World Cheese Awards or Black Friday?

World Cheese this year was an enormous tonic.?In a sea of turmoil, downturn, economic upheaval and political pantomime, the love of cheese and cheese people was evident inside our 2000sqm dairy mecca in Wales.

And it wasn’t just that love that filled our tanks. The judging process identified 98 Super Golds; 328 Golds; 583 Silvers and 839 Bronzes from the entries, helping to celebrate cheesemakers across the planet.?

The highlight??Possibly the judges from 38 different nations filing into the judging arena past the Welsh choir, Only Boys Aloud, to strong and proud Celtic harmonies. The ex-Britain’s Got Talent finalists created a social media filming opp and therefore a judge scrum, reminiscent of the throng in a football bar in a dubious corner of Qatar or a Currys electrical outlet on Jan 1st.

Or indeed Black Friday.?As I write its looming. How on earth do we stop this materialistic, wasteful, deliberate big retailer profit spike??The sentiment of folk saving money at a difficult time is laudable, but I’m not convinced it gets close to truly helping struggling households.?I would warrant the opposite.

My friend and fellow Independent Retail Confederation board member, Meryl Hall (Booksellers Association) has had a cracking idea.?‘Civilised Saturday’.?A chance to shop in independent retailers where you can nourish your mind, body and soul, encouraging stimulating shopping experiences, without the rugby analogy.?‘Civilised’ might be too far to get any traction nationally as it will be viewed as elitist: we should all continue to fight that label in our food and drinks shops.

Perhaps ‘Sensible Saturday’ would hit the mark.?The message would be to buy sensibly on your hight street, from retailers who know their subject, offer worthy things for a fair price and better circulate the local pound.?That’s saner than having your face pressed against an end of isle gondola to buy yet another, slight bigger TV, and it is certainly more sensible than navigating the logistics of 4,434 cheese from 42 countries for the judging pleasure of 250 experts in one big room in Newport.