A load of sour milk

Cheese. It’s one of my vices, along with a nice drop of single malt and fly fishing. The latter duo can quite easily be enjoyed together, I find, especially when standing in an ice cold stream on a crisp spring morning. To bring cheese into the mix, too, would be wrong, though. Wrong on numerous counts, the most prominent of which my lack of a third hand and fear of dropping any one of my triad of vices into the frigid waters.

But I don’t mention cheese as a prelude to rambling yarns of whisky soaked fishing adventures: no, I’ll save those for another time. Actually, I don’t merely mention cheese at all. “CHEESE!” I cry with a hoarse yelp that causes my voice to break and reveals my panic. The reason: cheese is so astronomically expensive here in Canada.

When I initially toyed with the idea of immigrating to Canada I weighed up the pros and cons. The low cost of petrol, sorry gas; the wonderful homes I could trade in my tiny London apartment for; the life amongst nature; the friendly people… OK, I got hung up on the pros. I just didn’t see any cons. But that is exactly what Canadian cheese is, a huge con!

Back in London, in a grocery store of the same size and type as your Independent or Foodland, I could buy a block of cheddar for quite literally half the price of a slab of Cracker Barrel. And get this; it was Canadian cheddar. Yep, emblazoned across the wax paper packaging of a piece of cheese the size of a house brick were the words ‘Canadian Extra Strong Cheddar, produce of Canada’.

Oh how I salivated at the thought. How I imagined the vast tongue-tingling mountain of cheddar awaiting me. It all made sense. If Canadian cheese was £3.00 ($4.50 to you folks) in England it must be virtually free in the Promised Land!

My mind was made up there and then in the grocers: “we’re moving to Canada,” I exclaimed to no one in particular. An old lady pushing a trolley, sorry shopping cart, looked at me quizzically. I smiled and wiped the drool from my beard.

Now, I’m no cheese snob. I don’t yearn for mouldy stilton, so blue it could run for Stephen Harper’s job; nor a nose withering fisherman’s sock of an epoisses - I’ll leave that one to the French. That’s not to say I’m a Kraft slice man either: god forbid. And the stuff that comes out of cans! It should be confiscated and burned, for I think it a worse evil than the hard drugs that the authorities dispose of in such a way. No, all I want is a good strong hunk of cheddar. Make that two hunks, enjoyed with a thick slice of homemade bread. 

And so, you can picture my horror, feel my pain, at the moment reality hit home. When, after turning into the refrigerated goods aisle – cheddar flavoured butterflies fluttering in my stomach; my trolley, sorry cart, a yawning empty vessel just waiting to be stacked high with that extra strong yellow gold - I drew up alongside the cheese display…

Where once my use of the word ‘gold’ may have been seen as a Freudian slip, now it is a down hearted, even maudlin (blame that on the Scotch) statement of fact. Why? Because here in my adopted home cheese costs more than freakin’ gold!

While here in Canada a bottle of good whisky – not the crap you folk mix Coke – is on par with prices back in Blighty. While fly fishing gear is considerably cheaper and access to water in which to use it isn’t controlled by some jodhpur-wearing, plumy voiced aristocrat. Cheese, that soured milk staple, has been priced out of reach of the common man; and me!

And so, as I take a break from casting my nymph, from seeking out that elusive trout, I’ll take a dram to warm my cockles. I’ll pluck a hunk of crusty bread from my pack and I’ll ponder my life here in Canada. A life so full of wonder but a life blighted by the price of cheese.