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

Author:Alex James
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2012-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

SPRING

CHAPTER 7

MUSIC

Up at half past four. Everyone dreads getting up that early but rising with the lark is probably the cheapest and most certain way to feel glamorous. The utter silence of the middle of the night in the middle of the winter, that stillness coupled with the early riser’s sense of purpose; the promise of things about to happen was exhilarating. There is no sunshine like early March sunshine. It is rare and there is only the tiniest amount of warmth in it but the colour was like a magic spell. It gave a sense of hope to the huge amounts of devastation underway. The whole farm was getting a haircut. Hedges trimmed, the digger was back in commission and hoiking out overgrown trees. I hardly recognised the place. It was definitely going to look amazing in fifty years.

The next-door farmer was retiring after a lifetime spent in the fields and the sheds. He was selling everything he had, from his piles of rubble to his shiny mini tractor. I went for a poke around. Mud is something I’d avoided for most of my life, but I was making up for lost time. It seemed to be the main ingredient of agriculture. It is pretty miraculous stuff, mud. You can make all kinds of things out of it if you get the right machines and the right mixture.

All the equipment was laid out in rows in one of the fields. There was a lot of it, an entire career’s worth. It told a story but it was hard to tell which bits were junk and which were vital to the plot. I recognised some tractor-type things and there were some iron gates in a pile but it was quite hard to tell exactly what anything else was. The brochure said there was a pig-slaughtering stool, but I couldn’t find that. There were a few muddy people around staring at things. 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. People in the country are much madder than in the city. Close contact with massed humanity does keep your feet on the ground. Being at the centre of nothing but a distant three-hundred-and-sixty-degree horizon all day, I guess you get used to doing whatever you like. This guy would have made the Dean Street crack muffins look clean and reasonable if you’d put them side by side. It wasn’t a threatening burp, 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.

I’d been looking forward to the sale and, as I’d suspected I would, I wanted to buy everything. Especially the stuff that looked old and well used. If it had worked here for a lifetime, presumably it would go on working next door for a while longer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.