Insomnia found me browsing the web when the headline Cheese fire causes traffic meltdown in Norway tunnel caught my eye.
As a cheese lover, how could I not be interested in a story that starts:
Some 27 metric tons of flaming brown cheese (brunost), a Norwegian delicacy, blocked off a three-km (1.9 mile) tunnel near the northern coastal town of Narvik when it caught fire last Thursday. The fire was finally put out on Monday.
Twenty-seven metric tons of toasted goat’s cheese: a turophile’s delight!
(I gather brunost is made either from goat’s milk or a mixture of goat’s and cow’s milk, though perhaps not from the breed of mountain goat whose rather hazy photo I snapped in the Sierra de Francia, Spain.)
A fairly natural chain of associations led me on to Ben Gunn in Treasure Island and his dreams of “cheese – toasted, mostly”.
So I looked up the full quote:
“Marooned three years agone,” he continued, “and lived on goats since then, and berries, and oysters. Wherever a man is, says I, a man can do for himself. But, mate, my heart is sore for Christian diet. You mightn’t happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese – toasted, mostly – and woke up again, and here I were.”
Now I want to know, if he lived on goats, why on earth didn’t he try and make goat’s cheese?
don't confuse the narrator 