Cheese has nothing to do with it (Heather Mallick column)

[Canadian Socialist]

>by Heather Mallick
May 15, 2005

It has finally happened, this thing against which great women and men fought so hard and with such distinction. I think they called it la Ré-Résistance. General Charles de Gaulle led it — after the war was over, oddly enough — with his special cap and huge aristocratic nose presiding over a snotty populace he claimed was ungovernable because it produced 325 varieties of cheese.

Cheese has nothing to do with it. The general failed in his mission. The French have become polite.

I know this because I just came back and I was revolting. If I may use the same cheese metaphor used by the French to explain their previous consistent impossibility, I caught a bleu d'Auvergne (a sharp, alert-making blue-spotted slice) of a cold on the flight to Paris and partly because I was hit with vicious insomnia. I lay awake each night all night in the hotel room in a puddled Epoisse (a runny stinky cheese) of sweat, whispering on the hour, “Can I watch BBC World with the sound off?” or “Can I drag the armchair into the toilet and read my Joan Barfoot novel?” The answer was always no, so I lay awake counting Les Vieux Corses (little square Corsican sheep cheeses) and waiting for the shops to open.

<snip>
http://www.rabble.ca/columnists_full.shtml?x=39266

I absolutely adore the way she writes.