Finding Gorgonzola | A Pilgrimage From Colombo

Rich, salty, earthy, savoury, sharp – gorgonzola is not a cheese common to Sri Lanka, and yet its mere anticipation calls to mind on the island the seven stages of living.  And of them all,  how can you ever manage to make the last, last?

I wake and see two yellow Minivets flying off into the jungle. And, by a dizzy sequence of associations too tiresome to make sense of, my mind is turned almost immediately to thoughts of gorgonzola.

Gorgonzola is not an easy cheese to find in Sri Lanka.  Even the capital’s only self-proclaimed cheese shop, Luxe, has yet to discover it, preferring instead to pack its chill cabinets with cheddar, edam, gouda and brie.  It has, however, been discovered at Colombo’s latest addition to its still demure roster of uber luxury hotels – the Cinnamon City of Dreams.

That the building itself is significant is evident from the outside, even from several roads away.  It sticks out like the sort of Lego construction children enjoy making, one with extravagant and extraneous extensions that stick out like the antenna of discarded Daleks.  Great white 3D stripes randomly ribbon the exterior, as if some fashion-inclined soul has bought a set of sumptuous designer clothes to give to a poor but deserving relative. 

Like the best of spoken luxury, this creation puts you firmly off guard the moment you arrive, the car drawing up at an entrance so bland it could pass for a toothbrush factory.  But beyond it stretch vast, cosmic, profuse marbled spaces  - a set of dreams nearly arranged into rooms and retreats, lobbies and bars, cafes, and arcades, all crying out for GPS.  So spaced out is this particular city of dreams that you might be mistaken for thinking you are its only inhabitant. In so busy and noisy a city as Colombo, finding yourself in the equivalent of a silent and closed monastic order is an unexpected challenge.

But it was the restaurants I was here for, not the challenge, and for one in particular that a friend of a friend had said it had real gorgonzola on its menu.

I should have felt some shame in making such a determined and transactional an approach as this, but a whole year without Gorgonzola had rather neutered my moral compass.  And after checking out a variety of possible restaurants, I realised with grateful astonishment that it was the modest, if brazen, hotel buffet that had the delicacy on offer.

For there sat the cheese itself, on a chilled open shelf of cured meats and other, lesser cheeses.  The buffet and the accompanying à la carte menu offered a multitude of other impossible-to-find treats, and I tried my best to enjoy some of them.  But really, it was the gorgonzola that I came back for, time and again. 

Rich, salty, earthy, savoury, sharp, it was like being permitted to nibble the cheek of some unreachable Olympic god.  I rolled bits of it around in my mouth, letting it stick to my tongue and palate and fill the gaps between my teeth to be gently sucked out, to produce again and again that wonderful taste combination, detonating like a kind bomb within my wistful head. 

Sometimes I added a tiny slice of dried fruit to a morsel of the hallowed cheese, sometimes a crumb of a hard biscuit – anything, really, to experiment with and prolong the taste tour. 

And I was still journeying with the memory of it all as the car drove back out of Colombo, past the lovely lagoons that lie south of Negombo, on past the airport and the string of impassable villages up to Mirigama before the first completed section of the new central expressway finally began – and with it, the speedier ascent to the first foothills of the central highlands and my home at the Flame tree Estate.

It was, I thought, a journey not unlike life itself, a sort of gourmet interpretation of the seven stages of living.

The prenatal stage was certainly the unknowing expectation of eating such a cheese as this, not knowing what I would come to know. 

The infancy period was the dawning knowledge that such a cheese existed at all.

The childhood part of the evolution was coming to understand that the cheese did not merely exist, but that it actually existed just 100 kilometres or so away from me.  It was within my grasp. 

The adolescent part of it was the acceptance of reality, the drive to the so-called City of Dreams to achieve my goals. 

Adulthood was, of course, eating in every way possible, via every conceivable combination of options.

This is, of course, the point at which I should have died.    For people who die before their 50s - usually in shocking or outrageous circumstances – by murders, car crashes, sudden heart attacks – they are the glamorous ones.  They have gone out on such a high, their deaths creating such cavernous holes, some monumental gaps that those of us left behind cannot ever really cover or make sense of.

But for me, returning home with the taste of the cheese a memory in my mouth, was like, instead of entering into that final long stage of life, wandering out into the sunset until eventually the sun comes down, and sometime later somebody says, " Oh, what happened to David? Is he alive?  Didn't he die?  Was it last year?  Of the year before? Maybe he hasn't died yet? Do you know?

“The unexamined life,” said Socrates, “is not worth living,  adding, for good measure, that “the only good is knowledge”.

Old as I now am, I have a lot of knowledge I need to catch up on if I am to have any of the benefits of an examined life at all.  Too much, really.

And that is, of course, the silver living in not going out with a bang.  There is time, in greater isolation, to figure out the unfigurable.  You get to take everything out of the box and order it, if there is an order.

And whether or not any sense of order or purpose dawns, it is an arresting and absorbing occupation, like putting on the red light in the recording studio to say work in progress – do not disturb too much, please.

Returning up the estate drive, I met the dogs coming down on their evening walk, all 5 of them, beautiful as butterflies, barking their greater sense of now, the now that really is all that matters. 

Now?  Then? 

Here in these hills, the two combine with effortless elegance, and the sunsets, like only the best and greatest of cliches – coming still, day after day- are a wonder that never pales.

That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.