Читать книгу All Cheeses Great and Small: A Life Less Blurry - Alex James - Страница 7

CHAPTER 2

SOME PEOPLE

AND ANIMALS

Personally, the transformation from metropolitan hell-raiser to quiet country gentleman was one thing, but this was also a professional volte-face. I’d bought a business as well as a home.

Playing the bass in a rock and roll band for a living is probably the easiest job in the world. You’d be hard pushed to find a bass player in an internationally successful rock group who’d disagree with that. On the other hand, you’ll never hear farmers say anything similar about their line of work. No one says farming is easy, and the rusting supertanker of a farm I’d taken command of was already threatening to drift over the horizon.

The whole thing was moving. Ever so slowly, moving. It wasn’t a house. It was a machine. It was a little bit alive, and things happened even when no one was making them happen. I had no idea what the machine was really, where it started or ended, how to drive it or what to point it at, and I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t met Paddy.

I thought I was doing something quite drastic, quite daring, moving to the country but now I think about it it’s quite hard to call to mind an ageing rock gentleman who doesn’t live in the country on a farm. The farm is probably the closest thing the ageing rock gentleman has to a natural habitat. As it became clear just how much it would cost to fix the place, and how much there was to know about this world, all of it completely new to me, it was reassuring to think how many of my peers also lived on farms. And it’s not just rockers. There are always statistics saying no one wants to be a farmer, but it’s the first thing Formula One champions, lottery winners, and movie moguls and billionaires do, as soon as they get the sniff of a chance. Even princes buy farms and none of these people know anything about farming until things start leaking and falling over, and by then it’s just too late. They’re already hooked.

In the way that rock bands have managers to take care of business, anyone who lives on a farm but isn’t really a farmer, needs an expert to call upon for advice on the practicalities. Whether the farm is falling down or a tidy business, there are always lots of those. Things you just don’t consider when you’re on a picnic: fences, ditches, thistles, trees, frogs. There’s a reason why they are all exactly where they are. They’ve either been put there by somebody, or they live there, or they’ve escaped or invaded. The countryside is a carefully managed environment. And at the very top of the food chain is the land agent.

Paddy is my land agent. It would be hard to conceive of someone who would fit the bill of English Country Gentleman more perfectly. Educated not far from where I grew up, but in a parallel universe. The product of good genes and a good system, a county-level rugby player and a man able to cope in any situation the world might throw at him. A man of grace and impeccable manners. A keen shot and an excellent rider, he also has a beautiful wife who adores him and a dog who is crazy about him. Everybody liked Paddy and he worked very hard. He was very discreet about his other clients, but I know he built Madonna’s stables for her. I’m always disappointed by the lack of imagination of the fantastically successful. They always seem to want the same things as everybody else. There are so many other things to be had. A stable block is so run of the mill. Stables are usually the first thing rock wives go for when they arrive in the country, and are a piece of cake for a seasoned land agent. Paddy and I have had many conversations about stables. We got as far as laying a sort of sub-base layer for a riding school. Claire would have liked stables, but I kept getting distracted. Distracted, constantly overwhelmed by dreams of things that were more interesting and actual things that were much less interesting: the cellar flooding in the middle of the night; sheep escaping and eating the flowers; roofs blowing away. Even the river didn’t take too long to burst its banks.

We met every week and I looked forward to it. I always had a long list of questions for him. What is DEFRA? When is the latest we can plant fruit trees? What is the deal with bees? What is the best way to find a cricket pitch? One week I said, ‘I want a runway.’ He didn’t flinch. He said ‘That’ll be about £150.’ Paddy took everything in his stride. Things started to move but the giddying sense of the endless possibilities of a piece of land was constant. There were quite a lot of experts. ‘Farm’ is another word for a building site, there is a lot to know about building. It is all quite simple, but there is a lot of it and it all happens simultaneously and it is all quite expensive. There are two ways of learning about building. You can go to college for seven years and study architecture or you can use your own money and learn very quickly. Even if you decide to employ an architect you have to know what’s what, because if you asked any leading architect for an apple he would sharpen his pencils, draw an orchard and charge you twenty grand. And that would probably still only get you to the planning stage. An expensive architect will save you the most money, but the only way to ever save money is by spending more money than you wanted to in the first place, so any kind of architect is always the start of a slippery slope.

As we rebuilt the house I learned on the go, sometimes at tremendous cost, all the practicalities of plumbing, heating, wiring and flues. I learned about insulation and hardcore and U-values, and all kinds of building regulations, and planning permissions and licences. It was endless and Claire and I would argue about what kind of taps we wanted: polished nickel or satin steel. It was always the ones that were a bit more expensive, that were just a little bit nicer. Soon I had lost interest in taps but became quite fascinated by plumbing systems and water pressure – everything that happens before the taps. They don’t really ever manage to make you feel good about yourself, posh taps, not in the way the posh tap brochure tries to make you think they will, but water gushing out of a leaky system like a fountain always lifts the spirits somehow.

We got a couple of pigs without really giving it much thought. I suppose they were the complete opposite of posh taps – pigs were, for hundreds of years, the marker of the peasantry. Actually only very posh people keep pigs any more. Once we’d had them a couple of weeks, it was clear I was spending quite a lot of time with them, more time than was absolutely necessary. ‘I’ll just go and check the pigs are all right,’ I’d say to myself, about twelve times a day. They are very engaging animals, pigs. The quality of contentedness that emanates from the pig as he goes about his business really rubs off. They were just so comfortable in the stable. I made them a nest in the straw and they snuggled up in the corner.

The man who I bought them from had said that the straw I was using was far too good for pigs as soon as he saw it. He rolled his eyes, ‘Waste of money,’ he said, and he never looked me in the eye after that. An hour after he’d left he sent a text message saying, ‘DON’T GIVE THEM NAMES OR YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO EAT THEM!’ I settled on ‘The Empresses’. I tried to get them to play football, which someone had told me they enjoy, but they much preferred playing with apples. Apples were their favourite thing. They chased the apples round, nibbling at them. They were both gilts, young sows, and they clopped around elegantly. Their dainty knee-lifting gait gave an overwhelming impression of femininity and ballet. The trotter is a similar design to an impossibly vertical high heel. Maybe that’s what it was.

As soon as the pigs arrived we stopped having to throw food away. This is a small thing, but one that made me far happier than proportionally it should have. Leftover baby food and sloppy old salad are two of the most redundant things in the universe. You can’t use cooked food for compost, really. It encourages rats. So it just hangs around, clogging up the feng shui in the fridge. Those snorkers opened the channels of free-food flow. They transmogrified the guilt of throwing food away into the pleasure of giving. ‘Ooh the pigs’ll love that,’ I’d think to myself. A sack of sprouts going yellow. Yummy. Soon there was nothing going wrinkly in the larder at all. Possibly, I began cooking too much, subconsciously catering for the pigs as well.

They grew at a phenomenal rate. When they arrived I could get one under each arm. A month later they were too heavy for me to lift, but they still came and nibbled my feet whenever I went to see them. I took on a part-time farm hand from the village and he put up fences so they could go and live in the woods when it got warmer. He said his grandfather had dug all the ditches on the farm. It was quite exciting having a farm hand. It meant we could get a couple of cows. One of the benefits of living on a farm, one of the big draws, is having a little menagerie. Funnily enough it was the ditches I was most excited about.

It was pouring with rain. How beautiful it was in the rain, how quiet. A deer bounced over a thicket and disappeared. Paddy and I were trying to work out whether it was the hedges or the ditches that were more desperate for attention. The land was in a pretty sorry state. There wasn’t a single ditch that didn’t need dredging or a hedge that didn’t need laying. We were scratching our heads and stroking our chins when Paddy pointed and shouted ‘Racing pigeon!’ It didn’t look in too much of a hurry. It looked just like the other pigeons, but it did have a tag round its leg. Paddy told me he can always spot them since he’d shot one once by accident, and had felt very bad about it; so bad that he’d sent a note to the address on the little tag saying, ‘Sorry, your pigeon died’. ‘Delicious, though,’ he added. When I lived in London, pigeons drove me mad. I hated the things. When one flew into the farmhouse we were all spellbound. In London I would probably have called the fire brigade, or Rentokill, but this one was so beautiful I wanted to let it stay: all rippling greens and silvers. What a frame, the English countryside! What a lens!

I was changing. I was developing permanent rose-tinted specs. I thought the pigsty was beautiful as well. While Paddy and I tried to put the farm back together after twenty years of chemical fertilisers, poverty and neglect, I rented out the fields to Fred and Gwynne, the local sheep farmers. One of the mothers at nursery asked me how many sheep I had, and I realised I had absolutely no idea. I could tell she thought I was mad and couldn’t wait to tell all the other mums.

There was always so much going on, and people asking questions about everything, that I had an unspoken special arrangement with Fred, where we just waved at each other and smiled. He never asked me any questions, and I never asked him any.

I went down to the muddy patch where Fred and Groves, the farm hand, loitered about. ‘How many sheep are there, Fred? It’s a bit embarrassing, someone asked me the other day and I didn’t know.’ He didn’t know either, I’m sure of it. ‘It varies, Alec, you see,’ Groves agreed. I could tell, that was what he was thinking, too. I wish I’d thought of saying that, it’s a good answer when you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. I wasn’t buying it though. You could say that about the price of bread and still have no idea. I mean everything varies apart from the speed of light in a vacuum. I pushed hard for an answer, which was really outside the terms of our no hassle arrangement. ‘Varies between what and what?’

‘Four or five hundred, probably, see, now, then there’s lambs to come. Then there’s Gwynne’s as well, see. He’ll have a few too.’ It was as close as I was going to get to an answer. Gwynne was a quad-bike-riding Welshman shaped like an enormous baby, with huge woolly sideburns and a dog that seemed to be called ‘Bastard’. He had some of the fields, too, but it was Fred who did all the waving.

‘Talking of sheep, how did it go at Moreton, Fred?’ Moreton Show was the regional agricultural event, held yearly.

I had no idea, I had nothing to compare him to, but Fred was evidently some kind of genius. He’d swept the board, won all kinds of prizes. I thought his was the best lamb I’d ever eaten, but assumed it was just one of those things that happens, like thinking your own children are special. It was the right way to think, but I certainly didn’t expect anyone else to agree.

Even though it was excellent lamb, it was still really hard to sell. That lamb was all we were producing, in tiny amounts and it was hard to see what else we could do. I stuck at it though and I realised my ambition of making a huge mound out of all the combined piles of rubble. A bulldozer and a couple of dumpers took care of it. I was following a whim really, but I think it’s important to follow whims. What else is there to go on? It seemed to make sense to put all the redundant piles lying around the place near the house into one big pile in the distance. I was planning to put a shed on the top and write songs in it, but that big pile instantly became very popular with the sheep. The sheep’s quality of life improved no end after the mound. It’s not fair to say that sheep are stupid. It is true that sheep don’t understand all that much, but they do get mounds. They love them. They were a bit scared of it to start with, but soon they began to flock around it and eventually it was totally mobbed: the only place they wanted to be. They certainly liked the mound more than they seemed to like being organic. They weren’t bothered about that at all. In fact they almost certainly preferred to eat junk food. It was very hard persuading Fred to comply with organic standards. Part of the terms of his tenancy was that he would, but he clearly thought it was stupid and I was being conned by someone. He was old-fashioned. ‘Maybe we could charge more for the lamb if we sold it as mound-raised lamb,’ I said. I’ve never seen such happy sheep. It can be hard to relate to sheep, but I felt united with them, in our common interest in mounds.

Neighbours are different in the country. They live further away for a start. In London, until I met the neighbours, I thought I had the nicest house in the world. I had been at number 23 for two weeks feeling very good about myself, when I ended up one evening at Dave Stewart’s place, which was on the corner of the street. He had excavated some kind of huge spaceship into the rock face of the West End. There were hundreds of televisions, glowing carpets, triple-aspect receptions and a roof terrace big enough for cricket. I was quite miffed when I got back to plain old number 23. Out here, there was one very friendly neighbour who came over, and I invited him in for a cup of tea. He said if there was anything he could do, just let him know. He said, ‘We’ve been wondering how you’d be getting on because, you know, well my father owned all these fields. Mmm. Yeah, but he sold them – had to. They all just kept flooding. Terrible. Terrible fields. Do let us know if you need anything,’ and he pulled a sympathetic, helpful kind of face. The weird thing was that I was pretty sure it wasn’t true. I couldn’t be bothered to look at the deeds. I thought they were the best fields I’d ever seen. The house was coming on well now, too. The Aga was on. There was broadband, all the rest of it, I was feeling like I was doing pretty well for myself all over again. Then one Sunday we were invited for lunch at the pile on top of the hill.

What a house! It was a perfect Gothic castle with ramparts, the endless dry-stone wall and sculptures in the garden. I think it had its own cathedral or I certainly glimpsed something like that from one of the upper windows of the main house. You can really relax in a castle. You feel safe. There was another guy there, and he evidently had an even bigger house. In fact I think he might have had a whole country somewhere or other. It was so nice to get my building problems into perspective, and to talk to people who knew about roofs. In London, people know nothing about roofs. They avoid them. In the country, the more important you get, the more you have to know about them. They are always on the agenda. It is never inappropriate to bring up the subject. Everyone from farm labourers to lords of the manor has an interest in all aspects of roofs, from beam to tile. The two most hotly debated roofing materials were asbestos and, most of all, Stonesfield slates. The stone tiles that cover traditional Cotswold houses were made by frost-shattering the stone. No one makes them any more so all the people who have castles fight over any that come on the market. Roofers offer unsuspecting newcomers good deals on entire new roofs just to get their hands on more Stonesfield slate. Our host said he’d stopped worrying about it and whenever he got a leak, he just popped up there and wiggled something into the hole. He said his grand-children could deal with it.

Big houses are surprisingly practical. The really massive ones are surprisingly cheap to buy and anything at all you put in a castle looks fantastic. A vast reception hall still looks amazing if all it’s got is a sofa that came off a skip and a bare light bulb dangling from some remote ceiling. You can waste so much money on sofas, light fittings and making things look tidy. I’d spent months wondering if I’d bitten off more than I could chew but I came home wanting a bigger house. That castle was historically part of another estate and was numbingly beautiful, but the big house – the demesne of which this farm was once part – is the nicest house I’ve ever seen. A perfectly proportioned monument: a jewel in the crown of its gardens, which were all laid out by Repton, the first great English garden designer. The estate had once been almost unimaginably vast, a great chunk of West Oxfordshire comprising several villages and tens of thousands of acres, hundreds of square miles. But over the centuries bits had been hacked off and sold as separate titles. In turn, the farm had until quite recently comprised over a thousand acres, with a mill house, several cottages and a campsite which were gradually subdivided into further separate properties.

The campsite, just a small patch of woodland back when it had belonged to the farm, had taken the subdividing process to its logical conclusion. While I was busy planting trees and tearing up concrete, the opposite thing was happening over there. Before I knew what was going on the ancient bluebell wood had been tarmaced and redeveloped into high-class, buy-to-let holiday cabins. The owner tore down ever such a lot of trees and put concrete pads everywhere to receive the pre-assembled executive boxes. It’s about as far as you can take the subdividing process: to the high-density luxury level. It really annoyed me that where there had been woods, there was now a lot of concrete. I’d been trying so hard to take things the other way. I was wandering in that direction, and as I walked past the first occupied caravan a very sweet and proud elderly couple were taking delivery of their Jacuzzi; an optional extra when you buy one of these sheds. They looked so content, so fragile. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, and all of a sudden felt my frustration melt.

No matter how far away the neighbours are, it doesn’t make life any simpler. All borders were apparently under constant attack, but on the whole I was surprised how much I liked most of the people who lived nearby. Not just the nobs and the billionaires. We took on two gypsies from the trailer park as cleaners and they fascinated me. The younger one was very pretty, one of the prettiest women I’ve ever seen. She had absolutely no sense of her own beauty. Any number of billionaires’ wives would have given everything they had to look like she did but she worked all hours because she was saving up for cosmetic surgery. It was all she talked about. Her older sister had a baby. She brought the baby round one day, dressed from head to toe in heavily branded Armani. She gave us all her Burberry hand me downs. They were kind people.

All was peaceful in the rain. Under heavy skies, the lawn was dotted with bright daisies and buttercups. I’d caught a fleeting glimpse of a moist artichoke and thought it the perfect sight, but it’s never perfect for long. I was still admiring the optimistic modesty of the simple buttercup when I noticed a thin trail of translucent sludge coming up through the lawn. I’d never seen sludge like that before. It didn’t smell of anything. It looked like aspic. I had to call Paddy. It was everywhere but even he was baffled for once. A couple of months previously I would have been terrified by any mysterious spontaneous sludge phenomena, but I was changing. Worst-case scenario it was just a tiny leak in the space-time continuum. I was sure we could patch it up. But then about a million caterpillar things came out of the lawn and seemed to be making for my shed. They completely ate the lawn. I was trying to write a song and all I could think about was caterpillars. Then I got worried about what they were going to turn into. There were millions of them. There were a lot of slugs around, too, friendly looking things. The more I looked at them the more I liked them, leaving their little shiny trails, the curly graffiti of a strange order. The rain drew them out onto the paths and treading on them as I tiptoed around barefoot at night became something of a hazard. Squish. Ugh.

When you live on a farm, there is nothing, nothing in the world that is anywhere near as interesting, not even pretty faces, as someone else’s farm. I went to other farms: dairy farms, beef farms, cider farms, chicken farms, organic polytunnel market gardens, fish farms, oyster beds. I spent the afternoon with Jody Scheckter, an ex-Formula One champion. He had the most fantastic farm in the world: vineyards, the rarest cows in the world, laboratories full of men in white coats and mass spectrometers for molecular soil analysis. He whizzed me around the place at Formula One speed. We stood still in the library for a good thirty seconds, while he pointed at his unique collection of rare books on rare grasses. I needed about a month in there but he wanted to show me the biggest herd of water buffalo in the country. I thought buffalo were mad moose-looking things, but they looked very similar to cows. I think I’d got them confused with bison. Slightly disappointing.

The diversity of farming enterprises was staggering. Llamas and peacocks were surprisingly common in the Cotswolds. There was a big herd of ostriches nearby too. I was about to buy a horse when I began to think maybe I was more of a camel man. Wives are always keen on alpacas. Alpacas look like supermodel sheep, all limbs. They always draw a crowd at country shows but I thought it would be better to stick with traditional animals at our farm, like sheep, although sheep are about as native to Oxfordshire as orang-utans. The Romans introduced sheep and there are probably now more emus and llamas in Oxfordshire than there are in the wild. There isn’t much wild left.

Anyway, I had my hands full thinking about earthworms for the time being: Jody Scheckter had made me realise they were much more important than I’d ever given them credit for. Worms are behind everything. That was where everything started, on the worm level. I had noticed that worms don’t like lemons. They loved the rest of the compost but always left the lemons. Even worms are more discerning than we give them credit for. They live for ten years and they don’t like lemons.

It took a long time to get to the point where we were ready for chickens. You can’t really call yourself a farmer if you haven’t got chickens. Every farmhouse should have chickens, really. At Moreton-in-Marsh agricultural show you can get everything from little quails to whacking great roosters. We went along and there was the slightly frenzied atmosphere that prevails at these events; there is so much to see and people barge around like in the sales. I was beside myself and dragged Claire, pram and pushchair all around the pigs, cows, sheep and goats before we arrived in the chicken department. I was determined not to leave empty-handed. Prices started at a fiver. It was all quite overwhelming. I said ‘Chickens?’ to the steward. Forty minutes later, he was still talking, and I hadn’t said another word. His message was along the lines of the world of the chicken not being a place to enter lightly. You need to know your requirements egg-wise for starters. There are green ones, white ones, brown speckledies and blue-ish types, plus there are some birds that are good for the table and so it went on. It was so overwhelming that we did indeed leave empty-handed as the place was closing.

Actually chickens are a pure delight and a piece of cake. There is nothing simpler than looking after chickens. There is a book about it but it is quite short and very few people have read it anyway. Keeping chickens is all deliciously obvious. There were already a few pheasants and partridges pecking around the place and doing all right for themselves, so this clearly wasn’t a hostile environment for that kind of bird. Pigs are a commitment. They require emotional investment. Chickens don’t take much looking after at all, and you’d actually be hard pushed to make a worse job of it than people who do it for a living. So we went to see a breeder and bought some chickens calmly and quietly and I was quite excited. Being a farmer and getting your first chickens, is like being a teenager and getting your first car. I wouldn’t like to start working out how much those eggs cost to produce. They definitely wouldn’t be competitive on price. I suppose eggs were inevitable, but when the first ones appeared I was stupefied. The longer I stood there, the more spellbound I was by the endlessness of what was playing out before me. Resting on the barn floor, nowhere near the specially commissioned artisan nesting boxes, were one green egg and one brown one. Little cherries on the cake of country living.

I met Daphne because of the garden. She helped me find it and put it all back together. She had her own grouse moor, one of the best in the world. She was quite inspirational, a spritely dynamo granny. There was no holding her back. She was used to dealing with captains of industry and billionaires in her job as a garden designer and she bossed them all around the park, when she wasn’t entertaining lord knows who on her grouse moor in Northumberland. We’d walk around the yard, deciding what to demolish. It was always refreshing to spend an hour doing this with Daphne. ‘This cowshed, those two old hay barns and that lean-to’s days are numbered – knock ’em down,’ she’d say. ‘They’ve got to go,’ shaking her head and looking appalled, ‘They’ve got to go.’ Demolishing things is the ultimate expression of freedom. I lay awake at night dreaming of bulldozers, just like I used to when I was a little boy.

Gardens aren’t easy. When we first moved here we took advice from a different garden designer to plant a belt of trees behind the garden wall. A tree expert came and planted lots of them. He made a big fuss about them all having to be suitable species. What else did he think we wanted? He was so keen they should be ‘suitable’. Then he planted everything far too close together and far too close to the wall. I couldn’t have done it more wrongly myself.

Actually it’s not wrong to be wrong. It’s fine. It’s how you learn. I was about to scream at the scale of my own stupidity when it occurred to me that I was actually looking at a row of established oaks that the previous owner had planted. They were also far, far too close to the garden wall. Same mistake. For that matter there was the giant sequoia an arm’s length from the front door, the misconception of the owner before that. It was good to know I wasn’t the first idiot to live here. I found great solace in the stupidity of my forebears and vented my spleen with Daphne as we battled through the bad planning and planting.

Gardening can go wrong in a million ways. Even when it is going well, home-grown vegetables seem to express themselves more vividly than the ones I’d been used to and they only approximated the shapes, the symmetry they achieved in the shops.

Eggs, though, are definitive eggs. They were surprisingly upmarket. I’d never seen a more accurate egg shape, or a more Farrow and Ball eggshell than those first ones from the chickens. The green one seemed particularly miraculous. I stared at it for ages, pleasantly adrift on a sea of contemplation. I longed to taste it, but I wasn’t ready to break the shell quite yet. I wasn’t sure whether to cook the thing, hatch it, or pickle it in formaldehyde. However much these eggs cost, it seemed a small price to pay for their mystic perfection and the disproportionate feeling of triumph. It called for a soufflé.

It had really taken a lot of chin stroking and groundwork to get to egg Valhalla. I’d realised by now that farming isn’t something you can really rush along and I couldn’t see how we could have got to this point any quicker. I knew soufflés weren’t easy, but a lot of work would have gone into getting this one to rise. Here’s the recipe: first, buy a house, rebuild it, while looking after the ditches and drains, toppling trees, leggy hedges and fallen fences. Begin to convert the entire two hundred acres from intensive beef unit to organic pasture. Next, consider chicken housing, convert a stable and choose chickens. Build more fences to keep dog away from chickens. Take eggs, mix with cheese and place in very hot oven until ready. Voilà! Making a soufflé is simple. Making an egg is the hard bit.

Some things are best homemade. Sometimes, even with no expertise, it’s next to impossible to make a worse job of something than the very best, most expensive versions available in the shops. Eggs are probably the best example of this. There is no hen’s egg commercially available at any price, anywhere in the world, that would be anything like as good as the worst homemade one. Maybe they are perkier because they are fresher. Maybe they are tastier because household chickens tend to have a more varied diet of scraps and leftovers that would be prohibited commercially. Whatever the reason, eggs from the back garden are in a completely different league from the rest. Of course most people don’t have the time or inclination to get involved with chickens. And whatever their shortcomings, shops do make everything wonderfully easy.

The eggs gave me confidence in my farming skills but I still wanted to be an astronaut. I got myself a job in the Astrophysics department at Oxford University. I spent the mornings considering dark matter and the afternoon considering dairy cows. It seemed to make cows much easier to deal with. Cows weigh more than half a tonne and there was something very pleasing about their indisputable ‘XXL-ness’. All the equipment that comes with cows is satisfyingly chunky and mechanical too: really big tractors and forklifts. It makes sheep and pig paraphernalia look flimsy. Cows themselves always seem rather pleased with their size and there is a swagger to their parade. Sheep just gambol and graze, they’re very low maintenance by comparison. It’s a bit like looking after fish and looking at them sometimes made me think I was standing on a kind of seabed, at the bottom of the sky.

I felt the pigs would like me to spend more time playing football with them, but they were quite happy rooting, munching and chasing each other all day. But cows are tricky. There is an extra element of drama in dairy farming because the cows have to be milked twice daily. Margins are very tight in agriculture. Absolutely everything is driven by cost. The modern dairy cow has evolved into something unnaturally skinny with huge udders, a bit like a glamour model. The public tend to assume that farmers are the ones who exploit animals, but it’s probably the public who exploit animals by scrimping on how much they spend on milk. I never met a dairy farmer who didn’t love cows. You’d have to. Even the ones who were so close to bankruptcy that they couldn’t look after their cows properly, loved them.

Most people don’t take as much pleasure in cows as dairy farmers. But anyone would marvel at a milking machine. What a huffing, puffing, whirring delight. The best ones are immense rotating carousels which the cows queue up to board one at a time, like passengers travelling first class out of Heathrow. Then they reverse out of the machine and pirouette away – it is almost ballet. The revolving platform holds feeding troughs and udder clamps so that the cows are fed while they are milked. It is an incredibly efficient system but it also manages to give an impression of great spectacle, a benign and mesmerising magic roundabout. I put my name down for a couple of Gloucester cattle. There was a waiting list but that was a good thing. It gave me time to prepare.

At this early stage of my new career, the sheer momentum of livestock was quite hard to deal with. Plants, by contrast, wanted little attention. The fruit bushes in the garden, ignored by everybody in the household, even the new dog, and probably ignored for years before that, seemed to be in better shape than I could have hoped for if they were all I’d ever cared about. And that’s the way it is with plants. It’s very rare that a plant places demands upon a busy man to make yet another decision.

Of everything, I was most proud of the vegetable garden. It was the first thing that I showed to people when they came round, whether they wanted to see it or not. Plants fascinated me. The plants themselves were under control but the entire garden area was getting bigger all the time, much bigger. The whole blooming caboodle was growing exponentially.

A small stream ran underneath the house, through the cellar. The builders were horrified when they found it underneath the floor. They said, ‘You haven’t got damp down here, after all. No. You’ve got running water.’ It must have been there since the house was built, so I went with the flow. I left it there. It’s been hard to know what to use that room for, though. It is kind of moist. The previous owner had bred his prize-winning fish there, in tanks, so that was an option. I kept empty jars down there because I was planning on doing a lot of pickling. The bigger your house is, the less you throw away. A lot of problems would be solved if everybody lived on farms. Farms produce things as well as consume them, so the motive for recycling becomes quite selfish, a more reliable system. I was taking some old jars down there and as the lights flickered on there was a toad in mid-leap. I nearly dropped my jars. There was a pair of them. It was the perfect place to keep frogs.

Reasons for doing things often become apparent only retrospectively. I should probably have done what the builders advised and tanked out the cellar and made it into a cinema, like all the neighbours have done. But it had all worked out very nicely for everyone concerned. How I would rather watch toads than films, and the children couldn’t have been happier than poking toads. A toad cellar probably doesn’t add the value that a home cinema would, but I was much more at home with it.