to take a pay cut for a few months and still pay their bills, but that wasn’t the case for poorer people. And look at America, where for a lot of relatively wealthy people, losing their job meant losing their health care.
The government, which has been finding money from everywhere, will have to tighten its belt, and we know who loses out when governments tighten belts.
It shows how messed up society’s priorities are. Sport’s nice and being without it during the pandemic left a big void in a lot of people’s lives, but it doesn’t matter. Not really.
I understood people’s frustrations, but there were bigger things at stake than whether the football, cricket or rugby seasons should be completed, namely people getting seriously ill and dying. It wouldn’t have bothered me in the slightest if the Premier League season had been cancelled and Liverpool had not won the title (although I wouldn’t have stood in the middle of Liverpool and shouted that). The Olympics don’t really matter, Wimbledon doesn’t really matter, even cricket doesn’t really matter.
Coronavirus certainly made me question my usefulness. When I was growing up and wanting to play cricket for Lancashire and England, it seemed like the most important thing in the world. It was all I wanted to do, so it had to be important. Surely? And when I started making decent money and people were giving me adulation, it seemed to make even more sense that I was doing something important. It’s the same with the stuff I’ve done in TV. But none of what I’ve done has been important in the grand scheme of things, apart from maybe my documentaries. If I hadn’t played cricket for England, someone else would have played instead. If I hadn’t been a team captain on A League of Their Own, someone else would have been. And if I hadn’t presented Top Gear, someone else would have presented it. The world wouldn’t have been any different. People wouldn’t have even noticed. So I can only conclude that I’m completely pointless.
I’ve got God knows how many followers on Twitter but when the world was in meltdown, people needed saving and useful people were running around plugging all the leaks, where was I? Sat at home looking at trainers on the internet, because a man who can bat, bowl and talk about cars isn’t much use during a global crisis. And I think a lot of people would have had the same thought during the pandemic. What’s the point of the job I do if I can be mothballed for months and no one really notices? It’s quite sobering and I wonder whether there will be an upsurge of people quitting their old, point-less jobs and training to do jobs that really benefit society. Then again, probably not. Look what happened when they appealed for fruit pickers, hardly anyone signed up. They had to fly Romanians in, because British people were content to sit around doing nowt.
Personally, the fact that there was no cricket for most of the summer was a blessing in disguise. Me and the boys practised a bit at home but I wasn’t taking them here, there and everywhere like normal. Too much sport can throw a family apart, so the lockdown was a good thing in a way, because it brought us closer together. It was important to try and take some positives from a bad situation, and I was made for lockdown anyway. I’ve probably been isolating for years and not even known it. I don’t really need to be around people and don’t do much when I’m not working. I’m perfectly happy in my own company for days on end and if I’ve got my family around me, that’ll do me. It also made me acutely aware of what I really need in my life, materially. If you took everything out of my house that I didn’t need, I’d probably be left with a bed and a couch. That’s about it. Oh, and my trainer collection.
Getting to spend some time at home was great, especially because I got to spend time with the new baby. I’d get up late, throw on a T-shirt and bum around all day. Then when I landed a job presenting talkSPORT’s Breakfast show, I’d roll out of bed at 5.30 a.m., have a quick shower, make myself look half-decent, do the show and go back to bed. I didn’t have to worry about getting on a plane and jetting off somewhere or sitting in a hotel in a strange city, looking forward to getting home and seeing everyone again.
Work–life balance is something I’m always striving to get right. Playing professional cricket is not great for relationships or family life, but at least you know where you’re going to be most of the time. With what I do now, it’s feast or famine. You can be sat at home for a couple of weeks thinking, ‘This is nice, I could get used to this.’ Then suddenly you’re constantly checking your phone, wondering why your agent hasn’t been in touch. Or some work will crop up and you’ll suddenly have to wrap your head around the fact that you’ll be away from home for God knows how long.
I sometimes wonder how I keep getting offered work. It confuses me. And I’m constantly wrestling with whether I should take the work or not. Whatever the offer is, part of me thinks, ‘No, don’t take this one. Have a bit of time off.’ But there’s always the fear that if you do reject it, nothing will come up again for months. Or maybe ever again. Then there’s the money. I’m essentially a working-class lad, so I know what it’s like not having very much. But I also feel a bit guilty, because I remember how hard my dad had to work to earn his wages. I’ll think, ‘They’re paying me how much to do what?’ And then I’ll think, ‘Well, in that case, I should probably go and do it.’ But after being away for a week or so I’ll start missing the kids and know I’m not getting the balance right. Thankfully, the kids understand and just get on with it. And if I was one of those dads that gets up at six every morning, puts on a suit and doesn’t get home until seven in the evening, they’d probably spend less time with me anyway than if I was doing what I do, which is lots of interesting things.
During lockdown, the kids were all schooled remotely of course. They were all in the annexe and at their desks at 9 a.m. on the dot and didn’t finish until 3.45 p.m., like a proper school day. They even got their normal break times, an hour and a half for lunch and games lessons, with me as the teacher. I was surprised at how disciplined they were; they got their heads down, cracked on with their work and I didn’t hear a peep out of them mo
st days. There was no chance of them wandering in while I was in the middle of doing the radio show, which seemed to be happening all over the place during lockdown.
Not that I did any teaching in the classroom, because I’m absolutely useless. Anything I did learn at school I’ve long since forgotten. My daughter was 15, so there was no chance of me being able to help her in any way. And my oldest son was 14, which isn’t much different. I might have had some clue what my 12-year-old was learning, but only if I’d pushed myself. All the teaching was done online, which made me wonder what would have happened had a pandemic struck pre-internet. Not a lot, I suspect. The only problem came when they were supposed to break up for Easter and I decided to change the term times. That didn’t go down too well. But when I did finally let them out, rather than going all Lord of the Flies on me, they pretty much ignored their phones and iPads and spent most of their time playing outside. I put a cricket net up on the path leading out of the garage, did a bit of coaching with the boys and it was really quite idyllic.
Lockdown was frustrating in some ways, but most of those frustrations were trivial. Before I went in the jungle for I’m a Celebrity, someone told me that people adapt to those kinds of situations in different ways. Some people get freaked out by it and struggle to adapt, some people rebel against it and start acting up and some people accept it quite quickly, so that a weird situation soon becomes the norm. And just as in the jungle, as soon as I closed the doors of the house, I just got on with things. My wife also put together 20,000 care packages for Manchester hospitals.
I had to isolate for a week before lockdown proper, because I’d just got back from Australia. That was difficult, because it’s the most natural thing in the world to walk through the door after being away for a few weeks and give everyone a cuddle. I spent most of my isolation in a bedroom on the top floor, despite not having any symptoms. And even though I knew I could have it despite not having any symptoms, and give it to other people, it still didn’t feel right. Not only could I not touch anyone, I couldn’t be within two metres of anyone. I was like Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic, imprisoned in my own house. Or the Invisible Man. I could see everything going on around me but couldn’t interact with anything. I wasn’t even allowed to touch inanimate objects, and almost as soon as my clothes came off, my missus was carrying on as if they had to be incinerated. Maybe they were?
My parents are both over 70, so I was obviously worried about their health. They also weren’t able to see the baby, which was hard for them. On top of that, the kids got bored and missed their friends at times, and it’s challenging living in close proximity to anyone for that long. But not having some things in your kitchen cupboards that you usually do, or not being able to get toilet paper, or have the dessert you wanted with your dinner, or the right shape of pasta, or the right cut of steak, isn’t the end of the world. Just wipe your arse with a newspaper and eat something different. It’s not like we were cowering in a shelter every night, listening to bombs being dropped. Instead, we were sitting in a living room, eating beans on toast and watching Tiger King on Netflix. I realise that lockdown must have been a lot harder than that for a lot of people, but we kind of managed to make it work. I’d been working quite hard before lockdown, doing a lot of travelling with Top Gear, so I just viewed it as taking a bit of time off, spending precious time with the family and gaining a new perspective on what was and wasn’t important in life. I hope other people will have done the same and concluded that some of the things they thought were important were of no importance at all, and some of the things they’d perhaps neglected were actually crucial. Having given it a lot of thought myself, there isn’t much that is important apart from my family and friends.
When I saw what was going on in the supermarkets just before lockdown kicked in, I couldn’t believe it. People literally fighting over bags of rice and potatoes. It just showed how incredibly spoilt and entitled some people are. Suddenly, people were going out of their minds because they didn’t have any Diet Cokes or broccoli in the larder. Sometimes, I think that humankind is going backwards rather than advancing. That can be the only explanation for people being told that a disease has arrived that will kill millions of people and their first reaction being, ‘Shit, but what are we going to do about bog roll?’
Another thing that happened during lockdown was that everyone became an expert in pandemics. While I was only venturing out a couple of times a day for exercise and basic provisions, and spending the rest of the time hunkered down in my house and listening to the advice of actual medical experts, other people were treating the world to their views on coronavirus. Instead of taking advantage of time off from work to learn to play a musical instrument, it was as if half the country had done crash-course PhDs in virology. I had thought it was just football managers who didn’t know what they were talking about, but it turns out that medical professionals who have spent decades studying infectious diseases don’t know anything either. Had the pubs still been open, no doubt there would have been middle-aged men sat around tables slagging off various doctors, instead of players in their team.
And people haven’t just become overnight experts in pandemics, everyone suddenly became a personal trainer. I did a couple of Instagram Lives with my mate Stan, who’s an actual PT. But I didn’t take the class, Stan did, I was just helping him out. But every man and his dog (sometimes literally) was suddenly doing PT instruction. Tyson Fury, who’s one of my guilty pleasures, was the only one worth watching. He was on every morning at nine o’clock and it was lots of fun. His kids kept running in the room, he had to keep telling them to get out and it made me love him even more. How much money has Tyson Fury got? Tens of millions of pounds? And he’s living in a house on Morecambe Bay and doing exercise routines every morning, which is brilliant.
I suppose everyone was just trying to find something to do that was relevant to the situation. That’s why we had so many celebrities doing funny skits, dancing in their kitchens and singing songs in their gardens. Because they had a captive audience, they knew that they could throw any old shit out there and millions of people would watch it. That was them saying, ‘Look at me! Look at me! I’m still here!’ I’m sure some of them thought they were saving the world, one tweet at a time. I think others just saw it as an opportunity. There’s something a bit odd about battling for likes during a global pandemic and the competition to get the biggest names on Instagram Live was quite unseemly. There were even people subtly but not subtly pushing their endorsement deals, doing press-up challenges with products lying about. The worst thing about it was that I’d find myself watching them, so that I spent far too long in lockdown feeling disappointed in myself.
I’m always fighting technology to some extent, and don’t really understand the point of using your phone to turn the heating or lights on. What’s wrong with switches on the wall? Is it seriously too much effort to raise your arm to just above shoulder height and press a button with your finger? I preferred it when phones were phones. When the Queen gave a speech during lockdown, one of my lads spotted the big old-fashioned phone on her desk and said, ‘Why has she got such a bad phone when she’s got all that money?’ And I replied, ‘Because the Queen understands that a phone is for calling people on, nothing else.’
I remember getting my first mobile phone when I was about 17, taking it home and my dad saying, ‘They’re rubbish, them, they’ll never catch on.’ I honestly wish he’d been right. In fact, I’ll go one step further and say I wish they’d never been invented. I hate the fact that someone can get to you at any moment (I hide my phone around the house, so that I don’t know it’s ringing, because I really need to psyche myself up for a phone call). But if I don’t answer, someone will phone my missus to get to me instead, as I have a phobia of phones.
But technology certainly came into its own during lockdown. As well as the kids being taught remotely, their grandparents were able to see them whenever they wanted on FaceTime. Having said that, there
was a downside. There’s always a downside. Suddenly, I was in hundreds of WhatsApp groups. It started with one, and then someone in that group put me in another one, and someone in that group put me in another one, and eventually half of England seemed to have my number. I’d wake up every morning to 200 messages. It was an absolute nightmare. I’d think, ‘I can’t be arsed with this. Why is everyone suddenly speaking to each other? Why have they waited until a global pandemic?’ And because people can see if you’ve read their message or not, people know you’re ignoring them, which obviously isn’t a great look.
Meanwhile, people were getting arsy with me because I hadn’t commented on some dirty picture they’d sent. Mind you, that’s no different to normal. I’ve been on one group chat for years and never said anything. I haven’t got the heart or courage to leave. Seriously, if anyone’s got a problem, let me know – but I don’t sit around texting, ringing and FaceTiming people in normal times. They literally had nothing to talk about apart from coronavirus and what they were having for dinner.
I also kept getting invites to Houseparty. The kids had been using Houseparty before lockdown, to chat with their friends, and I was constantly telling them to get off it, because as far as I was concerned, it was just kids looking at a screen. And suddenly all my mates were saying, ‘Get yourself on Houseparty and we can all have a chat.’ And I was thinking, ‘I’ve spent the last six months telling my kids to get off Houseparty, I can’t be normalising it.’ Whoever owns Houseparty and Zoom must have been raking it in. I turned up at one of these Houseparties and didn’t know who was there. I was looking at all these phone numbers with international dialling codes and I didn’t recognise any of them. It was like when you turn up to a real house party and you’re shouldering past a load of strangers in the hallway, terrified that you won’t find anyone you know. And just as you’re about to turn around and leave, someone shouts at you from the kitchen. And you think, ‘Oh shit, he’s seen me . . . ’ Apparently, the same groups of people were on Houseparty and Zoom every week, while eating dinner and drinking shit loads of booze. It’s almost as if chatting to people was a new craze. People were suddenly having weekly chats with old mates they hadn’t contacted for years. I even found myself caught up in this new fad. I’d find myself having conversations about politics or shopping or the lack of kale in Waitrose, or coming across as rude by not saying anything (I found that a good trick was to not move for ages and pretend your screen had frozen). Then the Houseparty would finish and I’d vow never to do it again, before finding myself on another one a week later.
Right, Said Fred Page 8