When I was very young, coming into the Sunderland side, if we got beaten, I'd be very down. I'd go home, and it would drag on for days, I'd be thinking about the game. I was from Sunderland, felt things like a fan, and got really down.
I was player-manager at Sheffield United. I played my last ever game for them. It was terrible. We lost 4-1, I think to Sunderland. Fancy that, a Geordie, being forced to retire because of a defeat to Sunderland.
When you are very young and come through at a club, like I did at Sunderland, I suppose people do not expect as much and have not really heard much about you. Whereas, when you sign for a club, the expectations are higher.
There's no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there's only up and down and down is very close to the ground. And I'm trying to go up without thinking about anything trivial such as politics. They have got nothing to do with it. I'm thinking about the general people and when they get hurt.
It was through the Hammerheads that I got a route into the professional game, via a trial at Sunderland from Mick McCarthy and then an invitation to come back to Carlisle in 2004.
Sunderland is like a family and I'm very happy to be part of it.
It's very important to have a coach who wants to win every single game and who approaches them like they are not a problem - whether it is against Sunderland or Man City or against anyone.
I'm very happy about my career, and I'm proud of having played in Bolton and Sunderland.
You love the game, but it's hard to do the things you do when you're feeling like you're a leg down all the time, literally. Or you're always beat up, even coming into the season. So it's just not as fun when you're down, and you got to work your way up. And you can't really get there because you're so beat up.
Truth, beaten down, may well rise again. But there's a reason it gets beaten down. Usually, we don't like it very much.
It's one of those things: we've got guys that are very offensive and can take down anyone, and we've got guys that don't shoot at all but are very hard to take down. It's one of those things. You've got to decide what you're good at.
At Sunderland, if I had a bad game, it wasn't like it was the end of the world.
If you're thinking of coming to America, this is what it's like: you've got your Comfort Inn, you've got your Best Western, and you've got your Red Lobster where you eat. Everybody's very fat, everybody's very stupid and everybody's very rude - it's not a holiday programme, it's the truth.
I've worked for everything I've ever got and it's worked out. Even if I was the Cy Young Award winner I still would not want to feel that sense of entitlement. I would still treat every game like it's my very first game and my very last game.
As a Sunderland fan, I loved Tommy Sorensen.
I had a very down-to-earth product, my wrap dress, which was really a uniform. It was just a simple little cotton-jersey dress that everybody loved and everybody wore. That one dress sold about 3 or 4 million. I would see 20, 30 dresses walking down one block. All sorts of different women. It felt very good. Young and old, and fat and thin, and poor and rich.
My first game, I played the first play of the game and called a timeout and got sat down, got benched for the rest of the game, and we won the game. It was the longest day of my life. Long day. Very embarrassing.