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

I was surprised then, to find a fig tree. I thought that like lizards, they only grew on desert islands. Now I look forward to warm figs from the vine every year in the way I used to look forward to playing in New York City. Figs soften the blow of the end of summer, with their biblical glamour and intriguing insides. I had a rustle around in the friendly boughs expecting to find they were all still as hard as walnuts, but they were soft, ready. I shared them with the wasps.

If César Ritz had surprised me with an unexpected breakfast in bed, I couldn’t have felt any more elevated than I did as I wandered into the apple trees. I didn’t even know there were any. Orchards are enchanting places. Eden was an orchard. There were maybe a dozen trees standing in patient, orderly rows, bursting with bonsai vigour and laden with fruit. So very pretty. I laughed out loud as I pulled a dangling apple from one of those boughs. I felt in touch with something very big and benign.

In shops, apples all have to be exactly the same size. Shops would probably prefer it if apples were cube shaped so they could fit more in a crate, but I soon discovered that the small ones are the best. They are cuter and they are sweeter. There were four different kinds of apple in the little orchard and they were all as different as cheese and onion and salt and vinegar. There was a mist on the cherry-red skins. I’ve since learned it’s natural yeast. I polished a red one to a deep purple shine on the corner of my shirt.

The joy of fruit trees is profound. They need very little looking after. All they require is the odd haircut. No primping, feeding or weeding. Every year, they bounce back and knock me over with their bounty.

Full of apples, I wandered over to the giant sequoia, the vast tree that dominated the landscape, to see the sun go down. The giant sequoia is the largest living thing on the planet. There’s quite a well-known photo of one with a road going through the middle. They come from north-west America, but are fairly common in this country. Great avenues of them line the drives of stately homes like moon rockets, skewing the scale of everything. You see odd specimens in parkland dwarfing the ancient oaks. The farmer had told me it was supposed to be the tallest tree in Oxford, but he may have been mistaken. For starters, it’s clearly not in Oxford, Oxford is twenty miles away, but it is definitely tall, visible for miles around, straight and narrow as an arrow but leaning gently to one side. It set the tone for the whole farm really, that wonkiness. You could never be too precious living in the shadow of a vast, beautiful and lopsided tree. It towered over everything. I thought it must be hundreds of years old, but it turned out to be a mere sapling. There was one planted on each of the farms in the neighbourhood in the twenties. They can live for up to two and a half millennia but this was the sole survivor. They get struck by lightning and fall. If this one fell on the house it would be all over. Although it was leaning away and pretty unlikely to topple in the wind, it was hard to say what might happen in a lightning strike.

I gradually came under its spell as I stood there. I love that tree. It’s the first thing I look for when I’m coming home, the first thing I see when I walk out the front door. It swayed in the breeze. It’s swaying in the breeze now. Some people came round a few months ago. They said they wanted to tell me that the man who planted the tree had died, but I think they were just being nosey. I wanted to say ‘That’s a shame, I would have liked to ask him why he planted something that will be as large as the Eiffel Tower one day, quite so close to my house,’ but I managed to contain myself. It was puzzling why this colossal thing had been plonked on the doorstep. There were so many other places it could have gone. That was the perfect spot for a magnolia, not for a Tree-Rex. So many of the problems faced by farmers now are due to that kind of short-sightedness in previous generations.

I’d put my marker down on two hundred acres of England, but I still wasn’t clear exactly how big an acre was. Very few people seem to know what an acre is any more. Even the estate agent couldn’t help me there. Someone had told me Soho was about 140 acres, but it was part of a different planet. Here I was. Alone and quite liking it. I drifted across another huge concrete slab – it was instantly clear how much farmers love concrete – but beyond the huge tiles of the cast concrete pads, tessellating meadows and fields, so inviting: all that space, after being cooped up in a city for so long. I was totally, utterly, completely and blissfully clueless about farming; about building, about animal husbandry and gardens. Hedging, ditching and dry stoning all sounded like medieval forms of capital punishment. But the idea of having some land to play with was just enough to stop me being scared of what I’d done, which was to cash in all my chips for a vast ship that had foundered, run aground and, however magnificent it was, was beginning to sink.

I spent the days wandering the land, and the evening hours gazing at old drawings of the farm buildings and maps. The farmer had handed me a battered document folder full of well-thumbed drawings and plans stretching back a hundred years or so. There was also a map showing what the parish looked like a hundred years before that – almost exactly the same as it does now: it had the same field boundaries, the same roads and paths, even the ditches and drains were the same. The village was all there and just the same size. It was obvious just from wandering around though, that the valley had been under cultivation for millennia. There were a couple of fields of ‘ridge and furrow’, the remains of the farming system of the Middle Ages. There was an ‘S’-shaped field. When a field is ‘S’-shaped, it means it was ploughed by oxen so it would be very old indeed. There were ancient tumuli, standing stones and even one or two lesser known stone circles from the mists of time dotted around the parish. The oldest part of the farmhouse was the bit right next to the well and was probably built as a gamekeeper’s cottage deep in the Wychwood Forest in the 1600s – I loved the way no one knew. There were wells all around the barnyard. Every time I dug a new hole, I found a well – they are still turning up. I found another one just last month: wells and drains, everywhere. The architecture of the farm wasn’t just the stuff you could see. There was lots of stuff underground, too. It had proper sewers that, fortunately, all seemed to be working perfectly.

I’d bought a knackered cattle farm, but a hundred years ago when it was a small part of a vast feudal estate, it would have been knocking out a bit of everything. There would have been chickens, geese and ducks. A pigsty. Back then, it was home to a notable Shorthorn dairy herd. There would have been sheep for wool and for meat, as well as the extinct nuttery and the long gone orchards. A few dozen people would have worked here, taking care of the stock and tending arable crops: fodder for the animals, as well as cereal crops for the household and for market. There had been a bakery – I found the traces of the huge old bread oven, a sooty shadow on a wall – and a dairy that would have produced cheese and butter. Basically, it would have created more or less everything you can find in an upmarket delicatessen in Islington.

Over the last hundred years agriculture has changed beyond all recognition. Within living memory, fields were all ploughed by horse-drawn equipment: now it’s all about space age technology; combine harvesters linked by computers to satellites. Farms used to produce a wide variety of crops, but recently farmers have tended to concentrate on just doing one thing – watching machines. There are fewer farm workers and the countryside is peppered with beautiful, but redundant farm buildings. It’s easy to make stuff grow, but it’s very hard to make money from farming.