The Cornetto has lots of different flavours, with the nutty one probably the king, but I reckon the Magnum trumped them all with its white chocolate version. Is white chocolate really chocolate? I don’t care if it is or not, I love it. Dark chocolate, not so much. Everyone’s eating the stuff nowadays, and they tell me it’s more sophisticated than other kinds of chocolate, but I wouldn’t let it pass my lips. It’s for people who have allowed advertising people to convince them that it’s somehow more healthy than milk chocolate. But they don’t really enjoy eating it. They can’t, because it’s just so bitter. Like eating raw coffee beans. People might call me simple and unworldly, but I don’t care.
I once put a tweet out about a great meal I had at a Toby Carvery in Macclesfield and people were having a go at me for being unsophisticated. But you can waste a lot of time pretending to like things you don’t really like. As I got older, I started to realise that you’ve only got a certain amount of time left, so you want to spend time doing things you actually like, not what other people say you should like. I’ve been everywhere trying to find a better Sunday roast, but a Toby Carvery is honestly by far the best money can buy.
Toby Carvery does all the meats, all the veg, giant Yorkshire puddings, and you can pay £1.50 extra for an Alan Partridge big plate. I never get four meats (a turkey, beef and lamb medley is my thing, the white turkey meat offsetting the red beef and lamb, for health reasons, while gammon never even enters the equation) but just the fact you can blows my mind. Actually, I’m not being entirely honest, because I will usually double up on turkey, beef or lamb because of the lack of gammon. And when you get a big plate, they chuck in a couple of sausages, as well as an extra Yorkshire.
I don’t know how they do it, but the turkey is never dry, like the stuff you get with a Christmas dinner. It’s always the same on Christmas Day: someone will say, ‘Lovely turkey, not too dry.’ And I’ll be thinking, ‘But it is dry. You’re just saying that to be nice. It’s always dry. Every year.’ But whenever you eat in a Toby Carvery, you just know someone is going to say at some point, ‘This turkey’s very moist. How do they do it?’ And they won’t be lying. They must have access to special turkeys. Maybe it’s not turkey? Or they’re supplied by mutant turkey breeders whose birds live in aircraft hangars. To be honest, I don’t care what it is, it’s beautiful. As for Toby’s special gravy, that makes everything taste good. You could pour it on a lemon sorbet and it would improve it. I’d drink it straight from a mug. In fact, I have. It’s the perfect restorative beverage on a cold winter’s day.
In case anyone was wondering if I was angling for free food from Toby’s, they already give it to me. When I put that aforementioned tweet out, they got in touch and offered me a Toby Carvery gold card, which entitles me to a hundred pounds’ worth of roasts a month. That card is one of the best presents I’ve ever received, along with a Pizza Express card that I had for a while. Although I must admit, it’s a bit tricky sometimes when you’re well known and having free food thrown at you. When it gets to the embarrassing part when I have to pull out this card to get the free food, I take that opportunity to give the waiter a big chunk of what the bill would have been. That seems fair, and it means they look after us better than any waiter at the Ritz. Especially the lovely lad from the Bolton restaurant, who always turns a blind eye to an extra Yorkshire, and Liam from the Macclesfield branch, who knows a few people I know and pulls out all the stops. That man would slip me extra sausages until the cows came home.
I get a bit paranoid sometimes, because I think people in the queue behind me are thinking, ‘Who the hell does he think he is? Just because he scored a few runs and took a few wickets for England once, he gets extra meat.’ And they’re probably getting a bit twitchy, because they’re within touching distance of the food and they’re probably thinking, ‘Flintoff’s gonna clean up here. I just know it. He’s gonna snaffle those last two Yorkshires . . . ’ Although I’m hearing on the street that queuing and helping yourself is a thing of the past since the pandemic. Apparently, you tell them what you want and they get it for you. That worries me: how do they know where to put things on your plate? And how do they know the correct ratio of one food item to the next? You can give them a rough guide, but you’d end up hating yourself: ‘Sorry, no, a few more carrots. One less potato. Hmmm, that gravy has become a bit overwhelming . . . ’ Someone suggested I should bring a magic marker along and draw a diagram of where I want things to sit on the plate. That idea’s got legs.
While we’re on the subject of bringing your own stuff to restaurants, my mum and dad had a gathering at their house to celebrate my grandpa’s eightieth birthday and I turned up with my own wine glass. My mum wasn’t very impressed. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell by the expression on her face: ‘Who is this boy? I’m not sure I know him any more.’ I never did it again.
Obviously, I don’t drink any more, but I was always very particular when it came to glasses. If I was drinking Guinness, I’d have to drink it out of a Guinness glass. They have those grooves down the side to make gripping it easier. If I was drinking Peroni, it would have to be out of a Peroni glass. Stella, the same, even when they introduced the glass with a stem. Occasionally, the beverage–glass combination didn’t work. I was never a fan of the San Miguel glass, always thought it tasted better in a basic pint pot. I recently discovered that even Corona have introduced their own glass. I reckon they thought, ‘Jesus, this pandemic has given us a bad name, we’re going to have to up our game. A segment of lime isn’t going to get us through this.’
But back to Toby Carveries. I think people feel sorry for my wife, as if she’s made to eat at Toby Carveries against her will. But we all love it. There’s one between Bolton and Preston, so we meet my mum and dad there. I’m not sure it’s as good as my mum’s Sunday roast, but it’s better than anything I could do, and why would I even bother trying?
Not only have I drunk gravy straight from a mug, I am also partial to a bowl of mushy peas, unaccompanied. Someone recently told me that the mushy peas they have in fish and chip shops aren’t actually made of peas, but it makes no difference to me. They’re wonderful, whatever they are. And they’re a godsend for owners of fish and chip shops, because they don’t make any money on fish any more because it’s so expensive to buy. Next time you’re in a chippy and you order mushy peas, keep a close eye on the owner’s expression: he’ll be beaming from ear to ear, I guarantee you, because it means he lives to fight another day.
I understand that fish and chip shops can be a bit of a minefield for southerners visiting the north. There’s the story of Peter Mandelson, former Labour MP for Hartlepool, pointing to mushy peas and asking for a helping of guacamole. Then there are scallops. People see the sign and think, ‘60p for a scallop? Very reasonable.’ But when they’re served up, they discover that fish-and-chip scallops are actually fat lumps of fried potato, and nothing to do with scallops that live in the sea.
There was also a documentary series called The Game Changers on Netflix, about the benefits of eating a plant-based diet, so a lot of people are into it now and it clearly works for some of them. But I just really like eating meat. And while I don’t mind vegetables, I don’t want them to be the main part of my meal. And vegans get on my nerves a little bit. Eat what you want, but don’t tell me why you’re eating it. I’m not interested. People who don’t eat meat are similar to non-drinkers. Chances are when you ask non-drinkers what they want to drink, they’ll reply, ‘Oh, I don’t drink, I’ll just have a sparkling water.’ And chances are that when a vegan orders food, they’ll say something along the lines of, ‘I’m having the sun-dried tomato herb salad, because I’m a vegan.’ That’s their little way of letting you know that they’re morally superior to you.
As I always say to my missus whenever she hints that maybe I should eat less meat, I could go on the internet and find hundreds of articles saying veganism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whatever you want to believe in life, you’l
l find things to back up your arguments on the internet. That’s why the internet as an experiment has backfired, because while it is a fount of all knowledge, a lot of that knowledge isn’t factually correct.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE END OF THE WORLD?
Obviously, climate change isn’t a good thing, but I have a slightly more nuanced view of it than most people. Extinction Rebellion have a point, of course they do. But I’m not sure they go about things in entirely the right way. I realise we need to act to save the environment but pissing people off is not the way to go about it. Whenever Extinction Rebellion has a demonstration, it seems to backfire. There will be people closing airports with drones, stopping people getting to work or to hospital, gluing themselves to and climbing on roofs of trains (which are electric anyway) and when it’s all over, members of the public who were previously sympathetic will be angry about their tactics.
What they don’t seem to understand is that to achieve their aims they need the man on the street on their side. And when I say the man on the street, I mean anyone for whom environmental issues isn’t the main preoccupation in their lives. By breaking laws and making the lives of ordinary working people a misery, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot. Most people are trying to be more environmentally friendly in their own little way and want to get behind good causes. But they’re not going to engage with anything more meaningful unless organisations like Extinction Rebellion come across as more sympathetic and a little less eccentric.
I think coronavirus showed how we should deal with climate change. People need to be told how to behave by their leaders, otherwise they just won’t do what needs to be done. If governments were completely honest about what’s going to happen if we don’t take action – ‘carry on as you are and you’ll destroy the world by such and such a date, but do this, that and the other and you might just save it’ – then most people would go along with it (although not everyone, especially in America, because some people don’t like being told what to do).
On top of that – and this is where my views on climate change and the environment get a bit controversial – maybe this is just how humans are going to go out. It’s a morbid, fatalistic view, I know, but maybe there are simply too many humans being born, not enough resources to go round and there’s nothing we can do to stop us destroying the world. Maybe we’re too far gone, too set in our ways to learn to do things differently. And anyway, we’ve had dinosaurs ruling the earth, we’ve had our go for a few hundred thousand years (which some people say is a short span of history, but to me sounds like quite a long time), so maybe it’s time for another group to have a go, who are hopefully smarter than us. Maybe when the world ends, a super race will evolve who will make a better fist of things.
I should probably worry about things a little bit more than I do, but most of the time I just live in my own little bubble. It’s not that I don’t care about what’s going on in the wider world, it’s just that there are so many things to care about and so many responsibilities closer to home and not enough hours in the day. I worry about my kids growing up. I want them to be fit and healthy and achieve everything they want to achieve. I worry about them every time they leave the house, and I worry about how worried I’ll be when they’re a bit older, when they start going out in Manchester, which is only a few years down the line.
I also worry about worrying itself. It’s great that people are becoming more and more aware of mental health. It’s not great that it seems to be becoming more and more of a problem. People have always had mental illness, it’s just that it used to be ignored. But there also seem to be more triggers nowadays. Social media causes a lot of anxiety and feelings of inadequacy among young people. Kids are constantly comparing themselves to their peers, which creates real pressure to be a certain way. Not necessarily to be perfect, but ‘better’ than they’ve been led to believe they are. I think previous generations were more content with their lot. Because life was less complicated and people simply had less stuff, they weren’t always striving for ‘better’ things. It wasn’t always about who’s got the most or the fastest or the biggest.
The pressure on young people to look a certain way – i.e., perfect – is enormous now. You see teenage girls sculpted to within an inch of their lives. It wasn’t that long ago that women in their thirties were walking around with grey hair, because hair dye didn’t exist. But now if a female celebrity under the age of 50 has a grey hair – or hairy armpits or legs or eyebrows that are deemed to be too thick – it’s some kind of scandal. The irony, of course, is that we now have young girls shaving their eyebrows off and drawing them back on, which just looks odd. And instead of having natural skin, they’re orange. With jet-black hair.
But it’s not just the girls. When I was a kid, no one went to the gym. It just wasn’t a thing. Now, young lads are walking about with six packs. And they all wander about with their tops off. I’ll be sat there thinking, ‘Mate, that’s ridiculous, put your top on!’ Unless your washing machine is broken and you’re trying to fix it, there’s no reason to take your top off. I actually find it slightly offensive and it doesn’t reflect well on a person. Either they’re far too pleased with themselves or they’re trying to compensate for something missing from their personality. Or both. And young lads nowadays shave everything. It’s normal now for them to be like mannequins. Or dolphins.
I don’t know when all this pubic gardening and body baldness started, but even I’ve got caught up in it. In fact, I’ve been Veeting for maybe 20 years. I just think it’s wrong not to keep things neat and tidy down there. Not that I was a hairy person in the first place. I’ve never had to worry about my back, and my chest hair has never been unruly. But that’s kind of the point: when did people start worrying about having back hair? Not only did it just used to be a thing that men had, it used to be seen as quite manly. Now, it’s a problem.
It’s mad when you think about it. For most of human history, it was just considered normal to have a pubic bush. Probably up until the twenty-first century. Now it’s suddenly seen as slightly ridiculous. I’m told that internet porn changed the rules. It certainly wasn’t Razzle or Fiesta. Whatever it was, it can’t possibly be progress. Or maybe it is? Why would any woman want their man’s cock and balls to look like a tramp smoking a cigarette? That’s going to ruin an intimate moment. It’s not like I’m going to post my old chap on Instagram, but I just see it as good manners to keep it all looking tidy. That said, people should be able to do what they want without ridicule. If you want to walk around with hairy armpits, do it. If you want hairy legs, good luck to you. Then again, I’m not sure I’d be that happy if my missus had hairy legs. But is that fair because I’ve never shaved mine (I had bald legs until I was about 17, so there’s no way I’m getting rid of that). As you can probably tell, I’m very conflicted on this particular subject.
God knows what it must be like for kids who are overweight or too hairy or too this or too that or too whatever else. So many youth TV shows today are obsessed with how people look and not so much with the content of people’s character. And it’s having a real effect on men’s mental health as well as women’s. Eating disorders used to be seen as a female problem, but now one in four people with eating disorders are male. And because men find having an eating disorder so shameful, they’re far less likely to ask for help.
I’ve had to take more notice of my appearance for practical reasons, because no one is going to hire a presenter who looks like he’s just got out of bed. Shows have wardrobe budgets and the stylist on A League of Their Own has become a mate, so he’s developed a sense of what I’ll say yes or no to. He’ll sometimes chuck in some wildcards – a shirt that’s a bit tighter or more colourful than normal – and I’ll at least try them on. But it’s a horrible feeling, standing there in front of a camera wearing something that’s not really you. And as I’ve become more established, I’ve started to put my foot down a bit more. If someone hands me something that’s going
to make me look like Austin Powers, I’ll just say to them, ‘Absolutely not. Not a chance in hell.’
Having had a skinhead for so long while I was playing cricket, for the sake of convenience, I now have to spend quite a lot of time in the hairdresser’s. If I’m filming A League of Their Own, my mate called Donald does my hair and make-up. If not, I go to a fella called Howard who lives down the road and I’ve known for about 20 years. I just don’t really like meeting new people, I’m naturally suspicious. Whenever Jamie Redknapp introduces me to someone, he says, ‘This is Freddie. He’s a good lad, just doesn’t like anyone. It took me eight years.’ He’s exaggerating, but I know what he means. I always start from a position of neutrality. The way I look at it, if you expect nothing, you won’t be disappointed. If you end up liking someone, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. And by not being one of those keenos who walks around pretending it’s great to meet people all the time (which must be exhausting), you’ll ensure that you don’t end up with loads of acquaintances you don’t really want to speak to. It’s not a problem, you can’t like everything and everyone. There’s no shame in it.
The secret of happy haircuts is finding a hairdresser you can have comfortable silences with. And who can cut your hair properly. A few years ago, I was persuaded to try somewhere new, a bit posh-looking, with a hipster name like Hedge or Thatch or some such. But I knew I’d made a mistake as soon as I sat down because this fella immediately started chatting nine to the dozen. I thought, ‘I’ve got to nip this in the bud, sharpish’, shut my eyes and pretended to be asleep. It didn’t work, because he carried on talking. So the only option I had left was to actually fall asleep. The last thing I remember him saying was something about the Man City striker Sergio Aguero, to which I replied, ‘Yeah, I like him, he’s a good player.’ Then when I opened my eyes, he had a shaver in his hands. I said to him,
Right, Said Fred Page 10