If you have ever questioned the fact that Alex James is a massive tool

cymrococh · February 17, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/lostinshowbiz/2012/feb/16/alex-james-memoir-cheese

Stop what you're doing: Alex James is to publish the second volume of his autobiography. All Cheeses Great and Small – yes, I know – is to hit the shelves in March, picking up after A Bit of a Blur, which detailed James's years as the bass player in Blur. If you're searching for the Churchillian analogy, as all multivolume autobiographies demand, this instalment is perhaps akin to Winston's London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, detailing his experiences of the second Boer war, first as war correspondent for the Morning Post, when he was captured by the Boers and made a daring escape, and then as he combined reporting duties with an army commission, managing to be one of the first soldiers to relieve the Siege of Ladysmith, and going on to see the British take Pretoria.

All Cheeses Great and Small describes Alex's purchase of a farm in the Cotswolds and his emergence as Britain's premier cheese bore.

Naturally, I need hardly ask if you realised that our hero likes cheese. James's fondness for cheese is believed to be a matter of which no one in this earthly sphere is unaware. For a time, it was assumed that there were some remote peoples still untouched by his rennet-based droning, but in that recent aerial footage of the uncontacted Amazon society, the tribe was seen to have arranged a collection of bones and earthenware shards into the words: "PLEASE STOP ALEX JAMES GOING ON ABOUT BLOODY CHEESE."

As for the book, James writes like the brilliant satirist Craig Brown has got hold of his computer and done his worst. His is that most unfortunate of prose styles: auto-parodic. Let's lay our first scene in a chapter entitled CHEESE, in which Alex's land agent poses the fateful question: "'Do you like cheese?' I told him I did," reveals Alex. "I did, in fact probably more than anybody else I'd ever met, like cheese and it hadn't gone unnoticed ... I always liked to keep an eye on the cheese situation at large when I was on the move and for many years saw touring with the band merely as an excuse to travel the world tracking and eating obscure types of cheese. Cheese was on the rider. Cheese was de rigueur. Cheese was what I like a lot. I said to Paddy, 'Yes, I do like cheese. Why?'"

Mm. It's possibly my favourite passage in a celebrity autobiography since the bit in volume one of Wayne Rooney's planned five-volume effort, in which the Manchester United striker spellbinds readers by painting the following word picture of his home. "Our house has six bedrooms and a big kitchen which is very modern and greyish. I'm not good at describing decor."

For Alex, cobblers trips rather easier off the tongue. Thus we learn that: "Trees belong to the class of things that cost as much as you're prepared to spend, like pianos." The Japanese are "a conscientious hardworking people". "The Industrial Revolution skipped the Cotswolds." Even more bizarre claims follow. "I got myself a job in the astrophysics department at Oxford University," Alex declares at one point, where his business was "considering dark matter". Which I suppose is one way of saying he was once named the department's artist in residence.

Speaking of incredible claims, emblazoned on the back cover of All Cheeses Great and Small is the following excerpt from the Guardian's review of the earlier volume, A Bit of a Blur: "James's inquisitive nature makes him eminently and continuously likable."

I was going to challenge that. Then again, who could fail to warm to his accounts of the Cotswold locals? "On the whole," muses Alex, "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 ..." The reader is never burdened with their names – the elder cleaner is described elsewhere in the book as "the not-so-pretty gypsy girl".

Or consider his account of a machinery sale at the next-door farm, which is staffed by "a few muddy people". "One of them, a big fat one, did an enormous burp in my ear as I walked past. He just carried on staring out from his benign, muddy, burp world." Fortunately, Alex is able to gloss the encounter. "It wasn't a threatening burp," he judges, "in fact the bizarreness of it put me quite at ease: the strain of the vast silence between strangers, from quite different worlds, meeting in a field, relieved by a belch. It was as if he'd burped for both of us."

But for all these half-dimensional portraits of the rural working classes, the overwhelming picture James presents is of a Cotswold society where every second estate is owned by someone playing in their version of Marie Antoinette's hameau. "Pig owners are all long-lost friends," explains Alex of the ease with which he strikes up a conversation with another local (in fact it's Peter Kindersley, who sold his stake in a publishing business for £105m). "Apparently I'd only just missed the man who used to run Bradford & Bingley. He was now a cheesemaker of some repute." And I'm sure a nation saddled with a stake in what remains of his bank wishes him every success with his curds and whey.

The shtick reaches its apogee in a six-page hymn to what can only be described as the most t***tish shop on the planet. Actually, it can be described in more Chaucerian manner, but we only use that word in reported speech in the Guardian, so t***tish must do for now. Located in Alex's village, Daylesford Organic is the brainchild of Carole Bamford, wife of JCB gazillionaire Sir Anthony, whom Alex claims "didn't particularly care about making money". (Most fortunate, as according to Daylesford's published accounts it loses millions.)

The complex is an insanely priced place of grocery pilgrimage for those whom convention demands we style as the Chipping Norton Set – your Clarksons, your Camerons, your Brookses. Loathed by most locals, according to James, the Daylesford he describes is a purveyor of "tasteful objects", which "radiates prestige", sporting "a whole New Age massage, yogaromatherapy wing, apparently staffed by Tibetan Buddhist monks". The car park is full of black Range Rovers, the car that more than any other indicates that its owner is a member of the arseoisie.

It reads like an open invitation to friendly bombs, but James adores it with a rare passion, which makes his recent willingness to appease the Sun's advertisers – writing craven screeds for the paper in praise of McDonald's production methods and the like – seem more cynical than ever.

Still, All Cheeses Great and Small is not without its social theorising. "The bigger your house is, the less you throw away," explains Alex. "A lot of problems would be solved if everybody lived on farms."

Especially if they weren't allowed to write books.

Gerry · February 17, 2012

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