Forget the eggs
Alex James leads a Slow Life
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’. Tattling twits from America have been calling her at two o’clock in the morning, wanting to know if Cornwall is in Devon and whether it will be sunny there next Thursday. Unbelievable.
I’d imagined us all going to Witney together, singing along to the Stranglers’ Greatest Hits, cutting the tape at the town hall, grabbing some Nicaraguan coffee beans and then dashing off to Woolworth’s to go mental on plastic toys made in China. But she’d had 500 emails, voicemails, texts and instant messages while she slept, the kids had been to Witney the day before and it was raining. So I went on my own.
Parking hadn’t been part of my Witney dream, either. Eventually, I wedged the thing in somehow into a 30-minute spot and, noting a traffic warden, dashed in late.
Then I was holding an eight-foot inflatable Fairtrade banana and, for some reason, André Gide suddenly sprang to mind. Gide believed all our actions are ultimately selfish. Still holding the banana, I mused on how far we’ve come. The subsequent generation of French Thinkers believed that life was pointless. Any quest or need for deeper meanings in human existence seemed redundant concerns as I stood there grinning for the cameras with a gaggle of ecstatic prizewinning children and holding my gigantic, reasonable banana. It was profound. I was resonating in harmony with something pretty enormous, or whatever the opposite of nausea is. It is fair to say that everybody there was keen to make the world a better place for no other reason than it is the right thing to do. Gide! Pah! Married his cousin, too. I thumbed my nose at those historic consecutive wrong turns of shoaling French intellectual traffic and went for a sniff-round.
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Roger Cooper
March 19th, 2008 6:24pmI write this from Bohemia, having recently driven through Switzerland and Germany from Spain. In each of these four countries I noted a huge demand for painted Easter eggs. The Russians loved them in the old days, and probably do so once again. Jacquie, the brilliant and qunitessentially English greetings card designer, has a new one just out, both stylish and amusing. So it seems to me that it's just poor old Alex James that lacks any appreciation of this ancient art-form. Chocolate eggs from Woolworth's? They wouldn't even pass the EU chocolate test, and rightly so.
Gwen Porter
March 20th, 2008 11:05pmWhere does Alex James think the art of Fabergé eggs come from? Is the the lack of a hefty price-tag the reason for his lack of respect for the centuries-old art form? No, it cannot be that, because he thinks people should judge the value of their lives by what Tesco sells…
Timothy Smith
March 21st, 2008 12:18pmWho is Alex James to judge what is good taste. Painted eggs as an art form has a long tradition in Eastern Europe, and there are obviously people who are prepared to pay good money for them. To describe this as charity is both an insult to the tradition and to the practitioners of egg painting. Thank goodness there are things that we can buy that we can't get from Tescos. Save me from that world, please.