Wallop! Bassman's cheese arrives in Shed
 In the last few years Blur's bass player Alex James has done more than anyone to talk up English cheese via his columns in The Independent and The Observer, documenting his journey from amateur cheese-fancier to all-round food pundit.
When Juliet Harbutt, uber-cheese guru and the power behind the British Cheese Festival, realised how much a sexy (so I'm told), articulate and media-friendly chap like Alex could do for the world of artisan cheese, she invited him to join the judging panel for her Awards. It was a natural step for the two - as the Evenlode Partnership - to move on to the creation of new cheeses, and there are now three, Blue Monday, Farleigh Wallop and Little Wallop.
We're now stocking the first one of these, Little Wallop, a cute (115g) beauty of a soft goats' cheese, washed in Somerset cider brandy and wrapped in vine leaves. Nutty and lemony when young, the flavour changes as the cider works its magic and the texture becomes silky. The actual making is in the safe hands of Pete Humphries from Somerset's Whitelake Cheese (see White Nancy). If you want to know more about the whole process, there are a number of Alex's Cheese Diaries videos floating around the net. Here's the first one.
And the Glastonbury connection? The newly re-formed Blur played there on Sunday night.
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Diana Smart - Pop Video Star: Now We've Seen It All.
 Diana Smart is - there's no other word - a cheese legend.
Once more, with gravity: A Cheese Legend.
I think she's about 83 or so, and still making cheese most days (having only started in her 60s!). Her speciality is traditional Double Gloucester (but she also makes the rarer Single). Here's my favourite picture of the two of us!
Anyway, speaking to her last week I was startled to learn she's featured in a pop video. A Popular Music Group called The Macabees (they played Glastonbury's Other Stage at 2.30 on Friday) decided to theme the video for their song Can You Give It around the quite seriously mad annual cheese rolling in Gloucestershire ... for which she supplies the cheese. Check out the video here. Diana enters at about 33" and there's a litle sequence of cheesemaking before attention to turns to the antics of the mentalists at Coopers Hill.
I didn't think anything could make Diana Smart more marvellous. I was wrong.
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Nominate Us (but only if you want to)
Why not let the good people at Radio Four know about The Cheese Shed? Their 2009 Food & Farming Awards
are now open and they're looking for nominations: people that the
public think are doing great work as food producers, retailers, farmers, internet cheesemongers (hint)
etc.
So if you like what we're doing here and if
you'd like to see what James looks like in a tuxedo, take a couple of
minutes out, nip along to the Radio Four site and nominate us. But only if you want to. It's not - you know - an order.
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