Some people are quite obsessed with cheese. To some, a savoury dish isn’t complete without, what is quite frankly, the compressed solids of gone-off milk. Cheese with baked beans, cheese with pasta, baked pasta with cheese and tuna, cheese on chips, cheese on chilli, cheese on burritos, cheese with wine, cheese with biscuits, cheese, cheese, cheese.

I’m not such a fan. Don’t get me wrong, a bit of crumbly Lancashire with piccalilli is divine, and parmesan definitely has its place, but it’s the sort of thing that I can enjoy in moderation.

There’s this weird thing that you’ll see on menus at restaurants amongst the desserts: cheeseboard. Cheese is NOT a pudding. When I own my restaurant, I will replace the cheeseboard with “chessboard”. Oh, how I will laugh at the faces of customers who order a strategic boardgame, thinking there was a typo on the menu. The chess pieces will be made of intricately-shaped mini puddings: take one of your opponent’s pieces, get to eat it. I bet it’s already been done in some fancy schmancy eatery somewhere, only with pieces of carved cheese. Nobheads.

Nob cheese.

Vegans
What I certainly can’t comprehend is the concept of vegan cheese. For goodness’ sake, aren’t these weirdos’ lives miserable enough as it is without more self-punishment? It’s no less than they deserve. I find it puzzling that people who take on a lifestyle that eschews all animal products think it’s acceptable to have animal-product substitutes. There’s a deep philosophical argument in there somewhere that I don’t have the intellectual capacity to engage in. But surely if you have an attitude with the supposition that it’s wrong to exploit animals in any way, then having fake animal products is akin to saying, “Well, actually, I really like eating animals and their by-products and I can’t really live without them totally, not psychologically at least, so I eat pretend animal by-products”. If you were to fully embrace the whole vegan thing, then you’d consume only things that have ever been and only ever pretended to be vegetables, or soil, or whatever, not things that maintained that mental link to your meat-eating past.

Or, just not eat at all and fuck off and die, you fucking crackpot weirdos.

Cafe culture
As I ate my, wait for it, cheese and piccalilli sandwich this evening, I was taken back to my childhood when Mum used to treat us to lunch at the Kingfisher Cafe on Swinton Precinct. There, I’d always have the same thing: cheese salad barmcake with a strawberry milkshake. I always took great pleasure in making as much noise as possible as I sucked the last foamy bits of pink milk up through my straw. It was one of those places that was always busy with people who were taking a break from their shopping. The smell was coffee and Embassy Regal, with a little bit of the chippy from next door that wafted in when the door was opened.

It was delightful. Everything was back then, when life wasn’t complicated by the need to have things, to be a certain way.

Every time I go to a cafe, I always look to see if there’s a milkshake option on the menu. More often than not, my pursuit of childhood pleasures ends in disappointment and an Americano or a fruit smoothie. Living in the 21st century isn’t always all that it’s cracked up to be and it would be nice if we could maybe stop and think about what made us happy when we were kids, bottle all that up and recreate it somewhere special that’s insulated from from the worst bits of what stresses us all in adulthood. Back to a place and time when cheese was the main part of a sandwich and not an unnecessary accompaniment.

Le weekend
The tiredness I’ve been experiencing for the past couple of weeks – brought on mainly by the onset of autumn and restless nights’ sleep – has me looking forward to this le weekend more than I have done for a while. What’s even better is that I have given myself an October bank holiday Monday and so, when the majority of the working masses are having that Sunday night feeling, I shall at least for one weekend, be immune to the dread of the Monday morning alarm clock.

And it’s things like this that make me an absolute winner.