Before there was any chance to go to England, I changed schools, and it was rugby from there on in.
I think my form dipped after the Six Nations in 2007, from the World Cup onwards.
There is no point winning the semi if you don't win the final. It's as simple as that. No one will remember a big semifinal if you lose the final, so you have to do it all again.
If you start thinking about retirement in six months' time, you're already there.
I just want to concentrate on my rugby and enjoy it and live in the moment.
In your mid-20s, you think you'll go on for eternity. Then a point comes where you realise that's not going to be the case.
You have perspective when little people come into your life. You take the best things you have and let them overshadow your disappointment.
I was a football fan before I became a rugby fan.
Growing up, I supported Manchester United, and my hero was Mark Hughes.
Team sports are very important for shaping personalities. It's important that kids understand the mentality behind playing team sports and playing for one another and playing with friends.
If you can be a good role model for people, well, great. You try and live your sporting life and the rest of your life as well as you can, and if it's something that people admire, well, fantastic. I don't sit at home and think about it too much, though - there's plenty of other things in my life going on.
I didn't know Ian Smith myself!
I've been a professional rugby player all my life; I don't really know anything different.
You want to win everything you are in.
When you are captain, you are never speaking for yourself.
I don't care that people thought I was one way for my whole career because now that I am not attached to a team, I can have my own opinion, I can have my own voice. I can link myself to my own thought process rather than a generic message most teams try to get across.
You can't rely on your defence to win a World Cup.
There is still a big onus to be coached. I understand the best teams don't need a huge amount of coaching, but that's when a coach should decide not to do coaching.
Being recognised by Guinness World Records in their 60th year is a real honour. It's also a real privilege for me to be positioned beside such sporting greats.
When you've done something for more than a third of your life, your whole adult life, and then all of a sudden you're going to have to switch off and say, 'No more,' you want to grasp as much of it and enjoy the last few years of it as much as you can. Because you can't get those years back.
Your name or what you've done on the rugby pitch is not going to carry you through for the rest of your life. I realise I'm going to have to eventually do something else, and that does frighten me a little bit.
I still get a great buzz from rugby.
I don't really want to be the centre of attention.
In a team situation, I think the players are more inclined to give the answer they believe the psychologist is looking for rather than maybe being totally honest.
I have interests outside of rugby and have been cultivating them for when I do decide to hang up the boots.
The big upside to being captain is it's a huge honour, but the downside is that there is definitely extra pressure.
I'm very much a glass-half-full person.
I was quite small as a kid and maybe a little afraid physically. When I grew into myself, the realisation changed. That when you hurt yourself, it's transient; it doesn't stay forever.
You cannot say things one week and then behave differently.
I've always found when I was captain when other people were doing the talking for me, I didn't need to say as much, and when I did say one or two things, people tended to listen all the more.
I'm an eternal optimist.
If you stick around long enough and you do enough of the right things, you get seen in a largely positive light.
I don't feel comfortable with the kind of celebrity that has come my way - and I'm not very good at it, either.
As the summer moves on, there are Saturday nights when I come home and find friends I haven't even been out with sitting up in the hot tub.
There have been a couple of things I've been involved in launching that have been a bit more public, but I've always had other things tipping away in the background.
It's rare enough as an older generation player that you're 100% fit - there's always something niggling.