Graeme Swann has always had trouble following orders and is no different in the lead-up to the Ashes, now less than four weeks away. A rebel at heart, he switched counties after his jokes were banned from the dressing room, provoked a member of the England management to wrestle him to the floor and is described by the present captain as a buffoon. Swann does not do conformity.
For weeks the England players have been told not to dwell on the battle with Australia but to concentrate solely on the business in front of them - today's task is a high-stakes meeting with India in the World Twenty20 - but Swann just can't keep up the pretence.
"We are not supposed to think about the Ashes but it's impossible when you've got six hours in your room waiting for the next Twenty20 game for your mind not to wander," he said. "I said to Jimmy [Anderson] the other day that I feel like a kid on December 1 who has just been given his advent calendar. I've opened the first day and I just want to open all the other days as quickly as I can. I can't wait for Christmas.
"The first Test in Cardiff and the Lord's Test straight after are going to be incredible. It's what I wanted to play cricket for. When I was a boy, I wanted to be Allan Lamb, driving Merv Hughes all over the place. I know we are not supposed to be thinking about it but no-one's going to stop me, are they?"
Determined to play the game with a smile, and on a terrific roll since breaking into the Test team in December, Swann insists he will not be overawed when the Ashes series starts. "The only time I've felt nervous was when I was thrown the ball on my debut in Chennai. My legs felt like jelly, though once I started bowling I felt fine. I'm a great believer in fate, that whatever is going to happen is going to happen and there's not a lot you can do about it. If I've got this for another six months so be it, if I've got it for another six years then brilliant. So you should enjoy every minute. If you can't enjoy your cricket you might as well not play.
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"I don't think I'll be nervous. I'll just get so excited I'll hardly be able to contain myself. I'll be jumping about and banging my head against the wall. I've basically got the patience of a three-year-old with attention deficit disorder."
Swann's madcap jollity is seen as an asset in an England dressing room that has endured some trauma in recent months but there was a time when his high spirits were viewed with irritation. He was rather too silly for his own good, although, as he rightly says, had he been taking wickets when he was first selected for a full England tour 10 years ago, he would have been granted more leeway. The immaturity of his cricket rather than his immaturity as a person was what counted against him.
That said, he was a real pain. Long before Duncan Fletcher took against him while England's coach, Swann had tested the patience of Phil Neale on an under-19 tour of South Africa. Neale, then tour manager and now England team operations manager, was trying to deliver a talk in the dressing room while Swann persisted in bouncing a tennis ball, even after being told to stop. Exasperated, Neale tried to take the ball from him. They grappled on the floor in an unseemly wrestling match. Neale admits he was not winning when they were eventually separated.
Swann concedes the incident took place but says he cannot remember what triggered it. "Phil probably wanted to knock my head off because I'd been with him for weeks on end. As Andrew Strauss [England's captain] will tell you, I'm one of those people you need a break from after a while. I was a cocky little upstart who no doubt deserved a good kicking. We are best of friends now."
Neale's verdict says it all: "He was quite annoying then but is much better now."
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Of course, these things are relative. Asked whether anybody in the England dressing room talks more than he does, Swann admits not. "Ravi Bopara makes a lot of noise, a lot of noise, and strange noises too . . . he shouts and screams. I'm not noisy but I never shut up. I still cross the line from time to time and chastise myself silently."
Has any of the present team despaired? "What, and just smacked me . . ? I think everybody's got fed up at some point but I've not been punched yet. I'm sure it's only a matter of time. Eventually I'll say the wrong thing to the wrong person on the wrong day and he'll just slot me. I'm half-expecting it, especially without Steve Harmison to look after me."
Swann's carefree approach - which let him brush off the loss of the Stanford millions better than most - is perhaps a reaction to the way his family played the game. He could never become as wound up by the game as his father, Ray, a Geordie who moved to Towcester to teach and a keen amateur cricketer, and his elder brother, Alec, who spent several seasons with Northants and Lancashire. "My dad was an exceptional league cricketer. Wayne Larkins said he was the best player he ever played with who didn't play first-class cricket. But I wouldn't say he played with a smile on his face. He took the game very seriously and my brother takes after him. I'm just a happy mixture of my mum and dad.
"My brother would smash the changing room to smithereens, like my dad did, but the couple of times I did it I felt a bit embarrassed. There are times when you feel like having a rant but it tends to be when you've been cheated out. I've got no time for people who come in and rant just for the benefit of the coach. There's a few who do and it's pathetic."
Swann was 20 when chosen for an England tour of South Africa in 1999-2000. He had done the double of 500 runs and 50 wickets but was not ready for the big time and was peremptorily sent back to Northants, where he languished for several seasons. He was desperate to get back into the England set-up but the harder he tried the worse things became.
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Fortunately, he realised his cricket would not improve until he started enjoying life again. Unfortunately, in 2003 Northants signed a new coach, Kepler Wessels, whose spartan work ethic was directly at odds with the Swann philosophy. After enduring two miserable seasons the young allrounder was on his way to Notts.
"The fun factor had been completely stripped out of the game. I wasn't wanted by the coach and I didn't want to play for him. My heart wasn't in it and I thought about giving up. I was breaking up with a girl I'd been going out with for ages, I wasn't playing good cricket and the dressing room was banned from laughing at my jokes.
"I should have left a couple of years before I did but I'm glad I didn't because I wouldn't have appreciated just what a good place Notts was. When he signed me, Mick Newell [the Nottinghamshire coach] said he wanted me to be my chirpy bubbly self and inspire others to be the same. That was music to my ears. I am more than happy now to have been 'clinically depressed' for 18 months. It made the next three years an absolute pleasure. I appreciate things more, having had to work that much harder to get where I am."
Swann is determined to live life to the full or, as he puts it, tick off everything he wants to do before he dies. Hence his occasional involvement in a Nottingham rock band, Dr Comfort and the Lurid Revelations, whose other members rehearse far more than he does. "I turn up once in a blue moon. I've got to be sensible. I can't be seen doing it at the wrong time, so it tends to be the weekend I get back from tour. I drink a few pints of Guinness and wake up the next morning with no voice and a headache. We have a whale of a time."
Swann's success with England - he has taken 34 wickets in seven Tests - has coincided with a more stable period in his life. He is engaged to marry Sarah in January, 10 days after the end of England's tour of South Africa. "I don't want to tempt fate and say I'll be on the tour, but it would be a bit foolish booking the wedding in mid-December and having to fly home for it."
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There has been one scare. In March, a long-standing elbow problem resurfaced with a vengeance. Swann struggled through Tests in Antigua and Trinidad, sometimes bowling with tears running down his face. He went to America for surgery to remove many pieces of floating bone.
The process couldn't have been smoother and he was soon back bowling without having to grimace through the first ball of a new spell. But he endured an anxious period. "I lay in my hospital bed thinking, 'What if I can't bowl any more?' I decided I'd make my millions on the after-dinner circuit taking the mickey out of Freddie [Flintoff]."
Having endured his share of ups and downs, Swann looks on in amazement at some England teammates on whom the real world seems to have left barely a scratch. I remind him he once said Monty Panesar, the spinner he displaced, seemed to be mystified by real life.
"What I said about Monty is true of several people in this squad. I simply don't know how they have got to their age without electrocuting themselves or doing themselves some real harm. Ravi's like that, Luke Wright, too. Some of the things they say and do . . . they are just on a different planet. Rob Key asked Adil Rashid the other day what animal a lamb came from . . . he thought it was a cow! He actually said it out loud. The comedy value is priceless. That's what I meant about Monty. I love him to pieces but I sometimes wonder how he's got to this stage without wandering in front of a train or a bus."
When Ricky Ponting arrived in England two weeks ago, he clearly knew little about England's new frontline spinner and said Australia might have the better slow-bowling attack, even with just one frontline spinner, Nathan Hauritz, who has no wicket-taking pedigree.
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Swann is unfazed. "There's no reason he should know much about me. I doubt he was getting up at the crack of dawn to watch England play West Indies. I wouldn't if I was him. It doesn't bother me. But hopefully I'll get him out a few times and he'll know who I am by the end of the series."
Not that Ponting is top of the hit-list. That is populated by the five left-handers in Australia's top eight. "Obviously I prefer bowling at left-handers. The ball turning away is harder to play and normally there's rough outside off-stump to put doubt in their minds. But I'd rather bowl at 11 right-handers on a turning pitch than 11 left-handers on a flat one."
Yuvraj could hit England for six
Yuvraj Singh is the man England must keep quiet at Lord's this afternoon. The last time the 28-year-old faced them in a Twenty20 international in Durban in 2007 he smashed an impressive 58 runs from 16 deliveries, including a 12-ball fifty and six sixes in an over from Stuart Broad, helping him to reach the fastest fifty ever in Twenty20 cricket and also the fastest in any form of international cricket.
Twenty20's leading six hitters
27 Yuvraj Singh, India (12 Twenty20 innings)
24 Brendon McCullum, New Zealand (24)
22 Chris Gayle, West Indies (8)
21 Ross Taylor, New Zealand (18) 20 Albie Morkel, South Africa (15) 18 Sanath Jayasuriya, Sri Lanka (13); Misbah-ul-Haq, Pakistan (16)
17 Jacob Oram, New Zealand (14)
15 Paul Collingwood, England (16)