Alex James

A 2,000-year-old thoroughfare, St Martin’s Lane, and certainly one of my favourite places; contender, any time of year, for the world’s most festive location. On Saturday afternoon, a carnival of mad shoppers, confused sometimes, crossing roads without looking; arguing, pointing, dashing this way and that, laden down and worn out or grinning and just holding on to each other, half-drunk and completely in love. In another life I lived at the top end of the lane, at Seven Dials, and it was thrilling to be there again all of a sudden, after a frozen morning as still as a picture in the countryside.

So cold: I tried lighting a fire, but smoke just kept blowing back down the chimney, setting off the fire alarms. It’s a design fault with that fireplace. It happens whenever the wind blows in a certain direction. The architect really messed up there and I cursed him, the idiot, as I rubbed the heat on my hands into my trousers, having run outside several times, a sparking, smoking log in each hand. The wind was really howling and it was raining sideways. The fat logs continued to be on fire, lying on the grass, drinking the breeze, sending sparking, glowing embers flying around the back garden. Well, I suppose I just didn’t know much about fireplaces when we built that one.

It was a rainy morning on Friday when I woke up warm as toast in a small castle in Northumberland, surrounded on all sides as far as the eye could see by the immaculate, formal gardens still dancing under the weight of the winter sky and beyond them racing-green moorland stretching to infinity and eternity in all directions. I’d brought my gun and my guitar and we’d all been up singing until the small hours, singing all the songs I could remember. Well, there were a few sore heads at the breakfast table but the atmosphere was jocular, festive. Most of the guests had known each other for many years and it was an extremely well-staffed, well-run house. Cooks in the kitchen and boys in the bootroom; porridge and papers, coffee and cigarettes; an English breakfast banquet.

Being driven is one of the great luxuries. It’s right up there with breakfast in bed, silence, sunshine, new socks and vast expanses of marble. It’s elevating. It’s relaxing. It’s addictive. How lovely it is to fall into the back of a waiting car to be expertly magic carpeted off to, well, even to places one would rather not be going. My car expired at the start of summer, and, despite my best efforts, until this week I hadn’t replaced it. I seemed to be coming out ahead, more by sloppiness than by design. I needed a car, or thought I did, but the cost of second-hand cars was falling by more each month than what I was spending on a chauffeur each month, and it’s fair to say that I’ve been using the local chauffeur company a lot.

I was in a meeting a year or so ago about a charity record for Darfur. Mick was on board. Bono was confirmed. It was all looking good — good for Darfur, as the benevolent gods of rock assembled to come to the rescue. Amy Winehouse’s name was mentioned. ‘Isn’t she a bit tricky?’ said someone. Then an executive I’d only ever met after midnight, someone I’d always privately believed to be a simpleton, said something I’ll always remember. ‘People say she’s difficult. That means she is brilliant. It always does. You can’t be difficult and not be brilliant in this business. No one will tolerate it.

The tent had been a big hit over the summer. They called it a tent, but it was big enough for elephants and tightropes: a big top as big as a ballroom and just as plush, lined and interlined like a lush pair of curtains, certainly ridiculous, but pretty and practical. Our friends from LA had been back here for summer. They pitched it in their garden in June and didn’t strike it until September, more or less living in it on rugs and cushions for the whole time they were here, in the garden but out of the rain. We’d been to two parties in it, parties where everyone agreed it was a brilliant tent, and wanted one, especially when we found out how much they’d paid for it. It seemed a remarkable bargain — less to buy than to hire.

Are you the driver?’ I asked. ‘No, I’m the owner,’ he replied, and I liked him immediately. It’s a lovely hotel, The Torre Maizza in Puglia, a walled Italian farm converted into a five-star gastro-spa, growing its own food and inhabiting its own time-zone. ‘Vitorrio,’ he said, shaking my hand and asking if I wanted to have dinner with him, and I liked him even more. There were so many things that I’d planned to do, that had nothing to do with being in Italy. I’d bought lots of stuff I had to catch up with, a guitar, coloured pencils, everything. I had plans. I always fail to foresee that going away, there’s always suddenly all this other new stuff to think about.

Brad, who has been my constant companion for the last couple of months, was just starting to appreciate the strange power of television. The terrible authority, the ridiculous effects of time on the small screen had taken a while to become apparent. By the time the first show went out, we’d already been filming for a month, shadowed by camera crews, asking us to say things again, do things again, explain how we felt about this, that and the other, and after the first episode he was a bit ruffled. ‘I can’t believe it! Four weeks of cameras and microphones and I was only on screen for three seconds! What a waste of time.’ It was probably a little bit longer than three seconds, but television time doesn’t obey the laws of physics. It is all in troy measures.

The giant sequoia is the largest living thing on the planet: a tree. There’s quite a well-known photo of one with a road going through the middle. They’re indigenous to North West America but, far from uncommon in this country, great avenues of them are lining drives of stately homes like moon rockets, skewing the scale of everything; odd specimens in parkland dwarfing the ancient oaks. I reckon I’ve got the tallest one in Oxfordshire. Mr Taplin said it was the tallest tree in Oxford when he sold me the farm, but he may have been mistaken.

Colin wanted to meet me in Aldsworth. I’d never heard of it but it was only about five miles away, between where I got married and where the reception was. Colin was the guy behind the British Mars shot a few years back — Colin Pillinger, the man who, given half a chance, could do for science what Damien Hirst has done for art: popularise, subvert and sophisticate at a stroke. You may remember his spacecraft Beagle 2 crash-landed on Mars on Christmas Day 2003. Space science is the great adventure of the 21st century. The first man on Mars has been born, no doubt about it. Colin knows that. I think he also knows that there is, or has been, life on the planet already. ‘Did you know they’ve just found water?’ he said, as we were ordering lunch.

‘Lunch at the Athenaeum!’ I told my mum. No idea what I was talking about. ‘The Athenaeum! It’s a gentleman’s club on Pall Mall. I’ve arrived, mother. Look at me now!’ I’ve been trying to break on to the gentleman’s club scene for a while. I’ve even joined one, a creaking Goliath down by the river. The dining room there is about the nicest in London, but I’ve only been once. The food is good: reasonably priced, old-fashioned splendour, whacking great Chateaubriand and whumping puddings that trump the décor for scale and invincibility. The ceilings are high and the conversation is low. The view is of the river and a room half full of people I’ve never seen before.

I wasn’t planning to take the family on holiday. We live on a farm and there’s always something happening. It gets harder and harder to drag oneself away. Claire got quite indignant about having missed the strawberries when we arrived home today. There were only a few soggy ones left. ‘If it’s not the strawberries it’s something else. We were always going to skip something. Try a redcurrant,’ I said cheerfully, spitting out a pip, but she ignored me. I even managed to find her some mulberries later, but I could tell she was still filled with loss. She’s pregnant and she needs strawberries. The year before last we went to Bournemouth and completely missed the plums. That was a total disaster.

Brad is cool. He was clearly demonstrating his ability to retain grace under pressure and I suppose that’s what conductors get paid for. The traffic on the A40 was at a standstill at Gypsy Corner and he was due to conduct Verdi’s Il trovatore in Holland Park very shortly. I was much more scared about being late than he was. I gingerly invoked the unthinkable. ‘What’s going to happen if we’re, you know, er, not there in time?’ ‘The conductor is the one person they have to wait for,’ he said, and lit a Marlboro. ‘Have you learnt the words?’ I’m learning how to conduct as part of an experiment for television and Brad thought it would be good for me to help him out at Holland Park.

Stephen Lipson, a record producer, lives in the village up the road. Well, he was very pleased with himself, glowing with satisfaction like someone who’d just finished a particularly abstruse crossword. Back in the parish after a couple of weeks in Los Angeles, where he’d been making the new American Idol record. He didn’t even bore me with playing the record itself like musicians always do, but he told me how he’d played everything on it because American session players are all muppets, and then four hours after he’d finished it, it was number one on iTunes. ‘And it still is!’ said Penny, his wife. ‘And top of the Billboard 100.’ For any record-maker, that’s a bull’s-eye. I like that guy, Stephen Lipson.

That’s a lot of violins, I thought. Then I realised they were violas. The violins were to the left, smaller. Always smaller than I expect, violins — maybe because I wrestled with one as a child and it beat me: Tiny, pretty little things they are, with all the fleeting glamour and tyranny of a whole crowd of Hollywood starlets. Those always come up small, too. The cellos were in their nest to the right of the violas. I don’t think there’s an instrument more beautiful to look at than the cello, all balancing curves and arches, setting off the perfect parallels and perpendiculars of the strings. The more I think about cellos, the more I want one. I’ve been meaning to get one for a while and suddenly there were a dozen at my fingertips.

My shadow was a tiny slippery puddle at my feet; the sun directly overhead and absolute. I had to crane my head right back to see it, not that you had to see it to know where it was. Free from the familiar clutter of light and shade, an enchanting landscape sat sublime at this celestial point due south, its grand symmetries wavering in and out of form and abstraction in the heat. From the corner of my eye I glimpsed a movement under a baobab tree: an animal in the shade. I was too hot to turn my head, but I moved my eyes and caught sight of a protruding horn with my peripheral vision. For maybe half a second I thought I’d seen a unicorn and hadn’t been at all surprised.

There are only two kinds of people: the ones that make you feel better and the ones that make you feel worse. It’s a shame, but, as far as I can tell, most people make you feel worse. Some are deliberate s***s, but most of them can’t help it. It’s important to hang on to the ones that make you feel better. That’s not always as obvious or easy as it sounds. My favourite work of art, ancient or modern, is only my favourite because every time I look at it, it makes me feel better. I’m not kidding. It works like magic. It’s a photograph of a man in a warehouse, all in black and white apart from the big square he’s holding, which is dayglo yellow. Underneath the photograph it says, ‘When I woke up in the morning, the feeling was still there.

I’m a celebrity for hire. I do good causes for free — makes me feel good, dunnit? That’s the deal. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Be delighted to open a Fairtrade event in Witney. Be lovely.’ ‘You’re doing what?!’ said Mrs Neate James on Saturday morning. ‘You’re going to Witney? Well, that’s lovely for you. I’ll look after the kids as well as being pregnant and working full-time, shall I? Huh. So selfish.’ She’s had a rough week, started a new job in fashion. There is only one time zone in fashion and that is ‘right now’.