Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 11 October 2006
Nine months I've been tapping away in my pantry, tout seul, writing my autobiography. How easy it seems to write songs when you're writing a book. How easy it seems to do anything except write books. And how easy and infinitely wonderful it is to do nothing at all.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 04 October 2006
It had been an eerily good couple of days. It started when I went to London on Wednesday. One minute I was talking about cardoons with the President of the Royal Horticultural Society in Kensington, the next I was in Claridge's ballroom and the director of the Whitechapel gallery was saying: "We really need to put together a limited edition of the artwork that you made for us." I was on the point of replying when there was a loud noise. It was Roxy Music. They were on the stage. That was a surprise. Then it was Thursday. I'd been offered a radio show and a television series by midday, both of which I want to do. I think it's this cheese business. NME.com put my new cheese on the cover. I haven't been on the cover of NME since Britpop went mouldy.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 27 September 2006
I wandered around the garden in bare feet as usual. These days I only put shoes on for London. The September calm is supreme, and the view goes on forever. All the haze of high summer has cleared, the horizon is in sharp focus, and I think you can see Sam Mendes' and Kate Winslet's house. The whole landscape has softened, all the hard edges obscured by seeding grasses and haywire shrubs.
Alex James: How I became a big cheese
Published: 26 September 2006
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 20 September 2006
I spent the weekend in Manchester. Manchester's got posher since the last time I stayed there. What's going on? Are you really supposed to eat a burger with a knife and fork? I'll never be able to, it's like trying to eat a lollipop with a spoon, it's just wrong. The waiters were giving me the beady eye as I tucked in, two-handed. I felt that to ask for ketchup would meet with further disapproval.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 13 September 2006
Iwas lured from my bed on Friday by a particularly good piece of Cheddar. Cheese seems to taste best in the middle of the night and I often make the journey to the fridge in darkness. On Friday, though, the whole house was bathed in moonlight. Moonlight is a rural phenomenon. It's too subtle to compete with the background glow of the city. Even sunlight is at a premium in built-up areas, it's not really part of the package. Out here sunshine dazzles through low windows as it rises and sets and spends the rest of the day chasing you around.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 06 September 2006
Living in the country, surrounded by green open space and few obvious diversions, I still seem to spend my days in a state of peaceful distraction. I think therefore I digress, it seems. It all appears so mild and favourable out there. Just the thought of what to have for dinner is quite engrossing. I'm expanding the vegetable zones and starting to think about sowing some grain crops in spring.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 30 August 2006
Imagine that you're standing on the Equator and you draw a straight line going north-south, perpendicular to the Equator. OK? Then you draw another straight line next to it, perpendicular to the Equator again. You have a pair of straight parallel lines, right? No, they meet at the poles. Madness! Don't worry, even Euclid, the father of geometry, couldn't cope with parallel lines meeting. They meet because they are bending through another dimension. If you think that's weird, check out relativity. It's mental.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 23 August 2006
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 16 August 2006
"Look at that plumbing, it's wonderful, darling!" It was, too, underneath the sink the steel waste pipe was plumb perpendicular, the hot and cold inlets came out of the wall at exactly the right spots and turned neatly through 90 degrees to connect perfectly with the taps. It was a utilitarian work of art, a marvellous manifold. It gave me confidence.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 02 August 2006
We have three washing machines and they spin night and day. Since the twins and au pair arrived, as a household we no longer conform to a sociological norm and have to shop off piste. Supermarkets sell everything in parcels and quantise their stock around smaller family units. I'm just not having supermarkets any more. They're boring. They prey too much on the subconscious, and by the time you get to the queue you're 90 per cent zombified.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 26 July 2006
It's hard to describe the sheer fabulousness and mythic proportions of our neighbours Annabel and James. We don't see them all the time, they're often elsewhere, but living near to them does add enchanting possibilities and encounters to what is, after all, just a quiet corner of Oxfordshire.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 19 July 2006
It must be high summer. Fred, the sheep farmer, made his hay this weekend. The whole 30-acre meadow is an immaculate lawn under a minimalist blue sky. It's all so simple and benign. Living on a farm is very absorbing. I never want to leave. A farm is a big Lego set. There are always a few things that need doing, and when you have a few things that need doing there is nothing so nice as doing none of them and just sitting in the sunshine, considering everything.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 12 July 2006
I got a call from Matt Rowe, the pop song mastermind behind the Spice Girls when they were brilliant, and numerous others since. He was quite excited because he had tickets to see The Wiggles at Hammersmith. The Wiggles are my favourite band, and I think his and quite possibly Sophie Ellis-Bextor's. In fact probably anyone with a child between the ages of two and five would rather see The Wiggles than anyone else. The Wiggles are the best in high-quality entertainment for the under-fives.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 05 July 2006
My sister got married on Saturday. I guess she married "up". Her father-in-law collects paintings by Canaletto. My father collects coils of rope. Mind you, my mother did once have her bottom squeezed by Damien Hirst. Love is blind, though.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 28 June 2006
It doesn't take much to turn heads and get tongues wagging in the country. I knew Camilla had arrived because Blackie, who mows the lawn on Fridays, came to tell me there was an Evo 8 parked outside. "Top of the range!" he said with a big smile. He used to play drums for Hawkwind, so he must have seen some far-out freakiness over the years, but the car, which is the third fastest on the road, had set off an electrical storm in his brain.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 21 June 2006
The house is full of women. It's not really my house since the babies came home. The maternity nurse is in charge now. Maternity nurses are the crack commandos of the nannying world. They seem to be made out of pure maternity. In Denmark, when you have twins, the government sends you a maternity nurse and that is a terrifying thought. There is no way we would be sane, if it wasn't for the help, but the loss of control must be absolute when you can't even claim to be the employer.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 14 June 2006
Two babies came home today after eight weeks in intensive care. It was a close squeak. We'd turned a dozen heads by the time we'd got from the hospital door to the car. We hadn't even got in the stupid car, and everyone's looking at us. "Twins," people said to each other, and pointed and stared.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 07 June 2006
There's another roof off, and a whistling workman around every corner. All week I'd been watching them from the window and by Friday I couldn't resist it any longer and joined in with the decorators. Putting paint on things is very calming. It smells nice. Soon I was whistling too.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 31 May 2006
If all goes well this morning, I'll get "The Entertainer" ticked by Mrs Swann, my piano teacher, meaning I'll have finished Piano Book One. It's taken about 18 months of lessons. Learning how to fly only took a year. Mrs Swann says the biggest challenge has been teaching me to play quietly. As she points out most weeks, piano means "soft". Once you hit 30, life becomes one long and sometimes difficult quest for soft, I suppose.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 24 May 2006
The big house up the road just changed hands for 25 million. In Miami, that would get you something pretty on the water, but it wouldn't be enough to get you beyond the wealthy suburbs. If you wanted to impress other rich people, you'd have to spruce the place up with an art collection or a planetary observatory. In the Cotswolds, 25 buys you a potager, a parterre and an orangerie, a chapel, a hamlet and gardens laid out by Humphrey Repton, the first great English landscape gardener. In Miami you'd be living between Lenny Kravitz and Ricky Martin. Here you'd be looking to me and Jeremy Clarkson to make up the numbers for dinner. I did go there once and it is the most beautiful house I've ever been to for dinner.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 17 May 2006
In between writing an opera and building a picturesque cheese factory all week, I've been looking for a frog. Geronimo is two and he's having a "See frog?!" phase. I've checked the wells regularly and the pond, but nothing's turned up. One was hopping across the road on Saturday night and I stopped the car and went back, but couldn't find it.
Alex James: My twin miracles
Published: 06 May 2006
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