If Paula George won the lottery there is only one thing she would change. "I'd hire a chef to cook my meals at night," she sighs. "I have to eat so much food to keep my weight up."
Clearly this is not your average woman. Not many mixed-race Welsh girls from broken homes go on to captain England, let alone nurse an ambition to coach a top men's club. She was a Wales netball international before finding that rugby gave her a better buzz. When they make the film it will make a marvellous role for someone; stand by for a bulked-up Halle Berry in a gumshield.
When George says her upbringing was "tough" she is not exaggerating. She was raised in Kenfig Hill, near Bridgend, with four white younger sisters, until her mother lost a custody battle with her stepfather and disappeared from her life from when she was nine until 21.
At school she and an Asian boy were the only non-white pupils among 1600 children. Until her English teacher "taught me words were a far more powerful weapon", George frequently resorted to violence to handle problems. After her stepfather was injured in a mining accident she spent time in a foster home in Caerphilly, and she finally left home at 15 to live with a family friend in her village.
"I've still not found my real father," she says, referring to efforts to trace him through the American military. "It's quite hard to get through the bureaucracy and I don't have that much information." She only rediscovered her mother by "complete accident" after a tip-off from a friend of a friend living in Ireland. "We've become pretty good friends now but she's not particularly keen on rugby."
There are those, inevitably, who feel much the same as George's mother about the women's branch of the sport. No one wants a daughter to come home with a broken nose and cauliflower ears, but George preaches the flipside: without rugby she suspects her life would have been infinitely less rewarding.
George, 33, first came across the sport seriously while studying sports science at the Cardiff Institute, seizing on it as a chance "to stop me messing about and drinking too much". As she told one interviewer: "Rugby's such a cool sport, a secret that men have kept for years and years and now we've cracked it."
She loved the freedom, the chance to run with the ball and use all her strength in a team framework. "It does cross my mind where I'd be without rugby. It's been a real source of discipline for me." Nowadays, with the women's World Cup starting in Barcelona next week, the Wasps full-back reckons she "can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've had a drink in the last two years. You don't want to mess it up".
Her example helps explain the unprecedented levels of commitment within the England squad who gather today. Indeed, this month she has become the first woman to appear on the cover of Rugby World magazine. In recent days the players have been at the University of Hertfordshire training at 31C (88F) in an acclimatisation chamber big enough to accommodate an entire team.
With due respect to the coach Geoff Richards, who recently shared the England team coach of the year award with Sven-Goran Eriksson, George's hunger for victory over New Zealand's Black Ferns, stars of the 1998 tournament, fuels their whole campaign.
"I didn't know women were physically capable of playing rugby like that but a group of us sat down and said, 'Right, we want to be even better'," she recalls. The payback, gloriously, came last year when England, by 22-17, inflicted New Zealand's first defeat for a decade. It was the end of an aura, and more of the same in Barcelona might nudge the male hierarchy into allowing the women to play at Twickenham.
There will also be cheering at Vyners School in Uxbridge where she teaches a day and a half a week - "I get more money from teaching than rugby. That's sad, isn't it?" - when England kick off against Italy on Monday. "The Kiwis have got to be hot favourites but we now feel we can beat them," says George, flashing another gap-tooth smile.
