We chose Brexit, that’s what we wanted. We can’t have another referendum. Although some people are now saying we can. It’s so confusing. What happens if Brexit wins again? Do we make it best of five? Ultimately, if we’re in or out, we need to get on with it. I know Brexit might have terrible consequences, but I have to see the funny side of it, otherwise my head would explode. I was watching Newsnight recently, and the head of the sandwich corporation was on there, saying that Brexit would be terrible for the sandwich industry because the ingredients would be unavailable or too expensive. Avocadoes were mentioned, certain lettuces. I was thinking, ‘If this is the sum of it, we’ll be all right. They might have to stockpile avocadoes in Chiswick, but we’ll get over it.’
CHAPTER 24
WHO DECIDES WHAT MATTERS?
Going back to basics
I was driving through Manchester the other day, looking at people making their way to work, and I couldn’t help noticing how miserable everyone seemed. It was like one of those old pictures by Lowry, everyone was rushing around, bent over, with their heads down. It made me realise that not much has changed since he painted those pictures almost 100 years ago, except now it’s shops and call centres instead of mills.
There was this one fella – I can picture him now, big man, bald, in his forties, wearing a shirt and tie – who appeared from under the railway bridge and looked so flustered and unhappy. It bothered me. He was probably rushing to a meeting to talk about the targets he’s not hitting. I looked at him and thought, ‘Mate, what’s the point? It doesn’t matter if you’re five minutes late for your meeting. Nobody’s going to care. And if they do, bollocks to them.’ People get hung up on the wrong things. We don’t know how it all started, if the world is going to end tomorrow and what’s going to happen when we all die, and this fella is busting a gut to get to his office, where he’ll spend the next eight hours staring at a computer screen.
Who decides what matters? One day it’s Brexit, which is an end-of-days scenario, even though no one really knows what it is, the next it’s Adil Rashid being picked for England. If people stopped caring about everything, the world would be a far better place. I’m quite laid-back about most things, until I see people not being laid-back about things I think they should be laid-back about. There are so many things in the world that matter, but we spend our time worrying about things that absolutely don’t matter. Geoffrey Boycott comes straight out of a quadruple open heart bypass surgery and starts having a go at Adil Rashid. Come on, Geoffrey. Get a life, mate.
It’s bizarre what people worry about, what makes us happy and makes us sad. I remember when I was watching the 2012 Olympics. One of our canoeists won a gold medal and when the anthem came on, I started welling up. I had to get a grip of myself, physically get up and say, ‘What are you doing? He’s a canoeist in a false lake in Eton Dorney. It’s meaningless.’
I’ve never been much of a cryer. I cried in India when I couldn’t score a run and got out to one of the worst bowlers ever, which was the final straw. I had a tear in my eye at the end of my last Test, because I felt a bit robbed and was standing there thinking, ‘I’m fitter and bowling better than I’ve ever done, but I’m never going to do this again.’ But I certainly didn’t cry when we regained the Ashes, I just got on the pop with the lads. I had a tear in my eye when my lad scored his first hundred, but it was never going to escalate to full-blown blubbing. It’s not like I try not to cry, and it’s not like I’ve got a problem with men crying, it’s just not something that comes naturally.
Why is Mo Farah running 5,000m and 10,000m even a thing? Who decided it was a thing in the first place? Why am I bothered? I was cheering along with everyone else when he won all his races, because I was proud of what he was doing. But it makes no sense. Why does anyone care that someone can throw a javelin further than everyone else? It’s just people throwing sticks. Triple-jump, what’s that all about? Why does anyone in their right mind care that someone is brilliant at hop, skip and jumping into a sand pit? Greg Rutherford jumped a bit further than everyone else at the 2012 Olympics and people were calling for him to be knighted. He jumps for a living! How is that helping anyone? Does it matter if he’s helping anyone?
Big things don’t really bother me, but a door or cupboard slamming will. Or a football bouncing on a path. Punch me in the face and I’ll be fine. The other day, there were no blue socks in the drawer. There were white socks, black socks, but I wanted blue socks. I said to my missus, ‘Have you got any blue socks?’ She didn’t hear me, but I was running a bit late, flapping, and we ended up having a row about it.
When I got home, she tried to make me apologise. I pulled out the line, ‘I don’t ask for much. I just wanted some blue socks…’ I don’t like myself for it – who gets bothered by not having any blue socks, but isn’t bothered by Brexit, which could adversely affect my kids’ lives? Especially when I’ve just been going on about people being bothered about things they shouldn’t be bothered about. I was breaking my own rule, which bothered me… Fact is, there’s no real middle ground with me, either I’m horizontal or going mad about something trivial, like not being able to find some blue socks.
I don’t really see myself as a non-conformist, I just conform to what I believe is the right way of living. If I agree with something I’m told, that’s fine. If I don’t, I’m not going to pretend I do. If I feel I need to do something to improve, I’ll commit to it fully. If not, I won’t. When we used to do the beep test in training, I’d say to the coach, ‘What score do I need to get? Twelve? OK, I’ll get 12 then.’ And I’d get 12 and stop. Just give me a bat and ball.
Why would anyone do something they disagree with? It baffles me. It’s one of the reasons my head is so messed up. So many people spend a large chunk of their lives doing something they don’t enjoy. They’re no different from bees, or those ants you see carrying leaves on their backs, it’s just on a bigger scale. They’re all just working to keep things working, but to what end?
People work all their life to get to 60 or 65 and then when they retire, they don’t do owt. Surely that’s the wrong way around? You go to school and you’d sooner be doing something else, you spend your best adult years working when you’d sooner be doing something else, and then you retire, put a rug on your legs, eat an ice cream and stare out to sea.
Just knock everything down and build mud huts, then we can go back to living off the land. Then again, imagine if you had seven billion people all out hunting and gathering, all the animals would be gone in about an hour, Ricky Gervais would start kicking off on Twitter and we’d soon be eating each other.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know what the future holds. The fun is in not knowing. And by then, the world might have ended anyway. Or we might have been abducted by aliens. Or I might be a cockroach. Whatever it is I do, wherever and whatever I am, as long as I still have my family and close friends around me, I’ll be all right. What’s more important than that?
Do You Know What? Page 20