© Julia Welstead

Where the hell is my cheese?

(and why do I keep delaying my search, whilst helping everyone else to find theirs?)

A very very long time ago, almost lost in the mists of time, we used to have to work out how to get somewhere on a large and unwieldy thing called a road map, sold in all good garages and updated annually (my Dad got a new one every Christmas). The place you wanted to get to was invariably in the crease or on the edge of the page.

When I was barely out of my school gym slip, a boyfriend invited me to visit his family home at the other end of the country and, on my request for directions, told me to buy a map and work out how to use it. I could cheerfully have hit him over the head with said map, but he was at that other end of another almost obsolete networking system – a home telephone.

Lo and behold – I learned to use that map (he was rather fanciable) and in the process I absorbed Geography, like school had never managed to instill it. I learned north, south, east and west, I could identify topographic symbols and contours (that’s a hill, that’s a woodland, that’s a big old river that I’m going to have to find a bridge over) and most of all I plucked up the courage to talk to people along the way, to check the finer details of the route. Turns out talking to people is mostly a good thing.

Now we have GPS and smartphones for the instant locating of absolutely anywhere, and we no longer need to know our north from our south, our arse from our elbow, and we seem to have stopped talking to each other, and we seem more lost than ever.

But enough of this grumpy old moaning about the idyllic past. Back to the future. In recent years my sense of direction seems to have failed me and, despite a lot of scurrying from pillar to post on my part, aided and hindered in fairly equal measure by well meaning friends pointing the way, I’m feeling a little lost.

Enter stage left, waving from the Nirvana that is Cheese Station N, Sniff, Scurry and Haw. Now, like my annoying 1970s boyfriend (it didn’t last) I’m not going to explain the cheese story, I’m just going to say, get the book! “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson. You’ll find it through any good bookseller.

Well, ok, I’ll explain it a little bit. It’s a parable: a short story that explains, enlightens, instructs. There are two mice and two littlepeople (suspend your disbelief here, as we do with all storytelling – there really can’t be all those murders in Shetland etc). These four are in a maze looking for cheese upon which to sustain their lives. (The thought of all that cheese eating leaves me a little queasy, but that’s not the point…or actually…hang on….maybe it is…*)

Sniff and Scurry use their instincts to find cheese (I feel sure you can work out that one sniffs it out while the other scurries around a lot) and don’t get held back by intellect, fears, entitlement or expectations. Hem and Haw on the other hand….well you get the picture. Us human beans have become arguably (ants? cockroaches?) the most dominant species on the planet through use of our higher intellect. But it doesn’t half get in the way sometimes. Quite often.

This is a Russian doll story, the middle doll being a bunch of friends talking about the cheese story (the inner doll) and asking each other to think about the character with whom they most identify. And of course as the reader you are the outer doll, and supposed to be doing the same. And even though that’s rather annoying, and one feels a little bit patronised, cos this is straightforward stuff, right? that any old idiot could work out for themselves, right? it’s impossible not to.

As we are people with higher intellects, I think we are supposed to identify with either Hem (the totally stuck up his own arse one) or Haw (the fearful one with a dim dawning of what the game of life entails). Any mice reading the story will of course identify with Sniff and Scurry.

Ummmm, it turns out I’m a mouse. I’m Scurry, through and through. I realised yesterday (having read the book) that my adult life to date has been one, long, busy, headless-chicken of a scurry. I can, I suppose, congratulate myself that I haven’t been a Hem – I have never hung around anywhere for long enough for the cheese to run out, nor have I felt entitled to an endless supply of cheese – and I’m not much of a Haw either – I’ve never been fearful of treading new routes. But neither, unfortunately, am I a Sniff. 

Despite the early map reading skills I’m not good at finding good cheese locations, and even if instinct pulls me in one direction really really strongly (as is happening now) I still hedge my bets and scurry hither and thither along every available alternative path, rather than focussing my energies on the obvious route. I seem to have picked up the “well let’s just eliminate all the other possibilities first” mindset, which might be good practice in a Chemistry lab, but out in the big wide world of endless possibilities it’s just pure madness.

Well that’s good to know, yup. But what now? How can I hone my Sniff skills? How can I change my Scurrying mindset? How the hell can I find my cheese?! Cos I’m pretty tired now (as you’ll have picked up, I was a teenager in the 70s for gawdsake, I’m ancient!) and I’d like to settle down with some cheese (*other, more palatable, forms of sustenance are available – you get to choose!) at least for a little while, and perhaps even make my own cheese (for local food and energy production see next essay).

Maybe, just maybe, this is where my rusty old upper intellect might come in handy. And perhaps – just a long shot here – talking with and enlisting the help of my fellow humans might be a good idea. Because I’ve made the classic error of thinking I can do it all alone and, having just written an essay on human connection**, I should know better. Sniff and Scurry work together. Hem would have survived (spoiler alert) had he (sorry to be sexist, but he’s definitely a “he”) got off his high horses of pride and entitlement  (I know you can’t ride two horses at once, I’ve tried, but this essay is now so weighty with muddled metaphor that I may as well plough on ;~) and followed Haw.

Right now I have a floor to paint – no metaphor here, I really do. Because this is where a lifetime of scurrying has got me. Despite an arm-length list of enducational (typo left in cos I liked it) qualifications and various lucky breaks leading to wonderfully varied work in journalism, environmental research, health, retail, farming and even modelling, I now find myself reduced to minimal wage jobs like cleaning, gardening, painting and caring (as in, for the aged and infirm). And while there is nothing wrong with these jobs, and I quite enjoy aspects of them, IT IS NOT WHAT I AM SUPPOSED TO BE DOING.

I feel as if my head is whacking rhythmically against the maze wall now. It hurts, and the daft thing is that it’s me causing it, and I will continue to hurt myself until I figure out where the hell my cheese is, what I want my ‘cheese’ to be (spinach?) and how to get to it.