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

You get heaps when there’s building work going on, and there always is on farms. Farm is another word for a building site. The first building gangs were actually farmers. Farm workers built barns in the winter months when there was not much farming going on. Actually, stuff pretty much just grows by itself anyway. Farming really means taking care of everything else. That’s the tricky bit. There is always something leaking, falling over or blowing away on a farm, and building, rebuilding, patching and fixing are a continuous cycle.

There was a great view of everything from the top of my heap of rubble. I had a good look at the house. It stood right in the middle of the piles of muck, debris and ugly modern concrete slabs. Although it needed new windows you could tell it had started out, and remained, beautiful to the core. The Cotswold type of house is a beautiful thing. Built to last, built with stone and roofed with stone. Stone roofs held in place by great timbers from woods nearby and from old ships that had once sailed the oceans, now come to rest. The stone roof slates were a mosaic of a million greys, practically alive with moss, and gold and silver lichen, a part of the landscape. It had been built with care, and from where I was standing the roof looked like a work of art and emphasised the sense of shelter a home provides. There it was.

The house didn’t look in too bad shape. It was a typical rambling farmhouse with rooms and corridors everywhere, apparently at random. Plaster was coming away from the walls in places. Without the plaster, you could see that some of the beams were maybe a little bit rotten. Now I considered it, the roof looked like it probably needed replacing. The walls were good, mainly, apart from the damp, which made them smell. We’d more or less have to rebuild the whole house, I thought, as I stood there.

The picture was clearer from above. From my vantage point on top of the pile in the stillness, the wonderful whirring silence, I could take it all in. I suddenly felt slightly overwhelmed by my new life. I’d been here a few times but it was only from up here that the scale of the place became apparent. The red brick wall showed there must have once been a garden, as I thought. There were three courtyards of stone stables. The courtyards were all completely unexplored. They were kind of bundled in with the house. They’d all have to find some kind of use eventually, but for now they stood in ruin. I tiptoed over to the other side of the pile to check over the roofs. I knew the roof is always the first thing you have to take care of. As long as the roof is OK a building can sit there for years. The roofs were bad. I knew that anyway, I just thought I’d check. There were holes in all of them, except one stable with a clear plastic roof right next door to the house. It was full of plants and flowers. There was a pond in that room too, with goldfish in.

I slid down the pile and headed for the overgrown tangle of garden. I might never have known, as I know now, that at one time the farm had several gardens. I only found out because of an elderly lady who came to visit a short time after we arrived.

Tiny and delicate, pretty and frail as lace, her eyes darted everywhere. I’d hung on every word she’d said. She told me she was born in the bedroom, and she was still interested in the farm as if it was a person she had once been in love with. ‘Oh, there was such a lovely nuttery in that meadow.’ She talked about playing in vast orchards behind the walled flower garden and a kitchen garden, which was now completely extinct, concreted over in fact. There had been a tennis court. In one of the fields there had even been a cricket pitch, complete with a pavilion. I’ve been trying to find that cricket pitch ever since.

As it was now, it was like I’d stepped out of time: a hundred creaking empty rooms and a garden that had been asleep for a hundred years. It was a ghost ship in the sleepy spell of late summer. In the forgotten overgrown corner of the garden, I had to remember to keep my mouth shut when I was walking around to stop flies going in. There seemed to be so many different sorts. The air was thick with them. I swallowed several, which was so horrible it made me shout out loud. It was beautiful, too, but we never shout out loud for beauty when we are alone. Not normally. I was so excited. I shouted. I knew no one could hear. It was breathtaking. Oxeye daisies, those really big tall ones, stood absolutely motionless and inexplicable in gold, waist-deep grass. In the shady corners, the concrete slabs of the old bull pens were being colonised by a creeping moss. There’s nothing like moss. It exists at a different scale to the rest of the world. I got down on my knees to look at it more closely. The spiralling chaos of the tiny shoots spoke its own strange language. It seemed to communicate directly with the part of the brain that deals with roofs, and told it not to worry. The top ten most wanted enemies of the gardener had all set up shop and were all looking quite magnificent. There was a thistle rising to head height in full flower. Sticky willy, ivy, granny-pop-out-the-bed and nettles, the charging cavalry of English undergrowth, had been waging war all summer long but now territories were established, and there was a sense of balance and bounty that formal gardens lack.

The superficial silence resolved into the whirr of a myriad living things. There were butterflies and blue tits. There were rooks and rats. The farmer and his wife had shipped out to Stow-on-the-Wold some weeks earlier just leaving the horses so the house was unlived in. Unlived in by people. Everywhere had something living in it. Birds were all over the place like a gas: innumerable different sorts, from tiny whizzing whirling ones to big gliding bombers. I know now that you can always hear birds singing here, but you don’t always notice them. It’s the opposite of traffic noise. Calming. There were toads under flowerpots. Untold numbers of rabbits bobbed around. The place was empty but ringing with life. I was surprised to see a lizard. I thought they lived only on rocks and in jungles. This one was on the wall in the shade. The insects were much weirder than I had bargained for. A wasp as big as my thumb appeared, angry that I had shifted the balance as I beat a path through the tall grasses.

I was completely alone in deep silence. No taxis. No shops. No cappuccino. No adverts. Just space and peace, and it was all right. I wandered further from the house. The afternoon air was heavy with haze and buzzing. I turned this way and that way, wandering dazed and blissful around another blind corner of the slumbering afternoon. Suddenly there was a blackberry bush as big as a bus, festooned over some hidden banister of shrubbery, decorated with fruit, as festive as Christmas and about twice as delightful for being completely unexpected. I caught an overpowering biff of blackberry smell and it was like being shunted by that white van, now a long way away. Just an hour and a half from London, but another world. I’ve since come to appreciate that stumbling on unexpected blackberry bushes in full fruit, especially when slightly out of breath, is one of the great delights of nature; a sensory sensation, a smell like a magic spell. Close eyes, deep breath. Better than drugs or dreams.

It was a magnificent spectacle. I’d hardly given blackberries a thought since I was ten. I’d spent my entire adult life in cities. My dad was a fanatical blackberry picker and we used to go all the time when I was a kid, but I’d never, ever seen a bush like this on any of those happy expeditions. And there it was, deep in the countryside in the deepening afternoon sun: the quintessential specimen of English flora at its zenith. Overlooked, the bramble. The leaves, a shade of green seen nowhere outside English woodland; the black and red berries, almost psychedelic. I had to stop because of the smell more than anything. I hadn’t ever smelled anything like that. Well, maybe when I was a child. All you can smell in cities is drains and food and exhausts. I was transported back to my childhood the moment the first blackberry juice ran down my chin. I stood ecstatic, beyond time. The overgrown garden seemed suddenly to be a kind of Tudor scenario. I stood there smiling, chewing blackberries, half expecting Henry VIII to ride around the corner.