Manchego Cheese, the great character actor

It all started with the intense boredom of my translation. 

As you may now be sick of hearing, I am engaged in trying to make sense of the English note taking of council minutes for a national NGO and turn it into approaching passable French. It seemed a good time to do some online shopping. Fortunately, Mrs. Ottawacker takes care of that stuff for me, and had pre-empted me, ordering some of my favourite Spanish cheese, manchego, as a treat.

This took me back to a fantastic series of, erm, series, The Trip. If you have never seen The Trip, you should. It is fantastic. I'd actually been to one of the restaurants in the first series with my dad - The Inn at Whitewell, near the Forest of Bowland. It was great, so I was happy to watch the second series in Italy, and then the third in Spain. On top of that, having a passing acquaintance with one of the stars of Gavin and Stacey, I'd watched all of those programmes and had always liked Rob Brydon. A hugely talented actor and mimic.  There is a great scene in The Trip 3 where he riffs over a plate of manchego cheese and comes up with it being a world famous character actor of the same name. As with most of Rob Bryden's performance in the series, not shutting up is his forte. And off he goes, a couple of minutes as a new international superstar.

For some reason, as Mrs. Ottawacker offered me a piece of manchego cheese, I found I was incapable of saying it in my normal and rather splendid Scouse accent. It kept on coming out in this ridiculously effete Spanish accent. I felt like I was having a stroke or something. But no, I had just been Brainwashed by Brydon.

So I tracked him down on Twitter and tweeted at him. "I hate you
@RobBrydon - you have deprived me of my ability to say "manchego cheese" normally".
And bored, I returned to my translation.

When I checked back an hour later, I was delighted to find Manchego Cheese himself had sent me a 30-second video apologising that the charisma and brilliance of his acting had deprived me of any pleasure I might derive from the inferior dairy product bearing the same name. 

For a couple of seconds I got a bit starstruck, but then I realised I was 55 and got back to work. Still, a lovely touch from someone who is, by all accounts, a really nice guy. So I thought I'd share it. It's still up on Twitter if anyone wants to see.