The Night I Realized Cheese Could Save the World

Tiffany Aching once told me she learned everything she knew about people from cheese. I laughed until I remembered she’d confronted a literal Queen of the Fairies while wielding only a frying pan and a flock of six-inch blue demons. But it wasn’t until she described her “cheese dreams”—those quiet moments when the right flavor revealed exactly what a person needed—that I understood. Her rural upbringing on the Chalk, where she made award-winning Golden Sceptres for county fairs, taught her that humanity’s essence hides in the mundane. Like when she diagnosed a neighbor’s loneliness by how he buttered his bread.

Battling Queens and Other Teenage Hassles

You’d think fighting a malevolent fairy queen would be a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal. For Tiffany, it was Tuesday. She never asked to be a witch, but when the Queen of the Elves started kidnapping children, the Discworld’s smallest warrior stepped up. What stays with me isn’t her courage, but her strategy: she bargained with the Nac Mac Feegle, a clan of pugnacious kelda-worshipping hooligans, by promising them stories. “Everyone wants to be remembered,” she explained later, “even if they’re too drunk to realize it.” She once let me in on a secret: the Feegle’s “king” Wee-Wee still keeps a list of his “conquests” that’s just a bunch of scribbles and jam stains.

Ordinary Magic in an Extraordinary World

Tiffany’s cottage had no cauldron, no crystal balls—just a rocking chair and a bookshelf filled with agricultural almanacs. She’d tell you real witchcraft isn’t about sparks and smoke, but about knowing when Mrs. Earwig’s cat has worms or why the sandersons’ baby won’t stop crying. I’ll never forget the night she stared down the Gonnagle, a monster born of collective fear, and simply said, “You’re not scary. I’ve seen worse at the annual sheep shearing.” She once taught me to “mind the gap” between what people say and what they mean—a lesson I’ve used more than any wand ever could.