All Cheeses Great and Small: A Life Less Blurry. Alex James
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