I was settling in rather nicely among the rest of the lads, in fact, when Nigel Laughton, the team manager, came up to inform me that I had been called up to the senior squad. We had just moved to Canberra, it was two days before the academy’s first competitive match of the tour, and given that we had literally just unpacked, I considered this was some kind of wind-up.

Playing a trick on the youngest lad is not so out of the ordinary in cricket teams, after all, and some of the senior Lancashire lads had got me only a few weeks earlier on an end-of-season golfing event. Graham Lloyd had offered to drive me up to Gleneagles, and just as we were about to set off from his house, he checked whether I had got my passport.

‘What do I need a passport for?’ I asked.

‘Well, we’re going to Gleneagles, aren’t we?’ he said, in unison with Ian Austin, who had also turned up at his gaff to cadge a ride.

‘Yes.’

‘And Gleneagles was in Scotland last time anyone checked.’

Of course, naivety won the day and I was on the phone to my mum within seconds, asking her if she could dig it out for me.

‘What on earth are you on about?’ she asked. ‘I think someone’s having you on, James.’ Cue roars of laughter, and the slapping of thighs. Oh, how we japed.

In subsequent years I have been told stories that some officials at Lancashire even believed England had mixed myself and Kyle up, and picked the wrong one. You see, I’d featured almost exclusively in four-day cricket in 2002, and had only five wickets in three one-day matches to my name by that stage, whereas Kyle had been quite successful. But that is certainly not something that I was ever aware of; and why would I care whether other people were surprised by my inclusion? I was throwing stuff back into my suitcase and heading off to Sydney to join England’s Ashes squad.

In one way I was sad to be leaving the academy lot, as it was a really good group that showed its true colours with the number of other lads who were genuinely pleased for me. Gordon Muchall, of Durham, was my room-mate, and it was a fairly young collective, some of whom I had played alongside for England Under-19s. Darren Stevens, then in his late twenties, was the oldest.

One of the things that was good about that tour coinciding with the Ashes was that there were always different players flying in and flying out. Because of the number of injuries, it meant we had people from the academy joining the full tour, moving this way or that. Andrew Flintoff was on his crutches for a while, and Simon Jones came to us before he went home following the horrendous injury he incurred in the first Ashes Test in Brisbane. It meant as a new guy on the scene I got to meet quite a lot of new people, and I actually enjoyed that part of things, although you always wish your meetings could occur in better circumstances.

One thing that hadn’t really sunk in, though, until Nigel pulled me over for a quiet word, was that I was part of the group identified as next in line to play for England. There were so many good bowlers on board – Chris Tremlett, Kabir Ali and Alex Tudor – that even if I had considered myself one of the next cabs off the rank, I would have expected others to get the first fare. Of course, now with experience of the clearly defined hierarchical structure the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) has in place, it is fairly obvious that we were the understudies to both Test and one-day teams.

But the academy system was still in its infancy. We were only the second intake and although it is now par for the course when you get picked in an England Lions team that you are being groomed for international cricket (you are usually in the same country or pretty close by and shadow the full team’s programme in terms of fitness, nutrition and skill drills), it was fairly fresh back then. So even though I was in Australia, on the team’s doorstep, I never once felt like I was there because I was next in line.

Unsurprisingly, the England captain has some influence on a tour as to who gets called up, and at the time Nasser Hussain had never seen me bowl a ball. Thankfully, however, he was quite close with Ronnie Irani because, as the story goes, or at least the way a certain former Lancashire and Essex all-rounder tells it, it was Ronnie’s influence that got me in. We had played against each other earlier that year, and Ronnie, who was in that one-day party in Australia, had a word or two in Nasser’s ear when the list of injured fast bowlers lengthened to include Darren Gough, Simon Jones and Chris Silverwood. In addition, Andrew Flintoff had failed to recover properly from a hernia operation.

‘This is unbelievable,’ I thought as I checked into my room at the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney. I’d never stayed in a hotel like it before. It was as plush as you could imagine, and, to cap it all, there was a box of England shirts in the corner. Not any old England shirts. They were my England shirts. I just sat on the bed, speechless – no big deal since I still wasn’t very talkative in those days – considering how incredible this all felt.

It was not until the next morning at practice that I met everyone, and it felt totally surreal because there were some guys who I had spent so much time watching on TV as I’d grown up. Here were people like Alec Stewart and Nasser Hussain introducing themselves to me. It took quite a while for me to get used to that.

I was not selected for the opening match against Australia at the SCG, but much to my shock I was picked for the second at the MCG just a couple of days later. When I’d arrived and thumbed through that England kit in my Sydney hotel room, I’d made a pact with myself to cherish every minute. Even then I don’t really think I had factored in the possibility that I would be anything more than a last resort if every other bowler fell over or fell ill. But here I was on 15 December 2002, making my international debut.

I spoke few words in that first week as an England tourist. As you will have gathered now I don’t find social interaction straightforward with strangers, so I really only talked when addressed by others.