Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 09 October 2007
Yet another fortnight of digging and dumping, and the new garden is starting to take shape. On the back of The Cheese tasting so nice, I ordered a fruit cage and a greenhouse and 250 yew trees. That was when I called my management company to check when my next book advance was going to hit the coffers. I haven't started writing it yet. I know what it's about, though. It's going to be like A Year in Provence, only cheesier. "You had your book money on 7 July," they said. I checked again. I had. I'd blown it all on diggers and casual labour. It was bad. It takes a year to write a book, almost as long as it does to make a cheese.
Alex James: The Great Esacpe
Published: 03 October 2007
Last week, I returned to sunny Bournemouth, the town of my birth, to speak at a fringe event at the Labour Party conference. On my way to the talk my phone rang. It was Dave Rowntree, the other half of Blur's rhythm section, my erstwhile bridge partner and co-pilot. He said, "I'm in Bournemouth." "So am I," I said. "Really!" "Yeah, I've got a climate clinic. What are you doing?" "Drugs talk. What party are you going to, later?"
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 26 September 2007
We're nearly ready to decorate the au pair's bit. "Who can paint?" I asked. "If you can piss, you can paint," said John, slowly and wisely, and everybody cheerfully agreed. We were sitting in the static caravan – me, John, the semi-retired chippy with a lifetime's worth of bawdy aphorisms, and Blackham and Doa, the only idlers left in the village, or they were until they started working here. I feel bad for steamrollering Blackham and Doa's idyllic lifestyles. They were happy growing their own vegetables and going to see Mot�rhead occasionally, but the Kingham bubble has swept up everyone in its path and it is no longer possible to live here and not have a job, even if you're retired.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 19 September 2007
One of the pigs died from a kind of porcine measles. Claire cried. I was quite upset, too. We can't move her, The Empress, because of the foot and mouth thing, so she's in the shed, going nasty and casting the shadow of death over the gardening. If it were up to me, I'd have lit the bonfire we've been accumulating for firework night and incinerated her. It's a big one, a perfect pig pyre with a hay bale on the top, like a cherry on a cake. She'd have been vaporised into air and ashes before you could say: "Oh no, the barn's on fire!" Short of that, I'd have made a hole with the digger and buried her in the Jurassic stratum of subsoil, under where the asparagus is going. Unfortunately, both are verboten, so she's just mouldering under tarpaulin as death and the law mock each other.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 12 September 2007
I've been hanging around both ends of the Monopoly board this week. The first course of the awards dinner at the Royal Opera House, which involved figs and roquefort, I spent with P Diddy's bottom in my right ear. He was talking to Paul McCartney, who was sitting on the table behind me. It was a spectacular room, filled to its apex with all the divine promise of celebrity incarnate – like a church at Christmas when Jesus is there but not doing anything you can actually put your finger on. The party pack of fireworks always seems to remain unlit on these occasions, but it's very nice to look at them all lined up in their pretty wrappers in the big box that they come in, in this case the Royal Opera House. Maybe that's what glamour is, really, P Diddy's bottom in your ear while you munch on a fig.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 05 September 2007
There was about an acre of concrete outside the back of the farmhouse when we moved in. A vast tessellation of slabs that suggested a mouldering infinity: weeds springing through the cracks of a new flat earth. It was there for making silage; winter feed for the dairy cattle, and it must have cost a fortune. It had a battleship kind of beauty, a scale that made me feel dizzy – and it was its own authority.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 29 August 2007
The urge to fly has left me. Lately, I've been more involved with the earth than the air. After about 15 years of continuous loops, of world tours, of endless airports and hotel bedrooms and ballrooms, I'm now anchored to the family and the farm with a new rationale.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 22 August 2007
Space is available to farmers, like paperclips are to people who work in offices. You can always find some space somewhere on a farm. It's a cheap, throwaway resource looming in large quantities from all directions. Vast amounts of anything is glamorous, even paperclips, but nothing is as beautiful as a bit of room.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 15 August 2007
Austin at EMI was very excited about Florence. I went to meet him, in the poetry section at Foyles. "She's 20 and she's fit," he said, "and she needs someone to write with. She hasn't got a deal or anything. She's definitely got something, but we don't know what it is yet." I hadn't seen his eyes this big since Lilly Allen, or even the Arctic Monkeys sent him their demos.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 08 August 2007
My first impression of the farm that I visited yesterday, in Down Ampney on the Wiltshire-Gloucestershire border, was of overwhelming ugliness. There was no farmhouse, just 2,000 acres of fields, and a work area as grim as a derelict dockyard, all asbestos and concrete. Perhaps it was the lack of human habitation that made it seem such an alien landscape.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 01 August 2007
"That's funny," said the guy on reception at the Groucho, "your old bandmate Damon Albarn just walked in." I haven't seen Damon for ages and I went to find him. He was in a room upstairs and a dozen people were listening to him and taking notes. I had a meeting as well, but only with two people. We used to go to the Groucho and be silly. Now we go there to be sensible. Later Damon and I sat in Dean Street, smoking and talking about Graham Coxon, our erstwhile guitarist, as usual.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 25 July 2007
It was the Great British Cheese awards last Friday at The Mill House Hotel in Kingham, and I was more excited than I have been for ages. I was judging in two categories, and my debut cheese was entered in another. There were 900 different cheeses in the competition. That's more than they have in France. Hang on a minute! What? No, it's true.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 18 July 2007
An 04.30 taxi took me from the Groucho Club to Heathrow for the first flight to Copenhagen on Wednesday. I've always liked Denmark. What a vast and bewilderingly wonderful world it is, with all these rooms I never go in. My heart went faster all the way to Heathrow with the glamour of dawn, escape, the thrill of the unexpected and the thought of hot dogs.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 11 July 2007
I've been to a different castle every day for the last four days: two weddings and two concerts. Somehow the music was better at the weddings, or maybe music needs some context other than itself to really mean anything. The wedding on Saturday night was a big Cotswolds one in a castle. I gave the happy couple a small piece of the moon as a present. I do love a wedding. It wasn't clear how many of the wedding party were coming to our place for lunch on Sunday. Claire told me on the way home that she had invited everybody. The two chefs who were the only two definites prior to the wedding both pulled out injured on Sunday morning.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 04 July 2007
I got back late from the Rutherford Appleton laboratory where I'd spent the day testing the dangers of Wi-Fi applications and mobile phones. We'd stood under a telephone mast with microwave detectors and measured everything and as I suspected, it's all absolute bunk. There is more danger of getting killed by a meteorite from Jupiter than getting fried by a flying text message. And Jupiter is made from gas. It is quite safe to sit on a microwave oven with a Mac on your lap giving the gonads the radiation toastie treatment whilst talking on a mobile and watching satellite television.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 27 June 2007
The problem farmers have is that they only seem to appear on television when there is an agricultural crisis and we only see them moan. We never see their triumphs, and their triumphs are profound, fulfilling beyond what money can buy. Material wealth seems to shrink in importance as one approaches it. Ultimately green stuff keeps on growing and there is great natural buoyancy and affluence in the symbiosis of man and nature.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 20 June 2007
I am gradually getting a grip on the land. It takes quite a lot of thought and some big machines to organise nature so that it works best, but it is, ultimately, satisfying. This place has its own huge momentum, and taking it into my own hands has been quite exhilarating, like steering a huge ship into unknown but benign waters.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 13 June 2007
The hedge man came with his topper and gave the meadow its yearly cut. Where there were thistles, suddenly there was a neat carpet of grass. I spent a happy hour mesmerised by the vast lawn in the hovering twilight. Everywhere I looked there was something to catch my gaze: aerobatic swallows; a bounding dog full of insane glee; artichokes trumpeting silent fanfares in infinities of calm. It probably wasn't that good, but there was so much I was supposed to be doing, that I became utterly absorbed by the theatre of nothing in particular.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 06 June 2007
It's been suggested that there are only six different stories: overcoming monsters, quests, tragedies, comedies, romances and "voyage and returns". When Blur was happening, I knew it was a good story, a journey; but it wasn't clear which kind of story it was. It seems it was a comedy all along.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 30 May 2007
I'm not sure whether my next move will be chickens or a horse. Probably chickens, but I understand the horse thing now. Country fairs always end with a tractor parade, which is why Geronimo and I like them, but there might be camel racing. There might be a school big band. Sometimes there is something I've never considered; an enormous turnip or a worm factory, but there are always horses.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 23 May 2007
When channel Five's Fifth Gear invited me on to the show, they asked me what car I wanted. I had no idea. I'm not mad about cars. I like tractors and diggers. I called them back and asked for the biggest crane and the biggest cherry-picker that would fit down the drive, and on Thursday morning, three-quarters of a million pounds' worth of crane and a very large floating platform were waiting outside. My son was doing somersaults. My dad was displaying a deep fascination. There is something about huge, bright-yellow machines that speaks to the hearts of all men. Going up is absolutely exhilarating. It's much better than going forwards, backwards or fast around corners.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 16 May 2007
Monday mornings I go and think about stuff in Oxford. The rest of the week I spend poncing around having my photo taken and talking to other ponces for money, which I enjoy tremendously, but on Monday mornings I try to get myself properly grounded in 21st century space-time. I was thinking about the harmonic series this morning (1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5...). I'm not sure what I was thinking, mainly "Wow, prime numbers are weird," I was just looking at it, really. The harmonic series is the engine that generates all music and the prime numbers correspond to the different notes. It comes close to the top of page one of most maths textbooks and yet very few musicians know what it is. They're too busy having their photos taken.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 09 May 2007
I was filming on Friday and I didn't have anything to wear so I went to grab a shirt from John Pearse, the tailor, on Meard Street, Soho. John made the suit that I got married in and he seems to be the man of the moment. John kept showing me stuff he thought I might like and pretty soon I was in for a couple of shirts, a "trouser", an overcoat, a polka dot silk cravat thing and all sorts.
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 02 May 2007
Alex James: The Great Escape
Published: 25 April 2007
I've felt better about everything since I bought the microphones. It's the same feeling as having a good stock in the fridge, or a trusted builder working on the house. Life is sure to improve now I have the right microphones. On Saturday I told Bill I'd bought a pair of '87s. Bill's usually thinking about Bach and his music is sometimes on Radio 3. He's rarely stirred, but at the mention of the word "Neumann" he became very enthusiastic. "I tell you, man, they're the best." He waved his wine around and clonked his mandolin player on the nose.
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