We were passing by the front of the block and the guy from no 1 was cleaning his windows and the windows of no 2. I live at no 3. We said Oooo, hallo, you’re cleaning windows. Can you do ours? He said sure. I said we’ll bring you back some cheese. We were on the way to a cheese shop in East Dulwich. Do you like cheese? He said he did. How did you get out there? we asked. It wasn’t easy to get to the grass verge at the front of the windows. I climbed through the window, he said. Fair do’s. Climbing through the window had never occured to me. Afterwards, we thought: oh dear, we shouldn’t have put him on the spot like that. Never mind, we’ll get him some cheese. In East Dulwich we went in the cheese shop and got three cheeses: roquefort, fourme d’ambert and comte. When we got back to home the windows had been done. When we went round with the cheese, No 1 was out. So we brought the cheese back home. Oh dear! No 1 had probably been in  a hurry to go out and we’d forced him to do our windows. When we looked through the windows it was cleaner, no doubt about it. We had some of the cheese. Between us we got through a fair bit of it. I like the blues particularly. I had the fourme d’ambert on my pasta. We kept the cheese out of the fridge. It’s better that way, but it gets softer. Probably not really acceptable as a gift for no 1 anymore. I had a bit more after dinner tonight. When I next bump into no 1 I’ll have to have a strategy.

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