At the age of 86 I invented cheese

At the age of 86 I invented cheese

It was a simple chance occurrence; some goats milk left out had fermented into a cheesy mould.

I was overwhelmed at the flavour, the texture, the sheer wonder of it. At my very first taste I was already a cheese addict.

Why, I cursed the gods, why have I lived through 86 years of life before tasting perfection? At best I might live another year or so, but with my mind and taste buds failing. My peak cheese appreciating years had long since passed, I would never truly benefit from my discovery.

I decided to change the course of history. To go back in time and teach our ancestors the art of cheese making. It would mean that I would enjoy an entire lifetime of cheese, not just the last few months or years of my dotage.

Of course, there are strict codes covering time travel and taking cheese back in time is against every law ever written. If I’d simply gone back to an earlier point in my own life and given myself the recipe this would surely have been spotted – crossing your own time line shows up on every graph and any discovery or invention is especially closely scrutinised to ensure that it hasn’t be stolen from a later inventor.

However, cheese was one of the discoveries that could have happened at any time over the last 10,000 years, any human being anywhere in the world from a Malayan goatherd to a 7th century pope could have let their milk curdle. I went back 8,000 years or so and taught the cheese making art to a number of tribes across Africa. This far back in history a discovery would never be investigated.

If you have ever changed the course of history in this way you will recognise the sensation of new memories forming as history is rewritten. Warm, rich, cheesy memories filled my mind. My mother giving me a corner of cheese off her cracker, when I was still a crawling babe, then an entire cheese-filled childhood slowly filled my mind: family picnics, school lunches, comprising a thick wedge of cheddar between sticky thin white bread and thick butter, Dairy Lee, cheese and onion crisps, trips to pizza restaurants, cheesy evening meals: lasagne, cauliflower cheese and the first meal I ever cooked myself – cheese on toast.

Adulthood arrived. “You eat too much cheese,” my first university girlfriend warns me, as cheese takes over every meal. But I ignore her, I wanted Brie, Camembert, Roquefort, Cheddar. I want cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese. “You’re a cheeseaholic,” she tells me, “you’d rather spend a night with a piece of feta than with me.” She leaves me and within weeks I am going out with the girl from the cheese shop.

Ow!

My head hurts. This is the mental pain that comes with a major life change. The whole of my memory is being rebooted, sixty plus years of life are being ripped up and being replaced one by one, slice by slice, by cheese-dominated alternatives. For that university girlfriend was no casual fling, she was my life partner, my wife, mother of my children, the woman who introduced me to Beethoven, ow, my memory stings again as I say farewell to Beethoven, my children. Even the dog has gone. All gone over a pointless, brie-based quarrel.

My mind is in turmoil. I recoil on the floor in physical pain as yet more memories are installed and more are removed. Sarah moving in with me, our first night in our first date, the flash flood that prevented our first attempt at a wedding, the wedding day kiss, the home pregnancy test, the labour that eventually led to Kevin’s birth, it was if all these precious memories had to go to make room for the cheese. I am left feeling emotionally empty.

New memories form in their place: I get my first job after uni and with it comes money, real income for the first time in my life. And I spend it – on cheese. I become a known face at all the specialist stores in London. I savour every brand, breed and flavour. For from the simple goats cheese I invented has grown an astonishing explosion of tastes and textures: Stilton, Gorganzola, Caerphilly, Blue Monday, Blue Vinney, Lori, Tilsit, Chhena, Banon, Limburger. A whole new world, made entirely of cheese.

Another life change. I leave medicine to become chief cheese critic for the Evening Standard. Memories of talking to patients, befriending the community, saving lives, all disappear. In their place memories of eating cheese and writing about it.

My mind has been wiped blank and rewritten. I have caught up with my memory. I am 86 years old; alone, impoverished and overweight. Everything I ever had, valued, loved I have thrown away, all because of cheese.

And yet – I crave it still. For though I have memories of brie and camembert I have never actually tasted them, never tasted any cheese bar my own home-made concoctions.

I leave the prehistoric village and return to my own time. I descend on the first cheese shop I see and gorge myself until I vomit.

Return to my own time, I say, yet it is not my time. Technology, culture, art, politics, everything is a thousand years out of date. Around me people still travel by car, important decisions are still left to humans, computers not yet advanced sufficiently to run the world. As a result there is war, corruption and folly in every walk of life.

I decide to travel back in time to prevent myself spreading my cheeses – to undo the harm I have done. But it is too late. In this ignorant age time-travel has never been invented. Indeed, none of the great discoveries have been made,

The headline in today’s paper says it all. “Higgs Bosun discovered.” Ancient history being played out in my own time. The great inventors that would have been, have instead spent their time stuffing themselves with cheese. Instead of returning to their labs after dinner the world’s inventors simply stayed on for the cheese course.

As for our colonies, man has never travelled further than the moon. We have no colonies, we have never so much as met alien life, never so much as stepped outside our solar system. I feel more memories leaving me: the tastes of Malavian beaver meat, Trapacilisian Salads, Calooomino Volcano Juices; a million tastes and memories leaving my system, the culinary delights I once enjoyed from all over the universe have been replaced by the all-conquering flavour of cheese.

I have destroyed mankind. Thanks to my discovery of cheese our species will never develop beyond thinking about the next cheesy comestible.

The guilt, the loneliness, the mental exhaustion is too much for me. I decide to take my own life.

There is only one way for me to die.

I lay out the biggest cheeseboard I can afford. Cheddar, Wensleydale, Stinking Bishop, Motal, Livno, Gruyere. Twenty different cheeses, somewhere in the region of 50,000 calories. I eat, gorge, guzzle, gobble, gulp, scoff and stuff myself. I feel the very arteries squeal with pain, my brain screaming with sensation overload, my heart overworked, blood and veins clogged with oceans of fat. By the fourth course my brain has been reduced to stodge, I have simply become a cheese eating machine, an automaton, focussed on ensuring my own death. Still there is room for one last mouthful of cheese. I open my mouth and plunge the morsel into the stinking cavern.