When Cheese Attacks

But there is no reason whatsoever why one should not start a sentence with the word 'but'. However, it is advisable never to attempt to start a sentence with a hammer, as words are fragile and easily dented.

You may say; 'this is all very well, but what has it to do with cheese?'

Very little, actually.

I'm sorry, I know the article is entitled When Cheese Attacks, but there is a… slight problem. Cheese is, by its very nature, a pacifist. Very few chesses are naturally aggressive - with the obvious exception of Feta, of course - and tend very much to mind their own business, unless severely provoked.

So, despite the title of this article there are very few accounts of out and out cheese aggression in the literature, except - of course - the great Manchester Sage Derby riot of 1847. It is a tale often told, and taking its familiarity to all who even profess the slightest interest in cheese for granted, we can move on to some of the less well documented cases - few that there are - of rampant cheese aggression.

Let us begin with a case recorded back in 1899 when a Stilton ran amok, poisoning seven people in the now infamous Shrewsbury Stilton Slaughtering. The Stilton, which had murdered the people because 'they smelt a bit funny', was caught by the first ever recorded use of a Carrier Hamster to deliver a warrant for the Stilton's arrest while the cheese was still at the port of Dover, attempting to flee the country.

In the late 1950s, gangs of Dutch Edam wandered the streets of London's East end, ostensibly for their own protection from traditional British cheeses upset about the 'waves of Immigrants'. The Conservative politician, Kneejerk Bilefoaming, specifically mentioned them in the now-infamous contemporary speech where he claimed the rivers of Britain will be running with curds and whey if the waves of immigrant cheeses were not curtailed. The resulting tension exploded into in the Edam riots of 1957 when six Edams attack and savagely sliced some Cheshire cheese on its way home from a party.

In 1978 a man, Excrescence Dobbindong, out taking his dog for a walk was savagely beaten by a round of Double Gloucester in need of a fix of 'herbs'.

In 2003 'Red' Leicester was expelled from the Labour party for openly admitting he was a socialist. Three days later at the Labour Party's annual Conference, he attacked Tony Blair with a packet of Cheese Crackers, severely bruising the then Prime Minister's grin.

The Lake

The water looked deep and cold, inviting, on such a hot day. She wanted to step out of her dress and wade into the water. She wanted to walk out into the lake until the waters covered her and her hair fanned out on the surface of the lake like some dark-red lily pad. Only when she could hold her breath no longer would she burst out from under the water and start swimming.

She wondered, briefly, what her white body would look like through the distorting refraction of the water as she swam slowly out from the shore. She found that the thought that the edges of her body would become indistinct, wavy, fuzzy and distorted was a kind of comfort to her. She no longer wished to be sharply-defined against the background of the world. She wanted to blend, to merge - not invisible - but to become one with the world she walked through, and not to feel she was joined in battle, in conflict, with it all the time. She was tired of the constant struggle.

She looked down once more at the surface of the lake, sighed and picked up the package - damp from the dew-soaked grass - and turned back to the path without looking back. 

The Face Of A Morning

The slow beginning of a day and the birdsong grows out of the twilight to bring the sun up to the face of morning. We are here, waiting for the day to begin whilst the rest of the world is sleeping, missing this – the best part of any day.

Maybe that best part is the lack of anything human, though, so maybe if everyone woke up at the crack of dawn then it would, like everything else touch by the heavy human hand, be made bland by overuse. 

That Place

I go back down to that place. It remains the same: the same trees, the same bushes, the same grass and the same old twisting brambles. Of course, over the years - even though it has remained the same – it has changed. The trees, the bushes… everything has grown. That is, except for a small part of it that must have burnt somehow – where the grass is shorter, greener, as though recently shaved for an operation.

Yes, it remains the same place, but it has grown smaller as I have grown taller. What once seemed immense, large enough for all the possibilities of a child’s imagination, now seems far too small to have held within itself so much of my early years.

I hated school. I never seemed to learn the knack of being a sociable person, friends and family were there, but always distant. This tree, at the centre, and all that surrounds it, enclosed in this small piece of waste ground, saw the best times of my childhood. 

Monday Poem: Summoning

[Every Monday (until I run out of them), I’m posting a poem of mine that has fallen out from the submission process for some reason. In most cases, it will be one where I’ve received no response to my submission for at well over a year or more. Maybe the magazine I submitted them to has folded, the submission was lost in the post, or whatever. So, these poems can be seen as lost, orphans, of uncertain status, or something like that.]

These poems are also posted to ABCTales.

Summoning

There's a time for gentle carving,
perhaps in front of the fire
during the long winters,
when the possibility of spring
seems as hollow as a promise
no-one is expected to keep.

A time for more than ritual.

A time that calls for something
far more permanent, more solid
than just a ceremony of words.

Words can conjure demons,
words can draw out ghosts.

But it will take much more than words,
more than gestures and formal arrangements
for spring to listen,
for the ancient mother to hear.

These are stones, carved
by ancient, old fingers.
These are stones of calm purpose.

Shopping Trolleys

Those days are long gone now when the mighty herds of shopping trolleys would sweep majestically across the wipe open plains of the unspoilt car parks of this land. Of course, that was before mankind hunted them almost to extinction, and those few that are left keep huddled together in their special trolley reserves dotted about what mankind has left of those once mighty car parks that legend has it used to stretch as far as the eye could see without a single supermarket or DIY Megasupastore in sight.

Of course, there is occasionally one stray trolley left alone sometimes near the edge of the car park, maybe it is old and its wheels no longer all move in independent and mutually opposing directions any more, maybe it has lost its breeding chain that enables it to mate with the other trolleys. But, for whatever reason, now it is alone and is therefore easy prey to those troglodytes, or even small bands of Studenti - who like to prey on lone shopping trolleys - often subjecting them to several hours of trolley abuse before sacrificing them in mystical midnight ceremonies to the God of the canals.

Of course, mankind has cruelly abused the shopping trolley, using it as a beast of burden, forcing it to spend hours at a time being pushed down endless-seemingly aisles overloaded with shopping. Then - at the check-out - it is cruelly unloaded and re-loaded before heading back out into the car park where it is unloaded yet again before the now severely traumatised trolley is allowed to rejoin the rest of the herd in the trolley sanctuary.

Time And The Sky Revolve Around Us

There are stars beyond the distance of everything we can see. There is nothing out there close to the touch, even though a single hand can blot out the night sky and take all eternity away.

The dawning light can take the worries of the night away too. We can feel the coldness of distance in those dark hours so we make up stories to give us comfort and put ourselves back at the centre of everything.

Time and the sky revolve around us, we can tell ourselves tales to make the sun appear and the winter run away. We can ascribe and see patterns where there is no cause except the push of life to keep on keeping on.

A day begins and later it ends and we remain alone in the darkness once again. It is no wonder we do not want to be alone, that we draw curtains against it. We are frightened of the dark – what it hides and what it reveals.

We create the monsters that haunt our dreams and all the creatures that hide in dark places and in shadows; we bring them out into the night to warn ourselves that the darkness holds all our secrets too.