Halloumi cheese is utterly, utterly great. I can’t sing its praises enough. I was slightly suspicious of it when I found out that it makes a good grilling cheese, as paneer does, and well – hello, Mr. Flavour? You dead in there?! Let’s just say that it has some things in common with mediocre varieties of mozzarella, taste-wise.
Yes! I am a cheesyphile. I like trying cheeses. I’m not freakish about it; I mean you won’t find me breathing heavily over tablets of Gloucestershire Cheddar, or snuffling wetly up against a fine Roquefort, too close for comfort, in a tailcoat. I do however like trying new varieties when I can because cheese is quite important to me, being a veggie, and because good cheese generally tastes rather good.
(Although, I DID have a ‘moment’ in Marks & Spencer in my lunch-break at work once, where I saw these packaged sticks of cheese with herbs in that you could buy for your lunch, and I got excited, and my ‘colleague’ Zoë went “Ughhh… you’re weird!” “Thank you,” I replied mentally. I have, however, noticed that such replies do not seem to endear me to people, so I attempted some kind of explanation, and then just headed off in search of mousse).
Anyway, halloumi cheese is made of cow, sheep AND goat’s milk, comes with wet stuff in the packet (whey? Curd? Whurd?), and has mint in it, but the mint takes on a whole new life in its presence. It tastes just as delish the second time I have it as much as the first. That’s MAJOR. It also proved to have (possible) interesting side-effects, as I drank two glasses of water before eating some and had a ‘Lemon Cheesecake’ yoghurt, and my butt started fizzing. MY BUTT STARTED FIZZING. Before anyone gets grossed out, nothing happened, AWRIGHT?! *puts on Vinnie Jones forehead* It was just quite amusing.
Today, when walking back from buying my lunch at work (low-fat spinach and ricotta cannelloni with a pack of low-fat sour cream and chive crisps and a chocolate sponge pudding for dessert, OH YEAH), I saw a poster for Ice Age 2 on the side of a bus.
Before anyone gets scared that this is me being funny – I saw a poster for Ice Age 2 on the side of a bus, and you know what, I actually felt quite pained. I felt like I could almost be a film critic. Any longer, and I might have started making pained French-type sounds and gesticulating wildly with my hands, while actually speaking Italian exactly like the snarky pizza chef in The Simpsons. I understood all the critical whining about ‘slapstick’ taking precedent over anything else in the film. The advert showed the hapless squirrel from the first film’s face in close-up, fearful as his reaching for the ever-elusive acorn prompted the ice beneath him to break. “He Never Thaw It Coming,” the bus announced gleefully to me.
I wanted to cry, I really did. And not for the bloody squirrel either. It was just like “WHYYYY? WHYYYY DO THEY THINK WE’RE SO DUMB?!” Any second then and you would’ve expected Charlie Chaplin to pop up, dancing very disturbingly and trying to smack me over the head with his umbrella. He is slapstick for so many. Yet he couldn’t be more different from Ice Age 2. I thought of the sketch we watched in RTI (one of my English courses – stands for Reading, Theory, Interpretation) tied in to The Communist Manifesto, where Chaplin plays a man who becomes so obsessed with getting his work of tightening nuts with spanners right that he ends up going INSIDE the actual machine, and comes out having tightened all the internal bolts. He then chases after his co-workers, tightening their noses, then spots a lady going past and runs after her. Luckily, she escapes. He stands on the street, and then we see a big woman (not big as in fat) coming towards him, the two large buttons on her chest prominent and obviously symbolic.
It sounds very much in poor taste – exploitative, overly simplistic and arrogant. However, not just the context in which we watched it – as supportive of Marx’s argument that work eventually alienates the labourer from himself – but the expression on Chaplin’s face made all the difference. He has always fascinated me because he is a legendary comedian, but I often thought his eyes were quite sinister. He never really smiled when making other people laugh, and there was a terrifying kind of blankness to his eyes, as if he was not even exerting himself, more detached and doing it for fun. Chaplin laughs at us as we laugh at him. Yet in this film, there was a hint of fervour, of delusion threatening to overtake that blankness. It was now just sad – he was completely gone from reality.
I think that was what made it so funny for us. I don’t think the element of Schadenfreude at this man’s collapse was what did it. It was that it was terrifying. The best comedy tends to be tinged with darkness. I don’t know whether that’s a cliché or not, and I don’t care. It’s very true for me. Just like the line about having to suffer to be beautiful. I got my eyebrows threaded yesterday. Eye-watering anyone?
Oh well, my top guilty pleasure (The O.C) is on its way, so I am OFF. Byebyeees!
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