There already exists a cure for ennui, and it’s found in the pub. But when former BBC producer and Canadian radio presenter Michael Finnerty — famous enough over there to have his face on billboards — finds his life without lustre, he does not turn to booze, which shows a sense of restraint fellow journalists may be unfamiliar with. Instead, he moves from Montreal back to London on a sabbatical and, as the book’s secondary title, How Comté and Camembert Fed My Soul, suggests, he uses cheese as a cure. But this is not a tale of overcoming adversity with obesity.
Cheese is not his first answer. Despite his radio fame, needs must and he looks for a part-time job. He fails a trial shift at Ottolenghi. This does not help. But wandering Borough Market, he spies an advert for a trainee cheesemonger and sails through his probation. Soon he is hard at it, though the work itself is not a salve for his listlessness: instead, it leaves him utterly exhausted. But in this tiredness he finds reward; sitting at a desk, he is all mind. In the chill of the fridge, or lifting unrelentingly heavy cheese wheels, he remembers his body. Connecting to it again begins to settle him.
Finnerty is genuinely funny
Soon cheese is captivating him; at the ends of each chapter he describes a single cheese, with humour and evident understanding.
But this is not really a book of food. Finnerty is at his best when talking of the community he finds in Borough Market; of its traders and customers. His descriptions of people, their tics and quirks, are the book’s strength.
See also: 10 of the best restaurants in Borough Market and London Bridge, from Agora to Kolae
Finnerty is genuinely funny in these moments; funny, but curious and tender, too. The best of the book is found in his record of the November 2019 knife attack on London Bridge. The cheese fridge provides his shelter; he crams into it with his Borough Market fraternity.
To say more would spoil things. It is not quite redemption Finnerty finds, but a reconnect with what moves him. In the end, you believe he couldn’t have found that down the pub.
David Ellis is the Restaurant Critic of The London Standard
The Cheese Cure by Michael Finnerty is out now (HarperCollins, £16.99)
