What a friend we have in cheeses

The Borough Market is the place where Georgina and I thought we had died and gone to heaven. For Georgie it was not The Houses of Parliament or The Globe or The Rosetta Stone that is the marvel of London; it is the cheeses at The Borough Market. And, as Annie Lennox said: who am I to disagree. At one stall, I asked to try something unpasturerised: that would be all the cheese they had; something not available in Australia: again all the cheese they had, something really unusual... well, you get the picture. We tried to repress that wierd cross between panic and excitement that we were experiencing but only barely managed it.

Just as we thought we had found some sort of capacity to digest all that we had seen and all that we had tasted, we spied Neale's, a stand alone shop just across from the main market. I recognised the names of one or two cheeses: stilton, gorgonzola, but the rest were new to me. Dribbling, oozing, bleeding rounds of creamy delight. What is a girl to do? We tasted more and more until we become an embarrassment, and then we only thought about stopping. In the end, I bought oat biscuits, raspberry jam, apple relish, balsamic vinegar, fig infused balsamic syrup and cheese. I don't even know the name of the cheese I took home, but that did not seem to matter to him at all. He sat quietly in my handbag all the way home waiting to meet his doom. Georgina left the market with almond croissants and fudge packed in her bag, just in case we needed something to tide us over on the 500 metre walk along The Thames to our next engagement.

The only fitting follow up to the market was The Sainson Poetry Library in London's Festival Hall where we briefly snuck into the members' lounge. I looked up some Yestevshenko and literary criticism on Philip Larkin. The Poetry Library was inhabited by two librarians and two parties of guests. One man sat with his two sons reading and drawing, and Georgina and I grazed through the stacks and compactors. It is a great spot for a quiet retreat and we spied a party of homeless people picnicing on their meagre rations in one of the quiet rooms in Festival Hall. It summed up something about London that those who live a truely wretched life in England's winter, take refuge inside these lovely living monuments to the best the western culture has delivered. We had seen first hand the night before what happens after dark. After our play, we walked down the underpass to the station where people were laying out their sleeping bags in one corner and pissing in another as they prepared to bed down for the night. And a winter's night in London is truely bitter. I don't think they were singing "What a friend we have in Jesus" or singing the praises of the cheeses they had tasted in The Borough Market for that matter. This is England.