At the top of my fridge is a small ceramic jar of stilton, and every time I open the door I can smell it. Recently, it’s started contaminating other food. This morning I binned some butter after it took on the same scent.
The stilton went off in July 2019 but I can’t bring myself to throw it away. It was a flat-warming gift from my mother, even though my boyfriend, Oscar, hates strong cheese and I was then six months pregnant, so unable to eat it. When she produced it from a calligraphed paper bag, wrapped in green tissue, we didn’t tell her this. Instead, we thanked her and put the cheese in the fridge. When we moved flats two years later, the cheese came with us.
The stilton had been a mistake, one of many she made before she died a year later. They began when she forgot to refrigerate the turkey at Christmas, and ended when she failed to register I was in labour. Both were symptomatic of an illness that was already fogging her mind, but because it’s easier to remember the bad things over the good – it makes the loss less gaping – now, every time I open my fridge and smell that cheese, I thank God she’s not here.
