All Cheeses Great and Small by Alex James: review I'm not the sort of person who reads celebrity rich lists. But by the end of Alex James's second volume of autobiography, I really wanted to see the man's accounts. As the bass player in Blur (which I'm not quite sure qualifies him to continually describe himself as a "rock star") he must have made a decent wedge. But, as we learnt in his first book, A Bit of a Blur, he spent as he went. All the usual rock'n"roll clichés featured on his cheque stubs: swanky London pad, trashed hotel rooms and £1 million blown on cocaine and champagne. Admittedly, by rising to fame in the years preceding iTunes and illegal downloads, the era-defining Britpoppers were the last wave of musicians to make real money from real records. So when the band broke up in 2003, not only did James have enough cash left over to buy a 200-acre farm in the Cotswolds, he apparently also had enough to spend the next decade continually renovating the farmhouse's 100 rooms and turning one of them into a state-of-the-art "cheese lab" for making artisan dairy products. I know that a couple of these cheeses ("Blue Monday" and "Little Wallop") have won awards and there's been a collaboration with Asda (producing cheeses blended with salad cream and ketchup). But can that, a few bits of journalism and the disappointing sales of The Best of Blur still be funding a lifestyle which, in this book's closing pages, sees James putting a diamond necklace on his cat? Even if I could ask James about his finances, I doubt he could enlighten me. "I'd never really thought about money," he writes. I've come to realise that's probably all being rich is, as good as it gets: not thinking about money. It's a state of being which probably sounds pretty good to most of our recession-whipped population right now. But James is there to reassure us that "luxury," apparently, "can be a bigger obstacle to the world than poverty." Luckily for the hordes of suffering idle rich, James is living proof of a cure: "Since becoming a farmer I had noticed that existential angst, the terrible malaise that afflicts all those who have too much of anything, had evaporated completely." Alas, for James, most of the idle rich have already figured this out and are running their own organic farms in the vicinity. He gushes unbearably about the glamorous clientele of the farmshop run by the wife of a local billionaire which "radiates prestige" (but loses millions) and gazes in green-eyed envy at neighbouring stately piles (just as he once went weak-kneed over Dave Stewart's pop star flat in town). I'd always felt that Blur were the band that defined my generation of middle-class kids - and James's pronouncement that his forties would be "about food" reflects the aspirations of my friends. The boys and girls with whom I'd bopped about to Beetlebum at the university's indie disco now spent their Friday nights watching River Cottage on television. I guess we fantasise about peat-free grow bags the way we once did about playing Glastonbury, so this book ought to be a perfect slice of escapism. But James's total detachment from reality made me uneasy. "On the whole," he writes, "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 gipsies from the trailer park as cleaners and they fascinated me. The younger one was very pretty... she gave us all her Burberry hand-me-downs. They were kind people. The older cleaner is "the not-so-pretty gipsy girl." At its best, James's prose is clean and poetic. His childlike wonder at the simple things - from herons to heaps of rubble - can be infectious. But more often he's stating the bleedin" obvious: "death is a downer," trees "are a huge part of life in the country" and, in agriculture "everything is driven by cost." Just as he once thought himself the first pop star to snort coke and shag groupies, so he now thinks himself the first to discover that the English countryside is more than just a hangover cure. And can the man whose band had its biggest hit mocking the rural aspirations of the "city dweller, successful fella" who "thought to himself oops I got a lot of money" really miss the irony? All Cheeses Great and Small by Alex James 300pp, Fourth Estate T £13 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (rrp £16.99, ebook £9.99)