Posted in Cheesemaker Visits on Nov 12, 2020.
I hurried past the fountain, its ornamental tiers and winged lions standing where once cattle and Red Leicester cheese would have been traded, a marketplace bustle now reduced to a pair of seated workers in hi-viz vests brandishing Tupperware sandwiches, and a confused-looking couple scrutinising a map. I approached Leicester Town Hall’s gates, imposing barriers of gilt Victorian ironwork designed to impress as much as suppress, and noticed only darkness through the surrounding windows. I tried the handles, slippery with the afternoon’s rain. Finding them unyielding, I stood wondering whether my quest was thwarted. It started to rain heavily again, striking down some remaining leaves from the plane trees and pasting them to the flagstones. It was getting dark and I was running out of time. I needed to find the town crier.
Posted in Cheesemaker Visits on Sep 28, 2020.
As the three-kilo cheese left my fingertips I realised I had made a serious mistake. It would have been prudent to check the woods either side of the fifty-metre strip of perilously steep pasture prior to launch. The cheese started with a short roll, hopped from a tuft, then quickly gathered pace down the 40% gradient, bouncing in increasingly long, high arcs; a golden projectile cartwheeling on a collision course towards an elderly couple and their spaniel who had just emerged from the trees. If it were ten-pin bowling I could not have aimed better.
Pam and I had spent the previous day with...
Posted in Cheesemaker Visits on May 23, 2017.
From Mordor to the Shire probably seems an unfair analogy to members of the M62 Appreciation Society, but leaving the motorway and dropping into Lincolnshire across the Humber Bridge gave the distinct impression that the heavy industry in my rear view mirror hadn’t yet found a way of fording the cold grey waters. Once into the rolling chalk hills of the Lincolnshire Wolds, the only nods to modernity were the far off sentinels spinning their energy from the North Sea winds. I arrived beside the clean red brick and polished glass of Ulceby Grange Farm, home to Lincolnshire Poacher cheese, with a...