Rhys reviews chys #3 - Gouda

In this series of posts I will be reviewing various cheeses and stacking up the positives and negatives against the strong, proud, English cheddar.

Welcome to round three of this, the cheese to cheese scrimmage and its going to be a gouda one. Gouda one, good one, gouda one, no? Fine.

Today's contender comes to us all the way from the Netherlands and if it is anything like its country of origin, it will be geographically baffling (see below).

Here she is, a fine looking slab of cow muck:

Gouda is of course named after the Dutch god of  folding bicycles/pedantry.

Elbows and unwell-bows

Second year of University, Sunday, around 2pm.

I slowly regain conciousness unsure of where I am, one crusted eye slowly pulls itself open and I breathe a sigh of relief, my own bedroom, my own bed.

I reach an arm across my bed, searching for a phone so I could check the time. My memories start creeping up on me, we drank a bottle, we watched a band, we headed to a club, but then, nothing; a psychological road block. My phone confirms that I was still compos mentis and texting friends at 5am, my memories I figure, stop at around midnight.

I manage to persuade my second (of two) eyes to get in the game, I try to focus and blearily I make out a tall shape, a figure is looming over me, unmoving, silent.

My eyes adjust once again.

It is a tree.

As I regain my senses and my unease grows, I realise something is wrong with my arm. I throw the covers off my body. I am fully dressed, including a pair of soil covered shoes, the arm of my hoody is ripped and blood stains the sheets.

Life in sound #3 - The Day We Caught the Train

As well as being from the third album I can remember owning, this song reminds of budget holidays when I was knee-high to a pig and full of jellybeans.

When I say budget, I mean, collect 10 vouchers in the sun and a family of four can go on holiday for £10.

When I say holiday, I mean 4 days in a camp site run by the cast of the league of gentleman.

When I say camp site, I mean a Welsh field with a toilet in it.

Chiefly it brings up these three memories:

1. At an indoor swimming pool, some seven year old Spanish ruffian stole my inflatable rubber ring whilst I was showing some girls my dance moves by the towel racks (basic robot followed by some body popping). I chased him down (the girls had lost interest during a poorly executed cartwheel) and gave him a ruddy good lesson on English swearwords and British inflatable ownership law.


2. We went to cheddar on one of these holidays and we visited cheddar gorge. About half way through a tour, I got so scared by a mannequin that looked at me suggestively that I cried, climbed my dad like a tree and we all had to leave. In retrospect, I am not entirely it wasn't just Sir Jimmy dressed in a miners outfit with a Papier-mâché hat and ideas beyond his station.


3. One year we pulled into a jam packed welsh camp site and there was an empty pitch right in the premium first row near what they had rather optimistically dubbed a swimming pool in the brochure. We thought we had struck lucky and spent several hours putting up some sort of quasi  military fabric bunker my dad had borrowed from a family friend. The rest of the day was spent watching my father wage war against the gigantic ants nest we had invaded and triumph over the thriving mass of insects using fire, poison and (if I memory serves me correctly), his bare fists.