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

Even vegetable gardens, once such practical things, have become quite whimsical luxuries. In terms of cost, it really doesn’t make sense to grow your own vegetables. Allotments are popular but no one grows their own to save money. They do it because they like it.

I suppose I was coming at the place from a different perspective than anyone who had ever worked here, seeing its resources from a tourist’s point of view, with a sense of wonder at all the stuff that had accumulated as the wheels of agriculture had begun to turn faster and faster. I hired someone to help, a farm manager, but he clearly thought I was mad and left after a week. I continued poking around and turned up all kinds of treasure. I found a steel chopper, a scythe, in an old shed, it was rusty, but beautifully made and the blade, when sharpened, was the finest piece of steel I’ve ever seen. I didn’t find the old cricket pitch. But after a bit more poking around I did find the remains of a motte and bailey in the railway field – a Norman castle. It had just been sitting there quietly all along.

There was a river. I’d asked the farmer if there were fish in it. He said he thought so but that he’d never had time to go fishing. This seemed crazy. The river frontage was one of the main reasons that I bought the farm. What a thing to have! A river. There was about a quarter of a mile of the Evenlode. It was soon obvious that I would never have time to go fishing either, but the river was a source of hope, the only thing that really seemed to work in the whole place – the only thing I could trust to do what it was supposed to do and not break down, fall over or need servicing. It’s been rolling happily down the border of the farm for centuries and will do for centuries to come.

There was a railway line following the river and an eight-acre wood backing on to the railway line. Eight acres of ancient woodland: eight city blocks of the European equivalent of tropical rainforest. Giant puffballs, strange toadstools, thriving in the tangle and orchids, among the remains of rusting pheasant pens, a big pile of green tyres and a mess of rooks. I only found out for sure it was ancient woodland later but the very first time I fought my way in there, it was clear it was primordial. To enter, was to step inside another world with a slightly different climate. Even at the end of a hot summer, in places it was still really quite boggy among the oak trees. The place hadn’t been cultivated for decades, hadn’t been touched. A dashing hare, a dancing weasel, but no people had been in there for years.

The last few owners had more pressing concerns. Even the farmer before the one I bought the place from, had been chasing his tail. He’d chopped down fifty acres of ancient woodland but there was still a handful of the old forest left. He must have known it was vital. And it was. It was smaller than it had been, but once inside it felt like it went on forever and there was nowhere else in the world; a bit like when you’re in Selfridges.

I was used to being one of a crowd. I rarely spent much time alone. The more it was very still and very quiet, the less I seemed to notice I was on my own.

I’d been on endless loops of world tours – passing through hotel rooms, ballrooms and bedrooms – but now I felt anchored to something. The river, those woods and fields, but mainly to my wife. I loved her. It was a combination of things that brought me to a standstill, snapped me to my senses. As a travelling man, I suppose I led many lives simultaneously and didn’t take any of them particularly seriously, but now I got to work, thinking with all my might: new home, newly wed, new job. There were a lot of puzzles to solve. My friends all thought I had gone mad, and I had. Love does that. Every shed was a new possibility and for the first time in my life, at the age of thirty-two, I began to get out of bed early. I was always busy. I became absorbed by everything about the place, even the weather. I spent the evenings researching wind speed gauges and rainfall indicators as the heat of the summer began to disperse. The colours changed, and the supreme calm of late September cast its spell over the farm as the haze of summer gradually cleared. The distant horizon emerged in sharp focus and I could glimpse stately homes on their hilltops. The whole landscape softened, all the hard edges obscured by seeding grasses and haywire shrubs. Those derelict buildings full of birds, butterflies and dragonflies, silver sunlight and long shadows, standing still in a strong breeze. The leaves on the fruit trees were starting to droop, yellow and drop. While dawdling in the garden I spotted, picked and ate a solitary apple – a real beauty that had been missed, high up, hidden by leaves until just then. It was only a couple of weeks ago that high summer had its moment, but the blackberries now seemed to belong to a different world, another time and place altogether. Other than that apple and a few cheerful bright jewels of alpine strawberries, there was just the pear tree with its bounty still intact, dangling from almost bare branches, like upside down balloons. The garden party was over.

It was the very last firework of summer, that pear tree. It’s miraculous really. I was sure that, like the rest of the garden, it had had little or no attention over the year, or years past. But it was spectacular. I’ve never had pears quite that juicy.

A fire burned in the grate as I picked every last one, a great big basketful: all shapes and sizes, some long and thin like sausages, and some almost completely round, like dumplings, but somehow still all very clearly pear-like. I couldn’t resist eating the little tiny ones while I was out there. The biggest nobbly ones we sliced, seasoned, sloshed with oil and roasted on the fire. Eating them with sticky fingers in a silent huddle, feeling the little kicks in Claire’s tummy, watching the flames and listening to the rain as the wind rattled the windows.

And that was it. All of a sudden, snap, the nights drew in. A cold wind rolled in from the east. The lawn was a carpet of leaves and broken rose petals. We’d been living in the garden as much as the house, but from now until the spring we’d be holed up in the draughty house.

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