Cheese, wine and John Keats

(Originally posted on 7th July 2007)

I came across something rather splendid in our cookery department today: a self-published book called The Cheesemonger's Tale by Arthur Cunynghame. The author was once a Royal Warrant Holder as cheesemonger to the Queen and the Prince of Wales. I'm not sure what treachery one has to commit to lose such a warrant, but it doesn't seem to have dented the man's enthusiasm for his subjects, those of cheese, wine and the elegant marriage of the two.

It's the sort of book that the big publishers don't really do any more, a gorgeous gallimaufry with no more of central thread than the search for great cheese, a book that could only come from the mind of someone so immersed in the subject that the wider world is probably much of a mystery to him. Anyone who speaks of brie as 'temperamental' clearly communes with the stuff in a way a dabbling amateur like me can scarcely appreciate. Dull adjectives like 'steely' and 'floral' are reinvigorated here and he certainly has my mouth watering at the prospect of some proper Wensleydale, especially after foolishly buying a bland lump of the stuff from Sainsburys last week.

There are earnest little asides too, on the evils of supermarkets and a remarkably unlikely, given the author's undoubted Englishness, defence of EU policy of protected foodstuffs. And I particularly liked his definitive statement on the eating, or not, of rinds: if you like the taste, eat it.

Today's award for outstandingly ignorant pomposity goes to the customer who first was disgusted that we no longer stock a book he had bought from us in 1976 and, after a brief hiatus during which he ferreted fruitlessly for Keats in children's poetry before being directed to the adult section, declared himself baffled why we did not have that author's 'The rime of the ancient mariner'. I imagine that you will take rather less time to spot the fatal flaw in his reasoning that it took me to convince him of it.

He just shades the accolade from the ill-advisedly mustachioed gentleman who raged about Philip Pullman's being kept in teenage fiction when 'he clearly writes for adults'. Let not the fact that he been published only by Puffin and Scholastic, two of our finest children's publishers, deter you, sir.

I suspect there is going to be a prominent vein of literary snobbery running throughout this blog. Still, I'll brook no objections and all who take offence should go off and reread their 'adult cover' versions of Harry Potter.