“Oh God, don’t write about Chipping Norton,” he says, holding his head in his
hands. “This year Chipping Norton has become the evil of darkness.”
The gilded Cotswold triangle is home to a number of political and media
figures linked to the phone-hacking scandal, from Rebekah Brooks to the
Camerons, Elisabeth Murdoch and Jeremy Clarkson. Alex, too, has been dubbed
a member of “the Chipping Norton set”. He shrugs. “While all this was going
on, I was in my ‘foodio’ just trying to make cheese melt.”
Alex wants me to try his cheese on toast and leads me to a specialist grilling
machine in a converted outbuilding. We leave the kitchen, with its huge
picture window looking out onto a trampoline, bouncy castle and wooden
pirate ship with slide. We pass through a warren of rooms, where cubbyholes
are crammed with small shoes of his five children under the age of seven.
There’s a playroom, a laundry where three washing machines and two tumble
dryers are always on the go, and Alex’s music room where a drum kit, double
bass, cello, violins and guitars remind you that this country cheese maker
was in one of Britain’s biggest bands of the Nineties.
Alex James was the bass player in Blur, the band which dominated the charts
and whose single Country House beat Oasis’s Roll With It to the number one
slot in 1995, making the 10 O’Clock News. He lived out of a suitcase on
tour, was inebriated on champagne at the Groucho, picked up Brit awards and
cavorted in hotel rooms around the world, as is expected of a rock star.
Then, just as Blur was disintegrating, he met Claire Neate, a video producer.
“We fell in love in Little Barrington,” he says. He and Claire got married in
2003 and on their honeymoon, Alex surprised everyone by selling his bachelor
pad in Covent Garden and buying a run-down 200-acre farm in Oxfordshire.
The farm is still a work in progress. Built of golden Cotswold stone, it dates
back to the late 1700s. Foot and mouth and BSE had left the previous owner,
an intensive beef farmer, “on his knees” and the property was derelict. Only
after peeling away wallpaper and plaster did they discover some beams were
rotting and it needed gutting. “But all the decent builders and plumbers in
the area had remortgaged their own houses and were doing them up, so we
could only get three village bong-heads who spent months out here. That’s
how you learn,” says Alex.
He found himself getting stuck in, bulldozing up an enormous concrete silage
clamp and loving it. “I’m the world’s greatest jumper-inner,” he says. He
tackled ditches, the well and spring water supply, fields and drains, trees
and ancient woodland, and livestock (he now has sheep and, no longer a
vegetarian, just finished eating the last of the pigs). He learns from local
farmers, land agents and wise old boys. “Expertise is the cheapest thing you
can spend your money on,” he nods.
Today, a low stone wall is being built by a chap called Neil, and there are
piles of slates, tiles, wooden pallets and rubble everywhere. Alex points to
a digger in the front garden. “Look at that – far more exciting than a Range
Rover.” The pond is sludgy. It’s not done up or magazine-shoot perfect, and
I get the impression Farmer James likes it that way. “Running a farm is like
running a small country. Something’s always escaping, broken down, falling
apart or leaking.”
When we eventually get to the “foodio”, unfortunately the Wallace and
Gromit-style cheese-grilling machine blows a fuse, trips the lights and
triggers an outburst of swearing from its cheese-mad creator. Disappointed,
Alex steers me past the offices of other artisan cheesemakers who operate
from his farm (Crudges and British Cheese Awards creator Juliet Harbutt) and
towards the living larder that is his fruit and vegetable garden. He pulls
up little carrots, rinses them under an outdoor tap and hands me one. “I
don’t peel veg anymore,” he says, and who can blame him.
The maze of raised beds are stuffed with asparagus, celeriac, leeks (“good
with cheese”), onions, lettuces and cabbage. We eat plums and Russet apples
(also “good with cheese”) straight off the branches in the orchard, where
Alex is adding to the tree collection each year. He’s excited by his medlars
(“you have to leave them to rot”, he explains) and thrilled his fig survived
the harsh winter. Next, he would love a nuttery.
We end up in amongst a forest of triffid-sized heritage tomatoes in a glass
house attached to one of his barns. “I’ve gone crazy on tomatoes,” he says.
I nod. “The Victorians built orangeries; I have a tomato shed, a ‘tomatory’.”
We sit in the tomatory on a scruffy sofa and chairs and munch cherry tomatoes
– “One in three tastes of white truffles,” he says.
Alex is hosting his own festival next weekend, a food and music extravaganza.
“It’s the perfect reflection of my life,” he says. Some 10,000 people are
expected at Harvest, where food stars Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Monty Don
and Mark Hix “headline” alongside bands such as Athlete and The Feeling.
Alex loves country life, gobbles it up hungrily. He has an eagerness to try
new things, combined with a respect for tradition. I notice a ragged Union
flag hangs from a pole outside. “I’ve felt better about things since that
went up,” he smiles.
- Harvest, Sept 9-12; www.alexjamespresentsharvest.com
- NEXT SUNDAY: Read Alex James’s new weekly column