One unnerving thing about growing older is that there comes a day when you wake up to find serious histories being published of times you can (almost) remember. For several weeks now, for instance, I’ve been living with a proof copy of Dominic Sandbrook’s forthcoming Who Dares Wins, a volume devoted to Britain from 1979 to 1982 – and if it took me a while to open it, well, perhaps this was only because I feared some of the facts would not quite match the dearly held landscape of my memories.
But I’m glad I did (open it, I mean). Sandbrook devotes a chapter of his new book to food, and while I remember a lot of what he describes – the excitement of M&S chicken Kiev; the ongoing devotion of the British people to strongly brewed tea and shepherd’s pie (the latter being the first dish Mrs Thatcher served at No 10) – I was taken by surprise by his account of the rise and fall of the British cheese that was known as Lymeswold.
Of course I remembered its launch in 1982, and not only because the newspapers were full of it; my family was a bit snobbish about cheese, for which reason this mild, blue, brie-like substance, invented by committee at Dairy Crest, the processed foods division of the Milk Marketing Board, was the object of some derision in our house (as it soon would be in Private Eye, where it became shorthand for all that was bogus and backward in the countryside).
Lyy-mes-wo-o-ld, we used to say, stretching out the invented place name to make it sound more ridiculous, prior to demolishing our stilton. If you were going to eat a processed cheese of undistinguished taste and appearance, my brother and I favoured Dairylea, which we liked to squeeze from the foil triangles in which it was wrapped, the better that it resembled – sorry – worms or snot.
Lymeswold ceased production in 1992, for which reason I’d always assumed, slightly triumphantly, that it was basically a flop. But this was not, it turns out, precisely the case. In fact, so successful was the marketing campaign that heralded its arrival – the ad featured two French cheese enthusiasts driving around Somerset in a Citroen 2CV in search of this magnificent new fromage – Dairy Crest simply could not keep up with demand. Mere weeks after its launch, it had disappeared both from supermarket shelves and from Harrods, where customers wanting it were being turned away “in their thousands”. There were even reports of people hoarding it. No, it wasn’t the cheese itself that was a disaster. Rather, it was the fact that it came, almost overnight, to symbolise UK manufacturing incompetence. From this, it would never quite recover.
When Michael Gove recently announced on Andrew Marr’s programme that, even if Britain were to leave the EU without a deal, “everyone will have the food they need”, there was widespread derision – and I must admit that I laughed darkly, too. But I also thought, with feelings of mounting panic, of Lymeswold, the creation of which was announced with almost lunatic enthusiasm by Peter Walker, the minister who ran what was then the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. (“My dog is a hell of a fan,” he told the press, not content with boasting of how “tasty” his children found it.) In those days, the UK had a dairy surplus: a milky lake that Lymeswold was intended to soak up. Now, however, we rely on EU countries such as Denmark and Germany, from which we import milk, to maintain our supplies of red Leicester. Which makes me wonder: can it be long before Gove – and, perhaps, Theresa Villiers, the arch-Brexiter who succeeded him as secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs – will have to appear on television to extol the sublime deliciousness of, say, Violife “cheddar flavour block”?
Oh, but wait! Violife, leading manufacturer of lactose-free cheeses, is based in Thessaloniki, Greece. It seems, then, that on This Morning with Holly and Phil, the ministers will smilingly have to munch on dry Jacob’s Cream Crackers, as if they were taking part in some silly competition at a village fete – the prospect of which would be utterly cherishable if it didn’t also sound the knell for late-night cheese on toast.
