All Cheeses Great and Small: A Life Less Blurry. Alex James
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for themselves, so this clearly wasn’t a hostile environment for that kind of bird. Pigs are a commitment. They require emotional investment. Chickens don’t take much looking after at all, and you’d actually be hard pushed to make a worse job of it than people who do it for a living. So we went to see a breeder and bought some chickens calmly and quietly and I was quite excited. Being a farmer and getting your first chickens, is like being a teenager and getting your first car. I wouldn’t like to start working out how much those eggs cost to produce. They definitely wouldn’t be competitive on price. I suppose eggs were inevitable, but when the first ones appeared I was stupefied. The longer I stood there, the more spellbound I was by the endlessness of what was playing out before me. Resting on the barn floor, nowhere near the specially commissioned artisan nesting boxes, were one green egg and one brown one. Little cherries on the cake of country living.
I met Daphne because of the garden. She helped me find it and put it all back together. She had her own grouse moor, one of the best in the world. She was quite inspirational, a spritely dynamo granny. There was no holding her back. She was used to dealing with captains of industry and billionaires in her job as a garden designer and she bossed them all around the park, when she wasn’t entertaining lord knows who on her grouse moor in Northumberland. We’d walk around the yard, deciding what to demolish. It was always refreshing to spend an hour doing this with Daphne. ‘This cowshed, those two old hay barns and that lean-to’s days are numbered – knock ’em down,’ she’d say. ‘They’ve got to go,’ shaking her head and looking appalled, ‘They’ve got to go.’ Demolishing things is the ultimate expression of freedom. I lay awake at night dreaming of bulldozers, just like I used to when I was a little boy.
Gardens aren’t easy. When we first moved here we took advice from a different garden designer to plant a belt of trees behind the garden wall. A tree expert came and planted lots of them. He made a big fuss about them all having to be suitable species. What else did he think we wanted? He was so keen they should be ‘suitable’. Then he planted everything far too close together and far too close to the wall. I couldn’t have done it more wrongly myself.
Actually it’s not wrong to be wrong. It’s fine. It’s how you learn. I was about to scream at the scale of my own stupidity when it occurred to me that I was actually looking at a row of established oaks that the previous owner had planted. They were also far, far too close to the garden wall. Same mistake. For that matter there was the giant sequoia an arm’s length from the front door, the misconception of the owner before that. It was good to know I wasn’t the first idiot to live here. I found great solace in the stupidity of my forebears and vented my spleen with Daphne as we battled through the bad planning and planting.
Gardening can go wrong in a million ways. Even when it is going well, home-grown vegetables seem to express themselves more vividly than the ones I’d been used to and they only approximated the shapes, the symmetry they achieved in the shops.
Eggs, though, are definitive eggs. They were surprisingly upmarket. I’d never seen a more accurate egg shape, or a more Farrow and Ball eggshell than those first ones from the chickens. The green one seemed particularly miraculous. I stared at it for ages, pleasantly adrift on a sea of contemplation. I longed to taste it, but I wasn’t ready to break the shell quite yet. I wasn’t sure whether to cook the thing, hatch it, or pickle it in formaldehyde. However much these eggs cost, it seemed a small price to pay for their mystic perfection and the disproportionate feeling of triumph. It called for a soufflé.
It had really taken a lot of chin stroking and groundwork to get to egg Valhalla. I’d realised by now that farming isn’t something you can really rush along and I couldn’t see how we could have got to this point any quicker. I knew soufflés weren’t easy, but a lot of work would have gone into getting this one to rise. Here’s the recipe: first, buy a house, rebuild it, while looking after the ditches and drains, toppling trees, leggy hedges and fallen fences. Begin to convert the entire two hundred acres from intensive beef unit to organic pasture. Next, consider chicken housing, convert a stable and choose chickens. Build more fences to keep dog away from chickens. Take eggs, mix with cheese and place in very hot oven until ready. Voilà! Making a soufflé is simple. Making an egg is the hard bit.
Some things are best homemade. Sometimes, even with no expertise, it’s next to impossible to make a worse job of something than the very best, most expensive versions available in the shops. Eggs are probably the best example of this. There is no hen’s egg commercially available at any price, anywhere in the world, that would be anything like as good as the worst homemade one. Maybe they are perkier because they are fresher. Maybe they are tastier because household chickens tend to have a more varied diet of scraps and leftovers that would be prohibited commercially. Whatever the reason, eggs from the back garden are in a completely different league from the rest. Of course most people don’t have the time or inclination to get involved with chickens. And whatever their shortcomings, shops do make everything wonderfully easy.
The eggs gave me confidence in my farming skills but I still wanted to be an astronaut. I got myself a job in the Astrophysics department at Oxford University. I spent the mornings considering dark matter and the afternoon considering dairy cows. It seemed to make cows much easier to deal with. Cows weigh more than half a tonne and there was something very pleasing about their indisputable ‘XXL-ness’. All the equipment that comes with cows is satisfyingly chunky and mechanical too: really big tractors and forklifts. It makes sheep and pig paraphernalia look flimsy. Cows themselves always seem rather pleased with their size and there is a swagger to their parade. Sheep just gambol and graze, they’re very low maintenance by comparison. It’s a bit like looking after fish and looking at them sometimes made me think I was standing on a kind of seabed, at the bottom of the sky.
I felt the pigs would like me to spend more time playing football with them, but they were quite happy rooting, munching and chasing each other all day. But cows are tricky. There is an extra element of drama in dairy farming because the cows have to be milked twice daily. Margins are very tight in agriculture. Absolutely everything is driven by cost. The modern dairy cow has evolved into something unnaturally skinny with huge udders, a bit like a glamour model. The public tend to assume that farmers are the ones who exploit animals, but it’s probably the public who exploit animals by scrimping on how much they spend on milk. I never met a dairy farmer who didn’t love cows. You’d have to. Even the ones who were so close to bankruptcy that they couldn’t look after their cows properly, loved them.
Most people don’t take as much pleasure in cows as dairy farmers. But anyone would marvel at a milking machine. What a huffing, puffing, whirring delight. The best ones are immense rotating carousels which the cows queue up to board one at a time, like passengers travelling first class out of Heathrow. Then they reverse out of the machine and pirouette away – it is almost ballet. The revolving platform holds feeding troughs and udder clamps so that the cows are fed while they are milked. It is an incredibly efficient system but it also manages to give an impression of great spectacle, a benign and mesmerising magic roundabout. I put my name down for a couple of Gloucester cattle. There was a waiting list but that was a good thing. It gave me time to prepare.
At this early stage of my new career, the sheer momentum of livestock was quite hard to deal with. Plants, by contrast, wanted little attention. The fruit bushes in the garden, ignored by everybody in the household, even the new dog, and probably ignored for years before that, seemed to be in better shape than I could have hoped for if they were all I’d ever cared about. And that’s the way it is with plants. It’s very rare that a plant places demands upon a busy man to make yet another decision.
Of everything, I was most proud of the vegetable garden. It was the first thing that I showed to people when they came round, whether they wanted to see it or not. Plants fascinated me. The plants themselves were under control but the entire garden area was getting bigger all the time, much bigger. The whole blooming caboodle was growing exponentially.
A small stream ran underneath the house, through the cellar. The builders were horrified when they found it underneath the floor. They said, ‘You haven’t got damp down here, after all. No. You’ve got running water.’ It must have been there since the house was built, so I went with the flow. I left it there. It’s been hard to know what to use that room for, though.