Hoggy: Welcome to My World

‘But even the dogs have done some words, Daddy.’

‘Maybe later, Ernie, if you’re a good boy…’

REVEALED

OVERLEAF…

The amazing drinking exploits of

Andrew Flintoff…

Sorry, I was there, but I don’t remember a single thing.

5 Meat and Three Veg (#ulink_128f1a96-7a53-5ce3-8de1-efeda504e744)

This might sound a bit odd, but when I was younger I used to eat a lot of nettles. It was a bit of a party trick that I would perform from time to time to impress my school friends. I can’t remember exactly when or where I discovered it—some misspent afternoon or other when I should have been tidying my bedroom or doing my homework—but I must have read somewhere that if you hold the bottom of a nettle leaf when you pick it, then fold it carefully inwards, you don’t get stung. If you then put it in your mouth and chew it, you don’t feel a thing. And it tastes like, well, nettles I suppose. (Don’t try this at home, kids, unless you have a fully qualified nettle-handler in attendance, such as me.)

As you might expect, not many 8-year-olds in Pudsey were aware of this advanced piece of Nettleology, so they never believed that I would dare to pick up nettles with my bare hands and eat them. So my party piece never failed to impress. No pocket money changed hands, I must stress; my nettle-eating was never a commercial venture. I did it purely to gain friends and influence among the short-trousered community in Pudsey.

Funnily enough, I recently read on the internet that eating nettles actually makes your hair brighter, thicker and shinier. It also, apparently, makes your skin clearer, healthier and more radiant. Aha, I thought:

So that’s why i’m so bloody gorgeons.

Anyway, I only mention my nettle-eating antics because, as I’ve grown older, my eating habits have continued to be a bit weird. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fussy eater. On the contrary, there is hardly anything I don’t like. It’s just that I tend to be something of a mood eater: I eat when I feel like eating and, if I’m not in the mood, nothing will persuade me to put my snout into the trough. Sometimes I can go a whole day without eating until the evening. At other times I won’t be able to stop snacking all day long.

As far as my cricket is concerned, this mood-eating tendency did not made me especially popular with the nutritionists who worked with the England team, making sure that we were following the right sort of diets. Since the introduction of ECB central contracts a few years ago, we have become the first generation of cricketers who are officially supposed to watch what we eat. Not only are we supposed to be cricketers these days, but we’re expected to be finely honed athletes as well. In theory, at least.

Unfortunately, my mood-eating habits meant that I usually didn’t conform to the nutritionists’ idea of what makes for a healthy eating schedule. And their biggest bugbear was my preference for avoiding breakfast.

Generally speaking, I just don’t do breakfast, because I don’t like eating as soon as I’ve woken up. I am, in fact, a GRUMPY GRUNTING GIT in the mornings and if I eat anything shortly after waking up it makes me feel physically sick. Which, in turn, only makes me even more grumpy.

Now, I’m well aware that breakfast is supposed to be The Most Important Meal Of The Day. My mum told me that when I was a little lad and the nutritionists have told me umpteen times since. I know that it’s supposed to set you up for the day, get your brain and body going, regulate your appetite, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But it just doesn’t happen that way for me. And believe me, I’ve tried it plenty of times, and it always makes me feel grim. That might make me strange, it might mean that I don’t fit in with a nutritionist’s carefully conceived dietary programme, it might not be the right thing for a professional sportsman to do,

BUT I JUST CAN’T SODDING WELL DO IT! I CAN’T, I CAN’T, I CAN’T!

All England players are required to have a chat with a nutritionist on regular visits to the National Cricket Centre at Loughborough. Over the course of a day on Loughborough Univerity campus, you are put through something of a cricketer’s MOT. You have appointments with a representative of every branch of medical science known to man: the physiotherapist, the doctor, the podiatrist and the psychologist. There are fitness tests, eye tests, blood tests, skin tests, jockstrap fitting, underarm hair tests to ensure that your armpits aren’t too bushy. (One or more of the above may be fictional.)

Then, if there’s any time left, you’ll have a chat with Mr Nutritionist, my favourite appointment of the day. My conversation with Mr Nutritionist would usually go something like this:

Or