Alex James: The Great Escape

We're nearly ready to decorate the au pair's bit. "Who can paint?" I asked. "If you can piss, you can paint," said John, slowly and wisely, and everybody cheerfully agreed. We were sitting in the static caravan – me, John, the semi-retired chippy with a lifetime's worth of bawdy aphorisms, and Blackham and Doa, the only idlers left in the village, or they were until they started working here. I feel bad for steamrollering Blackham and Doa's idyllic lifestyles. They were happy growing their own vegetables and going to see Motörhead occasionally, but the Kingham bubble has swept up everyone in its path and it is no longer possible to live here and not have a job, even if you're retired.

September was everywhere, silver sunlight and long shadows standing still in a strong breeze. They've got it looking quite cosy in the caravan. Paddy bought it for 900 quid just after we moved in and the price is still painted on one of the windows. This caravan was briefly a surprise hit with the style magazines, but now they've moved on to "shed chic" and "hot huts" and it's back to being a plain old unfashionable static caravan. I like it in there, though. So do the gang. They all have their own spots and mugs. The garden masterplan seems to have its own seat, as well. It has become a member of the family, too. In summer, when the new garden was still a field, the drawing had to be stuck back together after the dog tried eating it.

Now it looks like a treasure map, covered in muddy thumb-prints, coffee-cup rings, quite a lot of "X"-marks-the-spots, and mystic annotations. Blackham took it home and spent the weekend with it trying to make sure the electricity and water supplies don't have to cross or share ditches, a complex problem of higher mathematics similar to the Bridges of Königsberg, which has no solutions in three dimensions. Blackham reckoned this particular topological conundrum could be solved with a three-ton dumper and a mini excavator.

I didn't expect building a garden to be as interesting as sitting in one doing nothing, but I doubt when it is finished it will be as interesting to people or as much fun as it is now. Building things is better than things. Things just sit there, finished, over, and boring by comparison. Part of me wants to keep digging. There's all kinds of stuff coming out of the ground, clay tiles and engineering bricks, underground springs and keystones. It must have been beautiful before, maybe 100 years ago. For some weeks, the area has looked like a battlefield. Visitors gasp at what used to be a meadow, stripped back to bare its bottom and riven with trenches. It looks dramatic, but how wrong can a garden go, really? It can't. It would be hard to get a garden wrong, or do it in bad taste. If all else fails get a bigger digger. That's the new family motto, "Excavate et Rexcavate." It applies to everything, not just gardening.

a.james@independent.co.uk