Cheese, Beer, Toast

Thursday 27th October. Drizzle and wet leaves on shiny pavements. A Cheese and Beer Tasting evening at Toast, Notting Hill branch. Inside, warm and dry and welcoming, a contrast to the night outside. Light from beeswax candles, flickering. Cheese supplied by Trethowans Dairy , including their own, delicious, and award winning Gorwydd Caerphilly. Bread from St John, spiced fig jam, Toast's own. Beer from London's own Kernel Brewery. I'm usually not a beer drinker, but these beers persuade me, so varied, so complex, one has after-notes of chocolate, another smells of grapefruit, and just like that, I'm converted. And all around us, Toast's beautiful, beautiful clothes, which I lust after every time one of their wonderfully styled catalogues drops through my letterbox, but which are even nicer when you can touch the soft wools, the sumptuous velvets.

That weekend we go to Maltby Street market to buy a box of Kernel Brewery beer, then walk on to Borough Market where Ned, who ran the cheese tasting, is selling the Caerphilly. I buy a huge chunk to take my my parents' for our bonfire party, where it hardly lasted five minutes it was liked so much.