Alex James: The Great Escape

That was Epiphany Sunday, that last one. What a good time to have it, just when the fun has run out. An epiphany, a "sudden intuitive leap of understanding, especially through an ordinary occurrence" is the best present anyone could ever wish for. You can't buy epiphanies, or encourage them to happen in any way. They just come along sometimes and change the way you feel about everything. Isaac Newton had the greatest one: when the apple fell on his head, he realised everything in the universe was moving. You just have to be in the right place at the right time, I guess.

I had a cheese epiphany just before Christmas, my first authentic leap of cheese awareness. I was in the Ivy for the last time. I'm not going there any more now that Mark Hix has left. Anyway, Claire and I were tucking into a festive vacherin when a baked Alaska rolled past and was set alight at the next table. I'm rarely disappointed to be sitting in front of a plate of cheese, but once the commotion had died down and we came back to our vacherin, it didn't have the glamour of the flaming meringue.

And then, suddenly, it came to me: I will make a cheese that's on fire. A whole new paradigm of self-toasting washed-rind cheeses from hell was revealed to me in a moment of divine inspiration.

You can't expect to have moments of clarity like that very often, but I had set aside Epiphany Sunday morning for doing nothing at all, which is when all the best things happen. I'd been looking through some old Ordnance Survey maps of the farm in a folder the previous owner had given me. There was a geological survey done by the Gas Board in the Sixties illustrating the strata of bedrock going back to pre-Jurassic epochs, and some creepy stuff from local publications telling the stories of families who lived on the farm in the past, including a girl who died here (I keep wondering where). Then I found what I was looking for. There's a cricket pitch marked in the front field on a drawing from 1969, and this time I noticed that there was a pavilion alongside it.

It fell short of a divine revelation, but it was exciting. I'm running out of barns to turn into cheese factories. It's impossible to get planning permission to build anything in open countryside, but reinstating past structures is surely no more complex than a protracted legal battle with the Government.

Unperturbed, I went with Claire and Geronimo to look for traces of the pavilion. There was nothing to suggest cricket or Pimm's, just a soggy empty field. I hadn't been in that field for ages. There was something about it that was perfect, the uninterrupted sprouting crust of a huge Jurassic pudding. Geronimo fell in a big puddle and burst into tears. God, I love this place, I thought. Every time you notice how much you love something, glimpse it from another angle, that's a little epiphany.