LONDON LIFES 8
A MOUSE

Mus Musculus is a house mouse, currently resident in London’s fashionable West End.

People say that in London that no-one is ever more than six feet away from a mouse. But we in the London Mouse Community have our own saying. “In London, no mouse is ever more than six feet away from a piece of cheese.” London is the cheese capital of the world, and it’s this that is drawing millions more mice to the city every year.

During the day, I curl up in a ball at the back of the Rough Trade Record shop in Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden. Obviously, I am an expert on cheese in all its many and storied forms, but since living in Rough Trade Records I have also become a connoiseur of experimental electronica too. For me, Pole’s new album is the best of the current batch, but I dislike the German duo Mouse On Mars. A mouse would not go to Mars. There is no cheese there.

At night, I creep out on my cheese bender. First stop is The Neal’s Yard Dairy, where hundreds of classic cheeses are arranged on easily scaled wooden tables. Last night I enjoyed some Laughton Log, a soft, goat’s milk cheese from Sussex. I was also tempted by a Mull Cheddar! So many cheeses, so little time, in London, city of cheese!

I head South to Pimlico’s Rippon Cheese Store. Karen and Philip Rippon claim to stock over five hundred varieties of cheese, and I think of their stupid, boastful faces crying as they realise that I have been eating their cheese every night without them knowing. I gobble a pungent Munster Fermier, from Alsace, and a slice of Shropshire blue, and then I do a tiny poo on the floor, to taunt the Rippons, like a master thief leaving a silken glove at the scene of his crime.

Heading across town to Jermyn Street, I sneak into Paxton And Whitfield’s, with its black, Victorian style frontage. Tonight I nibble the current top-seller, Montgomery’s Cheddar, a hand-cheddared cheddar with textured curd. There’s a Ticklemore on the counter but as I climb towards it I suddenly start to wonder... is this it? Is this my life? Racing around from cheese shop to cheese shop, eating expensive cheeses, and taunting cheese shop owners with my excrement? London has offered me endless pleasure, but does it give my life any meaning? Sure, the cheeses make me feel good, but in the morning when I awake, what am I? A mouse, hiding in the cellar of a record shop, with an opinion about which of the two LCD Soundstystem albums is the best. (It is the 1st, obviously).

Never mind. North again, to La Fromargerie in Moxon Street, dizzy and full of cheese. I enter under the gate to the alley left of the shop itself. But in the famous Cheese Room I see something unusual. Right in front of me, on the floor, is an obvious and clumsy wooden mouse trap, of the mass-produced Little Nipper variety, baited with a fat slice of eighteen month old La Machan Farmhouse Manchego, a rare cheese that I have always coveted. I approach and sniff the cheese. Its gritty, fruity texture enchants me and I realise, in a moment, that this is my destiny. The Farmhouse Manchego has come to save me from a life of futile decadence. It is both my executioner, and my saviour. When a mouse is tired of London, he is tired of life. I reach in to bite the Manchego, knowing this cheese will be my last. London has killed me.

Mus Musculus was talking to Stewart Lee