All Cheeses Great and Small: A Life Less Blurry. Alex James
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in the garden. I think it had its own cathedral or I certainly glimpsed something like that from one of the upper windows of the main house. You can really relax in a castle. You feel safe. There was another guy there, and he evidently had an even bigger house. In fact I think he might have had a whole country somewhere or other. It was so nice to get my building problems into perspective, and to talk to people who knew about roofs. In London, people know nothing about roofs. They avoid them. In the country, the more important you get, the more you have to know about them. They are always on the agenda. It is never inappropriate to bring up the subject. Everyone from farm labourers to lords of the manor has an interest in all aspects of roofs, from beam to tile. The two most hotly debated roofing materials were asbestos and, most of all, Stonesfield slates. The stone tiles that cover traditional Cotswold houses were made by frost-shattering the stone. No one makes them any more so all the people who have castles fight over any that come on the market. Roofers offer unsuspecting newcomers good deals on entire new roofs just to get their hands on more Stonesfield slate. Our host said he’d stopped worrying about it and whenever he got a leak, he just popped up there and wiggled something into the hole. He said his grand-children could deal with it.
Big houses are surprisingly practical. The really massive ones are surprisingly cheap to buy and anything at all you put in a castle looks fantastic. A vast reception hall still looks amazing if all it’s got is a sofa that came off a skip and a bare light bulb dangling from some remote ceiling. You can waste so much money on sofas, light fittings and making things look tidy. I’d spent months wondering if I’d bitten off more than I could chew but I came home wanting a bigger house. That castle was historically part of another estate and was numbingly beautiful, but the big house – the demesne of which this farm was once part – is the nicest house I’ve ever seen. A perfectly proportioned monument: a jewel in the crown of its gardens, which were all laid out by Repton, the first great English garden designer. The estate had once been almost unimaginably vast, a great chunk of West Oxfordshire comprising several villages and tens of thousands of acres, hundreds of square miles. But over the centuries bits had been hacked off and sold as separate titles. In turn, the farm had until quite recently comprised over a thousand acres, with a mill house, several cottages and a campsite which were gradually subdivided into further separate properties.
The campsite, just a small patch of woodland back when it had belonged to the farm, had taken the subdividing process to its logical conclusion. While I was busy planting trees and tearing up concrete, the opposite thing was happening over there. Before I knew what was going on the ancient bluebell wood had been tarmaced and redeveloped into high-class, buy-to-let holiday cabins. The owner tore down ever such a lot of trees and put concrete pads everywhere to receive the pre-assembled executive boxes. It’s about as far as you can take the subdividing process: to the high-density luxury level. It really annoyed me that where there had been woods, there was now a lot of concrete. I’d been trying so hard to take things the other way. I was wandering in that direction, and as I walked past the first occupied caravan a very sweet and proud elderly couple were taking delivery of their Jacuzzi; an optional extra when you buy one of these sheds. They looked so content, so fragile. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, and all of a sudden felt my frustration melt.
No matter how far away the neighbours are, it doesn’t make life any simpler. All borders were apparently under constant attack, but on the whole I was surprised how much I liked most of the people who lived nearby. Not just the nobs and the billionaires. We took on two gypsies from the trailer park as cleaners and they fascinated me. The younger one was very pretty, one of the prettiest women I’ve ever seen. She had absolutely no sense of her own beauty. Any number of billionaires’ wives would have given everything they had to look like she did but she worked all hours because she was saving up for cosmetic surgery. It was all she talked about. Her older sister had a baby. She brought the baby round one day, dressed from head to toe in heavily branded Armani. She gave us all her Burberry hand me downs. They were kind people.
All was peaceful in the rain. Under heavy skies, the lawn was dotted with bright daisies and buttercups. I’d caught a fleeting glimpse of a moist artichoke and thought it the perfect sight, but it’s never perfect for long. I was still admiring the optimistic modesty of the simple buttercup when I noticed a thin trail of translucent sludge coming up through the lawn. I’d never seen sludge like that before. It didn’t smell of anything. It looked like aspic. I had to call Paddy. It was everywhere but even he was baffled for once. A couple of months previously I would have been terrified by any mysterious spontaneous sludge phenomena, but I was changing. Worst-case scenario it was just a tiny leak in the space-time continuum. I was sure we could patch it up. But then about a million caterpillar things came out of the lawn and seemed to be making for my shed. They completely ate the lawn. I was trying to write a song and all I could think about was caterpillars. Then I got worried about what they were going to turn into. There were millions of them. There were a lot of slugs around, too, friendly looking things. The more I looked at them the more I liked them, leaving their little shiny trails, the curly graffiti of a strange order. The rain drew them out onto the paths and treading on them as I tiptoed around barefoot at night became something of a hazard. Squish. Ugh.
When you live on a farm, there is nothing, nothing in the world that is anywhere near as interesting, not even pretty faces, as someone else’s farm. I went to other farms: dairy farms, beef farms, cider farms, chicken farms, organic polytunnel market gardens, fish farms, oyster beds. I spent the afternoon with Jody Scheckter, an ex-Formula One champion. He had the most fantastic farm in the world: vineyards, the rarest cows in the world, laboratories full of men in white coats and mass spectrometers for molecular soil analysis. He whizzed me around the place at Formula One speed. We stood still in the library for a good thirty seconds, while he pointed at his unique collection of rare books on rare grasses. I needed about a month in there but he wanted to show me the biggest herd of water buffalo in the country. I thought buffalo were mad moose-looking things, but they looked very similar to cows. I think I’d got them confused with bison. Slightly disappointing.
The diversity of farming enterprises was staggering. Llamas and peacocks were surprisingly common in the Cotswolds. There was a big herd of ostriches nearby too. I was about to buy a horse when I began to think maybe I was more of a camel man. Wives are always keen on alpacas. Alpacas look like supermodel sheep, all limbs. They always draw a crowd at country shows but I thought it would be better to stick with traditional animals at our farm, like sheep, although sheep are about as native to Oxfordshire as orang-utans. The Romans introduced sheep and there are probably now more emus and llamas in Oxfordshire than there are in the wild. There isn’t much wild left.
Anyway, I had my hands full thinking about earthworms for the time being: Jody Scheckter had made me realise they were much more important than I’d ever given them credit for. Worms are behind everything. That was where everything started, on the worm level. I had noticed that worms don’t like lemons. They loved the rest of the compost but always left the lemons. Even worms are more discerning than we give them credit for. They live for ten years and they don’t like lemons.
It took a long time to get to the point where we were ready for chickens. You can’t really call yourself a farmer if you haven’t got chickens. Every farmhouse should have chickens, really. At Moreton-in-Marsh agricultural show you can get everything from little quails to whacking great roosters. We went along and there was the slightly frenzied atmosphere that prevails at these events; there is so much to see and people barge around like in the sales. I was beside myself and dragged Claire, pram and pushchair all around the pigs, cows, sheep and goats before we arrived in the chicken department. I was determined not to leave empty-handed. Prices started at a fiver. It was all quite overwhelming. I said ‘Chickens?’ to the steward. Forty minutes later, he was still talking, and I hadn’t said another word. His message was along the lines of the world of the chicken not being a place to enter lightly. You need to know your requirements egg-wise for starters. There are green ones, white ones, brown speckledies and blue-ish types, plus there are some birds that are good for the table and so it went on. It was so overwhelming that we did indeed leave empty-handed as the place was closing.
Actually chickens are a pure delight and a piece of cake. There is nothing simpler than looking after chickens. There is a book about it but it is quite short and very few people have read it anyway. Keeping chickens