Hot Hands Harmison

Well, since I was doing so little on the tour, Peter Moores suggested I respond to the British Olympic Committee request for a top cricketer to carry the Olympic torch. Freddy Flintoff refused to do it because the torch was a piece of Nazi propaganda constructed to suggest a historical continuity between Ancient Greece and Aryan Germany. Freddy said he believed such allusion between empires is still symbolically emodied in a torch that lights the start of a competition of sports encoded by the West. He said that until Yorkshire is recognised and ferret games are included, it is not an inclusive sporting contest- merely an invitation to the rest of the world to lose to the capitalist nations on their terms, something they do economically every day.

I think it's great though, all bright and orange, and wrote back to the committee to suggest myself for the ceremony. They agreed, saying my 'Ashes' performance would make great headlines. The plan, originally, was that I would bowl a cricket ball of fire into the Olympic cauldron to spark a flame, which would shoot into a pyrotechnic display of a burning Tibetan monk. It was a great idea, Jamie Oliver said he'd make a tomato, cumin and basil soup for the crowds over the fire. But he pulled out last week because of monosodiumglutamate in school dinners in Taiwan. I carried on regardless, and we practised the ceremony in secret in the Millenium Dome. Me, Kelly Holmes, Seb Coe and fifteen others suffered serious burns. Seb got caught in the back of the head trying to dodge a bouncer, then abandoned the idea of being a toga-clad batsman. I hit a cleaner with my slower ball, and Kelly Holmes got hurt after refusing to wear the asbestos gloves as wicket keeper. After two days of practice, we reached the conclusion that a 25metre square target for me would minimise the risk of casualties, but this just gave me confidence problems, and I stopped throwing the ball completely. So I was holding one of them for two hours, and burned my bowling hand. And that's the story of how Kelly Holmes got picked ahead of me for the last part of the Olympic torch ceremony in London.