Alex James

The Christmas tree is big enough for the children to climb. The small ones could get lost inside somewhere. Every year that guy gets it exactly right. His expertise is one of the most pleasing things about the run-up to Christmas. The top is an inch from the ceiling. He has an eye for these things. He grows them and he knows them, brings one round on a lorry with bits of rope for lashing it off the banisters. I am a knot man myself, but his tying skills are in a different league, special Christmas-tree knots that fly the thing plumb perpendicular up the festive feng shui leylines. He’s a supreme genius of the spruce genus. Not bad for 50 quid. Trees belong to the class of things that cost as much as you’re prepared to spend — like pianos.

People ask me sometimes if I still do any music and I always tell them that music is a garden and, once you’ve been there, you never stop going back. It’s true. Then I go and talk to someone else. I know people ask my old band mate Damon the same thing sometimes, possibly just to annoy him. It is really annoying, actually. Never ask anyone who was once in a famous band if they’re still doing music, unless you want to annoy them. Of course they are. It’s heroin. I’ve got a big show on Friday. It’s at Geronimo’s pre-school. He asked if I’d come in with my guitar.

Soon we will live on Mars. There is no doubt about that. Space is the great adventure of this millennium. It’s growing more rapidly as a place of business than China or India. It just needs its Damien Hirst. One peerless and fearless luminary who can make us all realise how much we need a piece of it: someone who can take command of the heavens and sell them to us. We are already in a golden age of planetary science. Since the Apollo moon landings nearly 40 years ago there have been missions to every planet and most of the interesting moons in the solar system.

The Astoria Hotel in St Petersburg is acknowledged by one and all to be the best hotel in town. This doesn’t seem to be a matter of opinion, taste or committee, so much as an unassailable truth. My wife mentioned that we were going to St Pete’s to our impossibly rich neighbours and they named it, without prompting. I suppose you know somewhere is probably going to be all right if George Bush has stayed there. Whatever else you may think of him, it’s hard to disagree with the most powerful man in the world’s position on hotels. The thing about the world’s best hotels is of course that they are all annexes of one hotel, really. When we arrived, I realised I’d been to this hotel before, in Florence. It’s exactly the same.

My friend Spud had an Agusta 109. That’s the best type of helicopter. They’re like super-fancy flying Ferraris, shiny, and all Louis Vuitton and shagpile inside, the closest thing to a magic carpet that you can get. For Spud, the 109 was a skeleton key to everything, as well as a magic carpet to everywhere. People always wanted to borrow it to go to swanky soirées and special occasions in. Those he hardly knew invited him to grands prix, garden parties, Glastonbury, Glyndebourne and for the short amount of time that he owned it he went to absolutely everything. He sold it for a couple of million more than he paid for it, too. It’s funny how these things work. Everyone was happy in that invincible bubble.

The invitation to the Frieze Art Fair was a bigger parcel than anything that arrived on my birthday. It looked like a kind of ambassadorial visa package to a higher realm, and spa. Art invitations now outweigh fashion invitations. I mean they weigh more. The events grow ever more lavish as the art bubble perpetuates and stretches and puffs itself wider. There is more money flying around in the art world than there is flying around in space, the whole of the rest of the universe beyond the planet: perhaps as a species we’re still looking vainly in mirrors when we should be looking in telescopes. The Frieze invitation didn’t extend to my wife, who, having been excluded, immediately declared that she wanted to go.