All Cheeses Great and Small

This is the story of Alex James's transition from a leading light of the Britpop movement in the 1990s, to gentleman farmer, artisan cheese-maker and father of five.

All Cheeses Great and Small is the follow-up memoir to Alex James's first book, Bit of a Blur, the story of his excessive pop star lifestyle during the nineties. But now Alex has grown up, fallen in love and got married. He has also fallen passionately for his new home, an enormous rambling farmhouse in the Cotswolds, set in two hundred acres of beautiful British countryside.

The farm represents not just a new house for Alex, but also a new career. As he breathes new life into the old farm he chances across an unexpected calling: making cheese. His cheeses, Blue Monday, Farleigh Wallop and Little Wallop have received widespread media interest and are now sold through many outlets.

The story culminates with an account of the triumphant reformation of Blur for Glastonbury 2009.

Reviews

‘James's prose is clean and poetic. His childlike wonder at the simple things – from herons to heaps of rubble – can be infectious'. Daily Telegraph

‘A joy to read. Prose flows and weaves and curls itself into pleasing rhythms…(Alex James) can write like a god.' Spectator

‘The upbeat tone matches that of his Blur-era autobiography A Bit Of A Blur, treating his downsize from rock heart-throb to cockerel-throttling country gent as if cheese contests were Britpop orgies. Riding bikes, the smell of berry bushes, piles of cow dung: all brilliant' NME

About the author

Writer, musician and cheesemaker Alex James is bestknown as the bass player in Blur, a time he chronicled in his acclaimed first book Bit of a Blur.

Alex James lives on a farm in Oxfordshire with his wife and five children. He writes a weekly column on all things food for the Sun, as well a regular column on farm and family life for the Sunday Telegraph.