Cheesy Practices

I can’t speak for the others, but I’m going to assume they all feel exactly the same; cheese is the greatest thing on the face of the planet. At some point a scientist will discover that it has life extending properties, and makes you dead attractive while eating it or carrying a wheel of it about in public. If somebody thought about it for a bit, I’m betting cheese could solve all religious conflicts and end world hunger – especially the last one.

When you first escape from the family home, forging your way and your independent life, you live on tins of beans and cheese. Cheese in sandwiches, on jacket potatoes, on top of the beans, layered and melted with ham – you name it, there’s not a recipe that doesn’t benefit from cheese. Even the best puddings have cheese in them. Well, the only pudding worth eating.

But times are changing. There’s some kind of bait and switch going on.

Forty years ago you could fill half a fridge with cheeses and it would have cost you the equivalent of a cigarette or something. Cheese was almost free. Then the price went up as soon as the cheese magnets clicked on you’d started a family and needed four times the amount. But it was OK, Big Cheese catered for your needs by selling you 500g packs, that’s over 1lb of cheese a pack in old money.

But it turns out that Big Cheese is no better than the bloke selling crack down the Rec. It has us all hooked and it can now treat us as its playthings. The 500g packs stayed the same size but only had 450g inside. This then shrank to 400g. The cost remained the same as the contents were reduced to ‘just barely over one sandwich worth‘ 350g.

Then the wife cam home from shopping at Tescasdaburies. She came home, reached into one of the bags and asked me to place the thing that she was handing me into the fridge. Something didn’t feel right. In fact, things were very, very wrong. It seems like only a few months ago all cheese was for sale in half-kilogram blocks – the pathetic specimen languishing in my palm was a 300g sliver. They got more cheese on ration during the war.

Probably.

It’s an outrage. It’s a crime against humanity. Is this the future? Have we all become extras in The Fifth Element? Vendors are now flogging off all their non-TPD compliant juice stocks. Soon it’ll all be tiny 10ml bottles. Next up: Cigarettes will be all filter, and you’ll have to queue outside licensed vape shops to have three drops dripped onto your coil once a week.

If this is the best the future has to offer then I’m off to overdose on a slab of Lancashire and a roule of full-fat soft garlic and herb nonsense.