Cheese

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s315/sh/aecbf413-e5ce-41d1-8804-e83356d0f692/035dcd2698cfca7e4352d600c9e6a6da

My first ever memory of cheese was Dairy Lea - full of dairy goodness (I think). Triangles of cheese often sticky fingers foiled again between French and PE. The Laughing Cow? Not until my teens. Primula in tubes? Not sure I was keen. Kids go for Dairy Lea. Unwrapping those shielded triangles and fading out of the eighties to 99% of Gargoyles look like Bob Todd. Some times mother would intrigue us youths with Norwegian Jarlsberg and Jacob's Crackers

Australia was only Tasty Cheese and Coon (we POM's did snigger!).

Then the gap between comprehensive school and university of COOP universally not comprehending cheddar, distressed cottage, yellowed cream and blandly processed spray on sunshite for Bird's Eye Burgers until my final year when a cheese shop opened in Jesmond Newcastle upon Tyne then matured Gruyère, Montegomery's or Quickes' Cheddar and Shropshire Blue, when our communal fridge became hazardously malodorous when ever we looked hopelessly on that heavy cheese, with a found Lambic Leifmans Kriek from Oddbins or Chimay which was ever meant to stir the cheese.

While I was educated in the bad ways of corporation beer there was an unnatural forgetfulness of cheeses; apart from on Pizza, while I had left university and became lost to my ego and I did not see - I drank Miller's, Carling, Foster's and 4X, but one summery evening in Nottingham, when Wit bier reminded me, I was found again and never looked back (now cheese and beer has become also with wine and cider and as I matured beautifully).

What then of Cheese & Co.? A cheeseshop sketch it became as re-branded to Epicurean Deli, moved further down High Street Wetherby and a fowl-faced man forgot his cheese for plasticine sandwich fillings for officer zombies and self rendering prosciutto. And on North Street this zombie feeder opened a weigh it your self olde shoppe(pound$$aver) in affluent Wetherboid; gone was cheese unless you gooned to Morrison's unredeveloped(Wensleydale (we like a bit of cheese (ye are forced to!))

Losing my local cheese orientating means I sought for foreign strands in Brittany and thankfully in this sundrie lond found Morbier (shaped like rugger ball) and Comte with some other Jura vine and was on a path of cheese's redemption. What is cheese other than truth in a Frenchman's interpretation. The creamy tangy sootiness of Morbier or the smooth earthy strong flavour of Comté are great stage posts for francophile boldness in years to come. (Cidré was quaffed with Comté - Hallelujah).