As a young boy it was like a magnet to me and just kept sucking me in. I remember those days so fondly, none more than on one Boxing Day gathering when Grandma came to me and asked me if I liked my Walkman, not realizing that we had yet to open our presents!

It’s quite a northern thing, I suppose, for entire families to meet up on a weekly basis but I always found it comforting. After Nana and Grandad passed away, the honours were passed down to the next generation, and Fridays have become pizza night. Even now that family time is special to me. In one way, having such a wonderful family lessened my need for contact with my contemporaries and meant I rarely felt the need to seek or develop other friendships.

I had a privileged upbringing on the border of Brierfield, two and a half miles north-east of Burnley’s town centre, and being so close-knit helped. I’ve never been someone who has found making friends easy, and so my cousins were my real mates, forming the social network upon which I relied.

Socializing was problematic for me from a young age. For one, I have always been extremely quiet and lacked self-confidence. To such an extent that I was already a bit of a recluse by the time I went to St Theodore’s High School at the age of eleven.

I was short, skinny and didn’t really have much in common with the other lads, so found it hard to get along. There were no real common interests between myself and the majority of the lads at St Theodore’s and because I showed no desire to hang out on street corners, or engage in other anti-social activity, I was viewed as different. And just as with kids of this same description up and down the country, being different made me a target for bullying when I got to secondary school. The bullying primarily took the form of name-calling, and actually began in middle school. I had quite big teeth as a young lad and so used to get called Goofy or Rabbit. Being vertically challenged, there were references to my height, too.

At first it didn’t really bother me but with time this wore me down. As an adult, in the environment I am most used to – the dressing room – banter flies around and Graeme Swann would think there was something wrong if a day went by without me taking the piss out of the size of his (humongous) chin. But when you’re young, cruel comments about your physical appearance can be very hurtful.

There were a few occasions when I tried to stand up for myself and came off worse for it, most notably on a school skiing trip when I was fourteen. I’d had enough of getting picked on, decided to have a go back at the lad who was giving me the most serious grief, and received a headbutt for my trouble.

I am sure this kind of behaviour happens everywhere. There is always a group of lads that is feared, and make it their policy to belittle people. And, like others who become victims of these mindless idiots, I lived in fear of them.

It meant that from Monday to Friday I just tried to get through the hours of 8.30 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. as best I could. My life consisted of cricket in the summer, then in the winter I would go on the football at the weekend and spend the rest of my time ticking off the days until the new year and the start of indoor nets.

It was not as though I was happy being such an obvious outsider at school, and I did go through a stage in fifth form of desperately trying to fit in with one of the in-crowds. There was a park across Ormerod Road and at lunchtime I would go there with quite a few lads and smoke. Peer pressure got to me to such an extent that I ended up doing something that I really didn’t enjoy, with people I didn’t really enjoy spending time with, simply in a bid to be liked. You see, part of me has always wanted to belong.

Even then cricket was the focal point of my life, and, because there was no cricket at school, time spent at Turf Moor became my refuge. Well, I say there was no cricket at school but that is not strictly true. There was the compulsory annual match when we entered the Lancashire County Cup.

This was always one of those games when the majority of our team took their ties and blazers off and played in the rest of their uniform. When it was our turn to bat it was like Russian roulette, as you attempted to pick out the barbaric, buckled pads that hurt least from the team kitbag. These monstrosities had been gouging lads’ legs since the 1960s.

I was one of the few St Theodore’s boys who played for a club, and although I didn’t stand out at Burnley I was much better than anyone else at school, and therefore was team coordinator. Teachers did the organizing on annual match days, which mainly consisted of telling me to get off after bowling a couple of overs, and allowing someone else a go.

Back at home, if sport was on the telly I was glued to it. It had been this way for me for years – from the age of six, I reckon – something I would think quite unusual.