Graeme Swann scrunched up his nose as he considered how he was going to convince a bunch of teenagers that he really was the man who could improve their cricket. Just coach them a bit, the public-relations woman had encouraged him. You know, show them how to bat or something.

“That’s easy,” Swann shot back. “I’ll show them how to follow through, then tell ’em to buy a set of golf clubs and play a game with real money in it.” He did not, of course, and charmed their white socks off with his asides as he gave the youngsters some pointers in the arts of Test cricket in the gym beneath the main stand of Trent Bridge, Nottingham.

The South Africans should be warned: Swann does not do stock sporting answers, neither does he do earnest discussion of cricket. In fact, he does not really do cricket at all if there is a reasonable alternative, such as loafing on the couch with a can of beer and a movie on the telly.

“Training only takes two or three hours out of every 24-hour day,” he says, “and I would never go home and study cricket and watch it religiously and think about it all day because I don’t love the game enough for that. I would rather watch two stupid films, a Blackadder episode and read a Viz comic and be in a much better frame of mind to play the next day.”

It is this cheeky chappie persona that has dogged Swann, the feeling that somehow he doesn’t take his chosen profession seriously enough — the slow bowler with the fast mouth.

While some players would be angered by accusations of arrogance, Swann shrugs them off with his characteristic laconic humour, and he did more than enough to quell the doubts during an Ashes series last summer in which he became a central figure. England will be looking to him over the next three months in South Africa for more heroics with bat and ball.

“You get pigeonholed, but if the s*** hits the fan, everyone reacts differently,” he says. “If I get angry and uptight, I am rubbish. I don’t perform. If people see me having a smile on my face as not knuckling down, then more fool them because they don’t know what they are talking about.

“I have just found over the years I am my own best shrink and I know if I am doing badly. Nine times out of ten, it is about taking it too seriously. I don’t mean stop training and start having a laugh, but in your life you have to be happy.

“Spinners build up a thick skin at a young age because if a batsman wants to get hold of you and it’s their day, they can destroy you. A fast bowler can run in at 100mph and try to knock the batman’s head off. I really envy that because sometimes you want to pick up a stump and smash that batsman over the head with it — I guess you can’t really do that. I have to try to be wily and clever.”

One thing you can be sure of is that you can, if you wish, find out just how Swann is doing in South Africa via his favourite medium, Twitter. For those not versed in this new technological miracle of social networking, Twitter offers bursts of short internet messages, which, in Swann’s case, give an insight into a fascinating, funny and hugely likeable character. The latest missives to his band of more than 23,000 followers say he is homesick just a day into the tour to South Africa, almost forgot to pack his jockstrap and had an altercation with the wing mirror of a Renault 5 before he left his home in Nottingham. The messages come thick and fast and in the same stream of consciousness with which he answers questions.

Swann, 30, has always been the same, since growing up in Towcester, Northamptonshire. He dreamt of being a fighter pilot, but watching the 1986-87 Ashes on television turned him on to cricket and he was good enough to be offered a contract with Northamptonshire before he had left school. He told his school’s careers adviser that he was going to be a cricketer and she refused to believe him. So he went along with her scepticism and told her, OK, he would be a fireman. It sounded the right thing to tell her, he says, although his mother was baffled when piles of bumf arrived in the mail offering him a career in the fire service.

But cricket now rules his life, or rules as much of it as he allows in between growing demands from a media bored with the sporting stiffs and delighted by Swann’s irreverent humour. Perhaps a career in the media beckons — he certainly fancies a tilt at Strictly Come Dancing in the wake of the cricketing winners, Mark Ramprakash and Darren Gough.

“I would walk Strictly. Honest, you should see me move, I am absolutely brilliant,” Swann says. “Cricketers are the most natural sportsmen going — footballers are the lads who couldn’t count at school and rugby players are the accountants and bullies who couldn’t get into the cricket team.”

But Strictly might have to wait a while because the ambition is to win an Ashes series in Australia. Unless Swann gets restless. “It would be magnificent if I could play for another five or seven years. But then again, I could get fed up with cricket tomorrow and go off to be a rock star.” Or not, but if he does, don’t worry — you will hear about it first on Twitter.

• Graeme Swann was speaking at a NatWest masterclass. For more information visit natwest.com/cricket

Knickers in a Twitter . . .

• Oh, how I love medical screening day. Woohoo!

• Heston Blumenthal is a genius. I want an Olympic breakfast ... with chips. Now!

• Passport, check; cricket boots, check; jockstrap ... jockstrap? Bugger!

• Anyone tried the caterpillar sweets from M&S? The jelly ones make me want to cry with happiness.

• In a completely separate note: how much are hitmen these days?