Cheese: Nature’s LSD

Once I owned a plastic fish; it was nice and orange. Then it went for a swim in the porcelain abattoir, swooshing through the pipes and U-bends of regret, rolling, turning, spinning, screaming before flopping onto a rotten pile of mulch on Saltcoats beach. Columns of rain drilled its glistening corpse, flying hyenas circled the ashen skies. Then it was gone – upwards, upwards, upwards, lost deep in the barren howls and caws of Western Scotland.

I dreamt that last night. My penchant for toasted cheese as a late night snack is now under review, as is my weakness for imbibing Lidl’s table wine just before beddy-baws. Organic alchemy somehow transmuted cheese and wine into LSD in my brain. Emancipating your subconscious can be a harrowing odyssey, or it can be rather pleasant. Maybe I need to buy more expensive vino or switch to Sainsbury’s Camembert; then I will REM of a Scottish Xanadu where I’m loafing on an exotic beach, being served a Mai Tai by Marilyn Monroe. Then again, the wrong cheese and, it could be Andy Cameron wearing hot pants on the turd-ridden sands of Ayr.

Perhaps abstinence is the most judicious course of action. But you see, I do love my cheese. Cheddar primarily; good old-fashioned mature cheddar, gouged from the cow pales of the Scottish Isles. Mull is a wee stoater, and Orkney has me salivating like Pavlov’s dog outside Westminster Abbey. My favourite concoction is the Mother’s Pride outsider, suffocated by an avalanche of Oban mature, grilled and then tsunamid with Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce. If I ever bludgeoned Joe Pasquale with a mace, it would be my last meal on death row. So let us hail the exalted patriarch of heart disease – cheese – the only food that’s worth dying for, and dreaming for.