I thought today couldn’t get any worse when I got bowled out for one by Ryan Sidebottom and then found that Jonathan Trott had stolen my Official Team England dinner plate and spoon set in order to eat one of his disgusting biltong and melktert sandwiches that he says his nana used to make all the time when they was growing up in Shipton-Under-Witwatersrand and which he says is actually as English as warm beer, red post boxes and a crushing sense of being trapped by soul-sucking mediocrity and I dunno about that but to be fair he’s here now and that’s the main thing, stolen plate notwithstanding.

I get out the iPhone and there’s like six missed calls from Colin Gibson, who is what’s called a Director Of Communications at the ECB which is not as the name might suggest someone you go to if you can’t get a signal on your phone or Andersony’s hogging the official team laptop and you want to play Murder Death Kill IV: Revenge Of The Third Umpire online against some bloke in Myanmar but is in fact a sort of Public Relations person.

Anyway this Gibson isn’t your usual Public Relations person in that he doesn’t have blonde hair and a kind reassuring smile and say “Hi I’m Kyla / Katie / Klare / Keithetta etc” and offer to get you a hot or cold beverage before they make you answer the questions from the Bad People with the notebooks but in fact this Gibson is a large, angry man and he’s already on the iPhone again and I have to say he’s using some industrial language and not quietly neither.

“What the bloody hell are you on Twitter for, making an arse of yourself?” asks this Gibson.

I says I don’t bother with the Twitter because frankly Ian Bell has more important things to do than spend his whole life telling people every last little thing he’s doing no matter how fascinating that would be to some fans and instead would rather concentrate on being the man to fill the problematic number three berth in England’s fragile middle-order, getting Nuneaton Borough promoted to the Premiership on Championship Manager, learning Esperanto, designing his range of volumising hair mousses for the recently deceased and generally being a decent bloke to have around the place.

So Gibson says it would appear that I have been a victim of Identity Theft which is one of the most serious crimes that can happen to a person in this day and age apart from obviously mugging, burglary or being murdered to death with like nunchucks by an irate ninja so I says oh and Gibson says well then and I says is this Twitter imposter going to groom me like I seen on Crimewatch and try to steal my soul and / or body for his own dastardly ends? and Gibson just says no don’t be a bloody idiot and stay off the computer for the foreseeable future so I says okay and so I guess this is Ian Bell logging off. KTHXBAI x

By Alan Tyers