LETTER TO MY TEMPTRESS
My Darling,
For many years you and I have enjoyed a mutually destructive yet passionate love affair, indeed at times your delicious creaminess threatened to destroy us both. From my infant years as a monumentally fussy eater when I was first introduced to bland rubbery squares of Edam as a reward for eating the vile HAM and CUCUMBER on my plate, to my mother’s ‘special treat’ of tomato soup with cubes of melting cheddar lurking beneath the surface, to my student years wasted smoking cheap hash and eating blocks of cheddar straight from the fridge at 5am, I knew our time together would alter me in both rewarding and hugely damaging ways. How right I was. Only now, 27 years later, after a rollercoaster of milks, fats, cultures and moulds, am I able to look back on our tempestuous relationship and say, hand on cholesterol clogged heart, enough is enough.
I have loved you in a way I have loved nothing else, and devoted myself to you in ways as yet unparalleled in my adult life. The Christmas Day I spend waitressing and devoured basically a whole stilton with a desert spoon in the cheese fridge, away from prying eyes, the failed attempts to give you up by restricting myself to only Babybel light, Dairylea triangles, and Lunchables, and the annual Christmas day fight as I catch my brother eating ‘my’ stilton, a tradition so irritating our mother ended up buying three separate pieces to placate the siblings. The acute head pains and face-on-desk crushing fatigue that struck daily at 4.15pm, the constant inability to breathe through my nose, the dreams, the significant weight gain, the expense of being a cheese snob,
IT. IS. TIME. There Will Be No More.
GOODBYE TO YOU, MY EVIL YELLOW SEDUCTRESS.
Farewell, for once and for all. You will be missed, but not by my vital organs.
Your once humble and obedient servant,
Lara
