It was gratifying yesterday to see
that Queensland’s Grand Fromage is reading Crikey, even if his comments
yesterday were just the usual curds and whey.

“Christian’s
information has got more holes in it than five kilos of gruyere,” wrote
the cheesed-off premier who, just like Roquefort, seems blue. And his
information is as off as Stilton left in the sun for a fortnight.
Crikey’s comestibles correspondent comments:

I eat gruyere. I eat it often. I have three types of
gruyere in my fridge at present. I have been to Gruyeres. I have
visited the main gruyere factory. I have seen thousands of gruyeres
being made. I have looked at cabinets full of pieces of cut gruyere.

It doesn’t have holes.

What
some aged gruyere does have is tiny, pinpricked-sized dimples – but
these are going as conditions for cheese making get very sanitary and
the gasses from raw milk don’t form any more. Five kilos of gruyere
these days would not get you much in the way of holes – if you managed
to find one that still had the dimples and added the lot you probably
wouldn’t get up to one decent hole.

But it would make a good
sized fondue – a melted cheese pot with bread dipped in. The meal is
uninspiring, unsurprising, always the same and while it can look
interesting before you start, it becomes quite a stodgy meal quite
quickly. In this sense, an utterly appropriate metaphor for Beattie.

The time to watch
politicians even more closely is when they take the time to deny
rumours they’re thinking of moving on. Peter Beattie mightlike to
pretend he’s as tough as pecorino and as sharp as red Leicester, but,
like all pols, when life gets tough he’ll fold up just like ordinary
individually-wrapped Kraft cheese slices.