I’m the Woody Allen of health and wellbeing. I’m not a hypochondriac but I did suffer a lot of illness when I was younger. A liver condition I had from the age of 10 hospitalised me when I was 21. I was actually dying. But it changed my life for the better. I was eating all the wrong foods and my liver couldn’t deal with it. So that threw me into Eastern medicine and things that in 1980 were considered to be completely whacky. I remember taking the vicar’s daughter I was going out with to her first yoga class and the next month in the parish newspaper was a piece about yoga being the work of the devil.
In my 20s I fell into a meditation cult, no alcohol or drugs, and days of meditation where you don’t move. Then we found the gurus doing everything we weren’t allowed to so we disbanded. But the meditation stayed. I now see it as technology rather than spirituality, which always has an aspect of hierarchy and holier-than-thou involved.
I have a shadow side and I’d never pretend otherwise. I can be as irritating as the next person and I have my own addictive drives that are hard to change. I waste time watching TV, and getting lost on the internet down a rabbit hole – not even the white rabbit hole, more like Alice in Consumerland.
I’m really happy with how I’m ageing. I feel blessed with the body I’ve got. But part of me can’t understand how I can be 58. I want to grow old but die suddenly. That would be my dream way of going, not, “Oh the windscreen wiper isn’t working and the doors don’t open.” I’d rather a quick exit than leave debris on the highway.
James play Kendal Calling festival, 26-29 July. The new James album, Living In Extraordinary Times, is out on 3 August via Infectious Music
