James - All Cheeses Great and Small: A Life Less Blurry

ALEX JAMES

ALL CHEESES GREAT AND SMALL

A LIFE LESS BLURRY

FOR CLAIRE NEATE JAMES

Contents

HOUSE WITH A
HUNDRED ROOMS

The end of the week, the end of summer: it was warm. Traffic crawling and brawling round the outside of Oxford. I stopped for fuel: the stench of petrol and the glare from the concrete apron.

Id watched the white van stagger to a halt as the driver slammed the brakes on. Id watched as it began to reverse towards me. There was the moment I knew he was going to hit me, and then I was flying backwards as the van smashed through the front of the old BMW I was sitting in. Id been reversed into at high speed. Strange. There was another dent to add to the collection on the back of the van and the front of the BMW had completely caved in. Steam was hissing out of the radiator.

I wasnt hurt, but I was furious that I might have been, and even more furious about the car. I leapt out onto the concrete and began to call the driver names. Many names. There were two of them in the van. They both got out.

Prove it, said one.

You just drove into us, said the other.

It was hot and the roads were packed. I had the keys to my new life in my pocket. I bought half a dozen bottles of water from the cashier and stopped every five miles, every three, every one as often as was necessary to top up the radiator while the temperature gauge hovered around the red. Crawling up the sides of apparently endless valleys. One more hill, one more dale until by fits and spurts I must have been pretty much at the middle of England: the very middle. Here, you might easily think that what is really quite a small island continues forever and ever. I coasted the last mile down the side of the last valley towards my new home. There were gypsies camping on the roadside at the top of the drive oblivious to the car doing ten miles an hour with steam coming out of the radiator. An old lady was doing some washing and was bent over with her backside hanging out of her full skirt.

I knew the car was a write-off. I just needed it to get me home, or what I was about to call home. Because Id just got married and swapped a London townhouse, with no garden, for a rambling farm. Why would I do that? It seemed straightforward when we were signing the paperwork. I thought that everyone wanted to move to the country and live in a cottage with the roses around the door. What I was doing was blindingly obvious to me, but when Id started to try and explain it to other people it seemed no one else thought so. I had to answer lots of questions. My friends looked at me long and hard, like Id started speaking a foreign language.

It wasnt until about the seventh time that Blur went to Japan that I managed to get out to the countryside there. Id like to go out into the country, Id say hopefully, every time I arrived in Tokyo as soon as my hangover kicked in. It seemed to me a perfectly simple wish but it didnt make any sense to my hosts. Where in the countryside exactly? they would say, diligently, what you want to do? I wanted to go to the middle of nowhere and do absolutely nothing. It was no more complicated than that. And that was what I was doing now, just on a larger scale.

I had always been a man of leisure. I grew up in Bournemouth, a tourist resort, and was at my happiest fiddling about in the New Forest, on beaches, on the sea, in coves and quarries where there was nothing remotely particular to do: just magnificent scenery, a fantastic stage with fantastic lighting. The backdrop of the sea and the open sky that soaks that world right through is an open invitation to relax and play. But it was as if to the Japanese, a conscientious hardworking people the idea of just venturing off towards nowhere, going somewhere that is beyond the bump and grind, beyond industry, beyond the workaday, just didnt really add up. At least, it took some explaining. Well, I dont really want to do anything: maybe walk around a bit, jump off some cliffs, throw some stones. You know, that kind of thing. Theyd looked at me strangely then, and they looked at me strangely now.

Around Blurs fifth Japanese tour I eventually got as far as a little spa town in the mountains, and it was well worth waiting for. Doing things in cities can be hit and miss, but going anywhere in the country is always a safe bet because there is nothing in nature that is not fantastically beautiful. You know what youre going to get. Even those parts of Iceland that smell a bit eggy are worth having a look at.

Home, since Id left college, had been Covent Garden. A one-bedroom flat when I was poor, and a house in the next street when the band sold some records. Claire and I fell in love one weekend in the Cotswolds and got married nine months after we met. We bought the farm on our honeymoon, at which point Blur promptly disintegrated. So I arrived in the country with a woman I didnt really know. Well, kind of with her. She was at work. I, on the other hand, didnt currently have a job. My friends were disgusted that Id stopped drinking for a bit to get married, and now Id appalled them further by walking out on them altogether. People said things like: How can you be a farmer? You dont know anything about farms? or How can you be a husband? Youre an arsehole.

The main reason for going to the country was to be with her. I didnt know anybody in the Cotswolds; I didnt really know anything. Living the quiet life would have driven me utterly mad until I met her. It wasnt until I wanted to get married that the countryside started to attract me for reasons other than as a hangover cure. Id spent my entire adult life living in the West End: the most metropolitan part of the largest city in Europe. But I was only there when I wasnt tearing around other large cities on tour with the band and gradually Id found that Id become addicted to big cities, their glamour, drama and possibilities. Now, though, I was definitely ready for a change.

Wed looked at lots of places. When we first saw the farm, there were a lot of fish in tanks in the cellar. In fact it looked like the people might be moving because they needed somewhere with a bigger cellar. The place was chock-a-block with tanks at all angles, and pumps and manifolds gurgling away. The fish were the first thing we were shown when we came to view the place.

Are there woods? Where are the woods? said Claire. Ah, yes, the woods. I think well just start by having a quick look in the cellar, though, said the vendor. The fish werent included in the sale. He just wanted us to see them. He took the fish with him, or they took him. He really didnt want to sell the place, the farmer. Poor man had been a beef specialist: punched on the nose by BSE, then kicked in the face by foot and mouth. Hed spent the last ten years watching everything hed spent his life building, slip through his fingers as his profits dwindled and his assets corroded. It had been the worst time in history to be a farmer. The place was a ruin, but hed loved it and poured his life into it. He was crying as he handed over the key, that was in my pocket now.

I cut the dying engine as I pulled off the road and was suddenly aware I was arriving at a point of silence. Silence and stillness. The gentle sounds, the pulses and tunes that had been there all along revealed themselves to my conscious mind. Rabbits scattered as I coasted slowly and gently down the drive in the filthy, dying car, with the front caved in and the rear drivers side window missing from an earlier incident.