Whiff of cheese - heese from around the world

I mentioned Paxton Whitfield, doyen of London cheese shops, yesterday. But any lover of cheese should also find time to pay a visit to one of the Neal's Yard Dairy shops - the original one in Covent Garden, or the Borough Market branch.

Now PW is a very fine shop, a very fine shop indeed. But my affections have been captured by Neal's Yard - the huge walls of cheese stacked up, the massive wheels of it, the whiff of cheese that hits you as you walk in, the absolute, almost bloody-minded concentration on cheese, cheese, the whole cheese and nothing but the cheese. (In fact, you can find biscuits and pickles to go with your cheese if you look for them - but they seem almost hidden away. They are only bit part actors and the main stage is reserved entirely for the cheeses.)

The focus is strongly on English cheeses. France is of course famous for its many types of cheese, but if you look outside the usual supermarket array of processed slices, plastic 'Gloucester' and 'Cheddar' from New Zealand, you can find some fantastic cheeses in this country. You could run them to earth at local farmers' markets - that's the way I found one of my favourites, the tangy Norfolk Dapple - but at Neal's Yard you can find them all in one place.

There's the nettle coated Cornish Yarg. (That's not a Cornish word - it's the cheesemaker's name spelt backwards!) Stinking Bishop (and it does). Stichelton, a creamy blue cheese with a rather nutty taste. Traditional names like Wensleydale and Red Leicester rub shoulders with Gubbeen, Verulamium and Ticklemore - the names are half the fun, it sometimes seems!