Do You Know What?

by Andrew Flintoff

  It bothers me, keeps me up at night. I’ll be doing my hair in the mirror or deciding which shirt to put on, and suddenly I’ll think, ‘Why am I wasting my time with this? What happens when I’m dead?’ It’s the one thing you know is going to happen, but your average punter doesn’t seem to give it any thought. Why would you not think about it? When is it going to happen? How is it going to happen? Will it be slow or quick, peaceful or painful?

  People talk about feeling apprehensive before starting a new job, because they don’t know what’s going to happen. But they do know what’s going to happen – they’re going to put on a suit, sit behind a desk and tap on a computer. Of all the things people spend time thinking about, why is death not even on the list? Maybe when they’re on their last legs they start thinking about it. But why not before? I’m told that most people get happier the older they get, which must be because they’re relieved it’s nearly all over.

  You put the news on, hear the bongs of Big Ben, and they’ll talk about all sorts – politics, war, famine, sport. But – and I’m not trying to play down the importance of discussing war and famine – why do they never talk about the big questions? The really important questions? Who cares if someone has been sacked from the Cabinet if we don’t even know why we’re here? Who cares if Man City won the Premier League if we don’t know how it ends? People say it’s pointless even talking about it, because there are no answers. But there have to be answers, and until I see the answers, I’ll not rest.

  I’ll be in the queue at Poundland, see a couple of people wandering down the street and think, ‘What are they doing? Where are they going at 3:30 on a Wednesday afternoon?’ I’m not saying what I do is particularly remarkable, but what is anyone really doing? I’ll see someone standing on a street corner and think, ‘What’s going through that person’s head right now? Is he happy, sad, bored, fulfilled, lost?’ I’ll even do it with animals. I’ll look at a dog and think, ‘What’s that dog thinking? Is he angry about being dragged about all day?’

  People say it must be great, just lying on the floor in front of the telly. But dogs don’t even know what’s going on on the telly. Being a dog is basically ten years of doing nowt, being told what to do, reliant on someone feeding and watering you and letting you out of rooms. What’s it like to be an ant? It’s alive, it’s got a head and a brain, but what does it do? What’s it for? What about a frog? What does a frog do with its time, apart from croak? I know what a bee does, it flies around all day pollinating, but is it content? Is it happy conforming? We worry about Brexit, but what does a bee worry about? Does a bee want to be a wasp instead? Maybe being a wasp is a less pressurised job.

  We experiment on rats and put insects in Petri dishes, and I sometimes wonder if someone is doing that with us, staring down a big microscope and saying, ‘What are these dicks doing? What are they for? Are they happy? Why did they decide to be humans?’ Who does decide to be born what they are? Why am I me and not that fella over there driving that van? Why am I not his dog? How does it all get divvied up? Is there a big meeting somewhere, with someone in the middle saying, ‘Dogs over there, frogs over here’? There must be someone who decides what’s what. I can’t have it when people say, ‘There is no designer, it’s just science and nature.’ There must be a designer! Science has got a lot to answer for. I think scientists make half of it up. Who’s smart enough to challenge them, apart from other scientists? That’s probably about 0.0001 per cent of the world’s population. The rest of us have to take it on the chin.

  Who designed science and nature? Who decides which sperm reaches the egg first? And after the sperm fertilises the egg, who decides what that egg turns out to be? Everything has to be designed. That car, this phone, that pen. It can’t just be luck, that’s a cop out. If it’s luck, who designed luck? I sometimes fantasise about being given a choice. Someone says to me, ‘You can spin this coin to decide whether you’re going be the most successful person in the world, at whatever you choose to do, or a cockroach. Or, we can shake hands now and you’ll be an orangutan.’ I think I’d be an orangutan. Then again, we’ve cut all their trees down. Maybe I’d risk the spin.

  The jury’s out on reincarnation. I don’t not believe in it, but I don’t believe in it either. If everything is reincarnated, and we only started with a handful of people, how has it got to this? How has the population expanded like it has if it’s on a one-for-one basis? And how do you know who’s up for it? I’m not sure Buddha thought this through. I reckon that when I die, I’ll come back with a good knee and play cricket again.

  I met the Dalai Lama in South Africa. I was on the team bus in Durban and saw him leaving our hotel. I grabbed Andrew Strauss, talked my way past security, but when I got to the Dalai Lama, I didn’t know how to greet him. In the end I said, ‘All right, Dal?’ Straussy was mortified. The Dalai Lama just smiled and walked off.

  I have my own religious beliefs, and while RE is the one subject I failed at GCSE, religion is the subject that’s been of most use to me on my travels. When I toured Pakistan for the first time with England, I made sure I knew all about Islam, because I wanted to understand the place and its people. It was the same with Hinduism when I toured India and Buddhism when I toured Sri Lanka. I think religion is essentially about trying to be a better person. If you like a bit of what the Muslims do, use a bit of that. If you like a bit of what the Christians do, use a bit of that. There is no right or wrong way of doing religion, as long as you’re being nice to people.

  I don’t go to church, because I don’t believe that being religious means having to go to that building at the end of the road and worship with loads of other people. God is meant to be everywhere, isn’t He? But I do try to remember to pray every night. I’m not a planned prayer, and I don’t ask for stuff. I never dropped to my knees and asked God to allow me to get Sachin Tendulkar out the following morning. It’s more that I want to thank God for what he’s given me. It’s also a form of therapy. It enables me to speak out loud and weed things from my mind, which can get quite overgrown at times.

  If there is a God, who’s God’s God? Who’s God’s God’s God’s God? But I have to believe in God, because that’s the only way I can make sense of anything. Either nothing is here, and all of this is complete nonsense, or God exists. Richard Dawkins argues against religion, but how can he argue when he doesn’t know himself? Either this is a reality we created for ourselves, or there is a God who created it for us. Scientists have got theories, but we’ve all got theories. And my theory is that none of this exists.

  I’m not sure if I believe in ghosts or not, but I’m scared of the dark. When we were kids, we’d wash the cars in the street, and as a reward, this fella Barry would let us watch movies in his front room. We started off with Rocky and Raiders of the Lost Ark, before graduating to The Exorcist. I was only nine. It triggered nightmares and meant I ended up on pills and all sorts.

  When I walk into a dark room, I get butterflies ten times worse than when I walked out to bat. I have to leave the landing light on at night. I say it’s for the kids. I think I might have seen a ghost a few years ago. Then again, I was half asleep, and the light was off. If I was a ghost, I’d pop up and show myself to people when they were in the supermarket or having a cup of tea in the garden. But why do we not put serious effort into finding out if they exist or not? It’s quite a big thing, is it not? Instead, we’ve got Yvette Fielding on the telly, stumbling around old houses in the dark with no torch.

  Which reminds me, when I was a kid I had a pet tortoise I thought died and came back to life. This tortoise was called Fred. (I’m a bit of a one-trick pony when it comes to names – I had a dog called Fred, a teddy called Fred. If I had a pony I’d probably call it Fred.) When Fred passed away, my mum said she’d bury him while I was at school. She left him on the top of the bin, the binmen came, saw this tortoise and put him back in the garden. God knows how they thought he got on top of the bin. When I got home from school, I was running around the
place shouting, ‘It’s a miracle! Mum, he’s come back to life!’ I played with dead Fred for a week, because my mum didn’t have the heart to tell me that he hadn’t actually been resurrected like some tortoise Jesus.

  How often do you sit around and discuss these questions, which are some of the biggest in the world? I suppose it would end up driving us all mad. That’s probably why I am mad, because I think about it too much. When you sit down to get your hair cut and the barber starts asking you where you’re going on your holidays, why don’t you say, ‘Don’t patronise me, ask me how the world started. Or what happens when we die. Or whether aliens exist. Or who’s God’s God’s God’? But if you did bring it up in the barber’s, or down the pub, people would roll their eyes, sigh and say, ‘Bit heavy, innit?’

  But I don’t find it heavy, I find it strangely liberating. I wish I’d felt a bit more this way when I was younger, it would have given me so much more freedom. I look back at some of the things that used to bother me and think, ‘Why?’ I was pissed trying to get on a pedalo in the Caribbean – so what? Who really cares? It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. If I don’t know how the world started or whether any of this is actually real, why would I be bothered about hitting a ball with a bat? I’m going to die, I don’t know whether any of this is real or not, but I’m terrified of being bowled by Zaheer Khan, last over before close of play at Trent Bridge? It’s all complete madness.

  CHAPTER 9

  NOT CURING CANCER

  Just doing a job

  I played in Soccer Aid at Old Trafford and was very grateful to be asked. But if I could raise money for Unicef by having a kickaround in the garden with my mates, I’d do that instead. There was nothing wrong with anyone, but I tend to retreat in those kinds of situations. I don’t just hate small talk, I detest it. I’m quite comfortable in silence. People sometimes think I’m rude, but I’ll be standing there thinking of something to say and won’t be able to. A barman will make a quip and I won’t know what to reply with. I’ll be walking down the street, someone will walk past and make a comment, and I’ll be dumbstruck. If someone makes a wisecrack in the street or the supermarket, my natural instinct is to tell them to piss off, but I bite my tongue and say nothing instead.

  While I was working for The Project, they were trailing the first Australian series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! There was the usual guessing game as to who was going in, and when it came out that there was a cricketer involved, people started saying it was me, which it wasn’t.

  I had no interest in sitting around in a jungle for a few weeks with a load of people I didn’t know, just to be on the telly. I’d been asked to do the British version loads of times and always said no. And when I got home from Melbourne, and was settling back into my life in England, I got a call from the makers of Australian I’m a Celeb, asking if I’d enter the jungle late. I said no again, but they kept on upping the offer, until after two or three offers things were getting interesting. I started thinking, ‘It’s only a month, and all I’ve got to do is sit about and chat nonsense.’ In the end, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I was on The Jonathan Ross Show and when I came offstage, my wife was sitting in the green room with my agent. She said, ‘You’re off to the jungle on Friday…’ So straight from interviewing Will Smith and Margot Robbie in LA, I flew back to Australia and entered the jungle.

  The fact I hate making small talk is one reason I don’t really thrive in a celebrity environment. God only knows how I won I’m a Celeb. I’m told it’s because I wasn’t trying to be anyone else but me. And once you start dabbling in celebrity circles, you realise there are an awful lot of people who try to be anyone else but themselves. It was the easiest month of my life, I just sat there losing weight and getting paid. My contract said I couldn’t get booted out before two weeks were up, so I slept for a fortnight before upping my game. I was sat there thinking, ‘If I make it through the weekend, maybe we can get a new patio?’

  I get fed up of people wittering, talking about nothing. People they’ve never met, people on Love Island, someone they read about in Grazia magazine. I’ll be standing there thinking, ‘I don’t want to be involved in this conversation, I don’t know how to be involved in this conversation, I want to be euthanised right now, while this conversation is going on.’ People will watch a programme about people pretending to live in a street in Salford and then try to tell me all about it. What is it about their own lives that they’ve got to watch other people’s pretend lives, which are really quite depressing? I can’t really talk, I used to watch Corrie all the time.

  I don’t get why people feel the need to shout things at me when I’m out. I was out filming in Manchester recently, with a cardboard cut-out of some bloke, and someone shouted, ‘Take your finger out of his arse!’ I thought about saying something back but could only think of bad things and that might have caused a problem for my crew. People will see me and scream, ‘Where’s your pedalo?’ It happened 11 years ago, but they’ll act as if they’re the first person who’s ever said it. People will shout ‘Jacamo!’ at me, because I’m on their adverts. How are you supposed to react to that? And if I don’t turn around they sometimes get offended.

  I don’t mind people asking me for an autograph or a selfie, there’s nothing wrong with that. But other people will come up to me and say, ‘Are you who I think you are?’ I’ll say, ‘I don’t know, who do you think I am? Denzel Washington?’ Other people will come up close, stand there staring and say to their mate, ‘Do you know who that is?’ These are grown adults! What kind of weird world do they live in where that’s acceptable behaviour? Even stranger than that, people will say, ‘I don’t know who you are’, and stand there gawping at me. If you don’t know who I am, why are you bothering me? I think them telling me they don’t know who I am is their little victory, another way of saying, ‘I know you must be famous, because I’ve seen those other people ask for a picture, but you’re not as famous as you think, because I’ve never heard of you.’ Other people will tell me they don’t like something I’ve done on the telly or someone I’ve worked with who’s a mate of mine. It’s just really difficult to get your head around.

  When I was in Ireland, filming with the chip van for Lord of the Fries, I was in bed in my hotel room, at about 1 a.m., and I heard giggling outside my room. Then I heard the door handle being jiggled. I thought, ‘It’ll be all right, they can’t get in.’ But then I heard a key card being slid in and the door opening. A girl’s head popped around the wall and she said, ‘Could I have a photograph?’ I was thinking, ‘I can’t get out of bed, because I’m naked, and all of a sudden I’d be the wrong ’un.’ After some gentle but persistent persuasion, she left.

  The following morning, I went down to complain to the manager. ‘Look, mate, someone got in my room last night and I don’t even know who it was.’

  ‘Oh…’

  ‘What do you mean, “Oh…”?’

  ‘That’ll be the ghost…’

  I don’t know much about ghost etiquette, but I’m almost certain they don’t need a key card or ask for selfies.

  After stints overseas and down south, I’m now back up North, living in a leafy town in Cheshire. The locals are very good to me, I can pop to the shops or the gym and the most I’ll get is a cheery ‘All right, Fred’, which is lovely. I love shopping in Poundland, because I get a proper buzz from finding things cheap, and I eat in Nando’s, wander around the markets and travel on the tram. Occasionally, I’ll find myself in situations where I’m out with the wife and kids and I’ll have to say, ‘Look, I’ve got to look after my family here’, and if it gets too much I’ll just make a quick exit. But my kids have grown up around it and people are generally respectful.

  Since I gave up booze a few years ago, I don’t really go anywhere or do anything on my own, I’d rather just stay at home with the family. I don’t thrive in big groups and get a bit anxious with a lot of attention. I don’t mind the attention that comes with
doing something, like on the cricket pitch or the stage, because nobody can get to you. But when people can get to me, I get in a bit of a flap. That’s why I disappeared after the 2005 Ashes, and maybe why I got so smashed during the bus parade, because I didn’t like being so exposed.

  Adulation is a very strange thing. I’ve always thought that the treat was playing, not the slaps on the back and the awards and medals. Along with the rest of the 2005 Ashes-winning team, I won an MBE. But cricket was my job, just something I did. Actually, I didn’t even see it as a job, because it was something I loved doing so much. Why would anyone want to give you an MBE for living your dream? Just walking out to bat for England was enough.

  People talk about the sacrifices sportspeople make to get where they’ve got, but if making all those sacrifices is such a chore, do something else. It’s not like you’re grafting down a mine every day, or looking after the elderly or disabled, you’re just going running or cycling or lifting weights in the gym.

  Every time I visit Old Trafford, I feel proud. I’ll walk around, see all the pictures and bats and jumpers on the walls, and I’ll feel part of something special. When I was 20, Lancashire were paying me £40 grand a year. I went into a contract meeting and told them that Sussex and Hampshire had offered me £110 and £120 grand a year respectively. They said, ‘So go then.’ But I didn’t want to play for Sussex or Hampshire. In the end, they upped the offer to £60 grand, which was still half what I could have got elsewhere, and when they called me in to sign the contract, it said £55 grand on it. I signed it anyway, because Lancashire was the only team I ever wanted to play for.