Britain has become cheese heaven in the last 20-odd years, if you take the trouble to find a good delicatessen rather than buy in the supermarket. It came about because of changes in the EU agricultural policy rules that meant (please don't ask me to explain why or how) that many small dairy farmers could no longer sell their milk. Solution: make it into cheese and sell that! Not only have the new wave of artisan cheese makers restored the quality of the traditional English cheeses (many of which had been downgraded into plasticky pasteurised bricks) and revived ones which had been forgotten, they have branched out into styles of cheese never before made in these islands. It's all brilliant.
Any Brimstoners who live in or near London, or pay it a visit on holiday, should make time to visit one of the stores of the Neal's Yard Dairy, https://www.nealsyarddairy.co.uk/. It's not the only great cheese company in Britain now, but it's one of the biggest and best. And not only will they let you taste everything before you buy, they will almost refuse to sell it to you if you don't taste. I once raced there in my lunch hour and panted 'I'd like 6 ounces of Ardrahan please', and when I saw the assistant go to cut a taster for me 'No, don't bother, I've bought Ardrahan here before and know how it tastes'. The assistant simply said 'No: you know what that piece tasted like, then. But all our cheeses are constantly ripening, and even the milk they're made of changes character through the year as the grass the animals eat changes, so you can't know what this piece of Ardrahan tastes like today till you sample it'. So I did. She was right; just as yummy but slightly different.
I occasionally used to collect cheese orders from
Paxton & Whitfield (near Piccadilly Circus; well worth a visit), and they were the same. It was an occasional job when the chauffeurs/commissionaires where I temped couldn't make it, but they treated me beautifully. Even if all I was asking for was a "stinky French cheese my mum will never have heard of".
The assistants were not judgmental at all of my reaction to be offered a bit to taste: "if my mum will like it, I won't... May I try a bit of that lovely-looking cheddar that I'm not going to buy, instead?" - they just seemed delighted to introduce someone to a new taste, and talk about cheese with someone who loved it too.
I've probably posted in the old place about "Judy cheese": a friend of my parents was in danger of being fined an enormous sum of money for accidentally going over quota on her milk yield, and instead of emptying however many thousands of gallons down the drain, she had a cheesemaker make a batch of cheddar for her. She gave some to my dad, and my mum promptly bought a
whole bunch more from her, gave her friends a taste (and then ordered even more on her friends' behalf).
When Judy had sold all the stock she'd kept back, she told us of a farm shop who had taken the rest; we visited them, and everyone was raving about this cheese. It was the best cheddar I've ever tasted, and we all really wished Judy had gone into cheese production with the expert instead of selling it to the Milk Marketing Board.
Oh, well, that was before artisan cheeses made a resurgence; lucky us now.