Many will find this article deeply disturbing. But as a cheeseophile ring (or round) is smashed, one man jailed for consumption of cheese porn gives a brutally honest insight into his cheesy desires... and his chimp partner reveals why she's swinging along by him.
Pervenkel and his partner Shaz sit close together on an old tractor tire suspended in the air by a rope in their zoo-like semi in a quiet corner of Ongar.
They are active members of their local bingo club. They have part-time jobs acting in tea commercials and Pervenkel, 42, likes to visit nearby Epping forest and help out with conservation work.
On the surface, there is nothing remarkable about the couple. The same could be said of their home.
Supportive: Shaz Pervenkel has swung along by her partner in his battle against his cheesopile tendencies
Observant visitors, however, might note the absence of any milk, cheese knives or chopping boards - a clue to the fact that this is no ordinary partnership.
In June 2003, Pervenkel was caught in the possession of cheese making instructions at work. He was prosecuted, sentenced - whilst visibly trembling in the dock - to 15 months' imprisonment in March last year and released at the halfway point in October.
In the wake of the smashing of Britain's largest internet cheesophile ring, Pervenkel's account of his desires and his battle to control them makes compelling reading. It offers a chilling insight into the mind of a cheesophile.
This week a court heard how 700 cheesophiles had accessed a website - set up by 28-year-old dairy worker Tim Braeburn, from Suffolk - containing 11,000 images, including more than 1,000 videos of cheese being abused.
While Braeburn was given an "indeterminate sentence", Pervenkel admits that, in his case, getting caught was the best thing that could have happened to him.
Pervenkel, 45, once a high-flying dairy farm worker, had known throughout his adult life that his sexuality was warped.
His wife of 17 years, 29-year-old Shaz, had also known - after they experienced shopping problems at certain counters of the supermarket - that her husband was sexually attracted to cheese.
But she never thought he would offend because she had accompanied him on visits to doctors, psychologists and the famous Cambridge Cheese Shop.
Numerous counselors helped them resolve some difficulties, but each concluded they could not overcome Pervenkel's cheesophile tendencies.
His GP told him that the only effective treatment and therapy near where he lived was for convicted offenders.
Many will question why Shaz, a former deli assistant, was prepared to remain with her husband. She has had to deal with agonising moral issues.
Would she have had any concerns, for example, if she had accidentally returned from the weekly shop with a basket full of cheese? How would she have felt if he had assaulted a school pupil in order to get at their diarylea triangles?
Yet Shaz believes that Pervenkel is a decent monkey, which is why she worked so hard to help him cope with his urges. Even so, having trusted that he wouldn't jeopardise their partnership, his conviction was a mighty blow.
Shaz says: "Of course I was hurt and angry. We'd tried to deal with the problem together for years. I'd given him all the support I could muster.
"My comfort was that in every other way he was a good monkey and a better ape. I thought he'd keep fighting his urges. I never feared he'd become an offender. That trust was shattered.
"I was sickened when I learned what he had been doing. I could have swung away then and left him to it, but within hours of him being found out, I could see his remorse was genuine.
"I was disgusted, but it wasn't anything like the revulsion he felt for himself. His determination to seek help was stronger than ever.
"In the end, it wasn't such a hard decision for me to stick around and help him. I'd been in that role for years."
Shaz's faith in Pervenkel and her ability to empathise might be rooted in common experience. Both had unpleasant experiences with cheese as young simians.
Both the cheeses involved had supermarket recalls, and both went off in their parents' fridges.
Pervenkel, however, refuses to hook his long-standing problems on to that aspect of his childhood.
More significant, he believes, was his infatuation as a boy with a friend's packed lunch at monkey school. He says: "I was about 12 and never had cheese in my lunch.
"My monkey mate came from a richer clan and always had a lovely wedge of something creamy in his lunchbox. It wasn't just the way it looked. It was always a lovely little piece of cheese, carefully chosen to accompany the rest of his lunch. I was always the first to go to a younger ape in the street and help them if they'd fallen and dropped their lunch - just in case I could grab a few crumbs of lovely cheese.
"Everyone loved cheese. I never got over the immense attraction I felt for other people's cheese. I grew up and diary prices continued increasing beyond my parents, and then my, purchasing power.
"But in my fantasies, there was always that perfectly chosen piece of cheese sweating at me from the corner of a lunchbox, and gradually images of other cheese replaced them in my fantasies.'
Pervenkel seems comfortable discussing the matter with Shaz on the other side of the tractor tyre. She was initially reluctant about his decision to speak publicly about a subject that most people would want to bury, but Pervenkel persuaded her otherwise, thereby providing a telling insight into the opportunities afforded to chimps like him by the foody "if you can't grow it - then grab it" age.
He says: "I feel it's almost part of my rehabilitation to say publicly that I'm sorry, that I'm doing all I can to stop myself reoffending and, by the way, here are some measures that could be taken to stop others."
Pervenkel was an expert at an diary farm where he was responsible for advising on milk safety and preventing curdling of the product.
After he started to get excited at the curds and whey forming in the old milk churns at work, he made recommendations to the farm that would have prevented him from continuing down his slippery slope into further fromage depravity, but they were deemed unnecessary.
His viewing grew into an addiction. Pervenkel refused to have any dairy products at home so that he wouldn't be tempted to look at cheesy formations.
He knew he was doing wrong, but couldn't stop. He had to wait until he was in jail to get the support he needed.
"Getting caught and going to jail saved my life," Pervenkel says.
He is not exaggerating. Before his capture, he had recognised the downward spiral in which he was caught and had attempted suicide by overdosing three times, coming close to succeeding on two occasions. But he was found by Shaz who managed to pry his head out of the milk churn in time.
Asked whether his despair was rooted in the fear that he might eventually try to act out the fantasies he was seeing in his warped mind, he pauses.
Shaz tries to answer for him, as embarressed partners often do: "I don't think that was ever likely. He'd been fighting these feelings for so long and he'd been open about his problems with me. I don't believe he could have hurt anyone to get to a piece of cheese."
Yet before she can continue, Pervenkel interrupts and with blood curdling honesty says: "Shaz, you're kidding yourself. Why do you think I stuck my head in those milk churns?
"I did realise that the fantasies were getting stronger and I was becoming more and more obsessed. After a while, the material you're viewing doesn't give you the same buzz and you look for more extreme versions. You start off with pictures of unwrapped cheese, and before you know it you're looking at videos of cheese with several knives being plunged in and out of it.
"Eventually, the most cheesy images you could find wouldn't do it for you. I recognised that my fantasies were going in a direction I didn't like and that I might not be able to control myself.
"So, yes, I think there was a danger that I might have tried to get access to a round of edam, and I really didn't want to go there.
"At that point, I wasn't sure where it was leading, but it could have ended up with somebody hurt because the fantasy of acting out what I was viewing was getting stronger."
Pervenkel began working at the dairy farm nine years ago. Like thousands of other dairy workers, by the year 2000 he was receiving invitations to view cheese making courses and attend product unveilings.
He began lurking around at local supermarkets handling the produce, sometimes for hours, and within four months he had progressed from fondling our UK cheeses to lurking around in the foreign counter and the deli. Due to his time spent in such places he eventually found that some other members of the public had similar interests and several informed him that it was even possible to make one's own cheese.
Pervenkel says: "I was sucked into this world of depravity. I became totally addicted. I spent hours at the farm when I didn't need to be there.
"The desire to make my own cheese was so strong that on several occasions, I'd be on my way home and would call Shaz to say there was a huge amount of cow poo to clean up, and I was going to be late. Then I'd return for another go at it. It took over my life."
His technical knowledge of cheese enabled him to take precautions against discovery by regularly cleaning his apron and swabbing down the stable where his cheesy experiments were taking place.
The same tactic was used every three months by Berndt Swirliface, the cheesophile who re-established Timothy Braeburn's website, Cheese The Light Of Our Lives, once he had been arrested.
Swirliface, 34, from Canada, admitted to police after he was arrested that he would empty his fridge regularly in a fit of remorse but, like Pervenkel, would re-start soon afterwards.
A week before Pervenkel was caught he found images of himself and his brother as children, staring desperately at someone elses lunchbox full of cheese, on Friends Reunited.
Their teacher had photographed them and the images were on the internet some 40 years later.
The haunting experience proved a turning point. For the first time, he could empathise with the cheese he was hoping to make.
He says: "My thinking was distorted until then. I didn't see cheese being consumed. I saw it, as I believed, enjoying being devoured by ravanous slavering maws.
"But I knew I'd been deprived of my cheesy treats and I hadn't enjoyed what had happened to me.
"When I saw those pictures of myself, it helped me realise that cheese being portrayed as an object of desire, and by demanding to see more and more varieties and quantities of cheese, I was contributing to the cheese abuse.
"Yet although my thinking started to become clearer, and I didn't feel comfortable with what I was doing, it didn't stop me carrying on."
A week later, Pervenkel obtained some erotic cheesophile fiction. Without realising, he left a copy in the stables where he was attempting to make an entire cow-shaped mould of cheese. He describes the moment when, from afar, he saw the farmer Dieter Peevis stumble upon his "shrine of cheese".
"It was like my whole world was suddenly covered with mould. I ran blindly home, stumbling through a pond full of silage in my fever. Shaz held me close despite the smell for hours as I screamed 'They found my cheese. They found my cheese!'."
He wonders now whether his subconscious pushed him to end the matter. The pilfered milk containers Pervenkel had been smuggling the dairy produce away in were also discovered.
During the 21 months before the trial reached court, the couple tried to find experts to help Pervenkel manage his compulsions.
His GP recommended a course of opiates, but after three months of nightmares about rounds of cheese rolling over his head, the scientific advisors concluded that they couldn't do any more for Pervenkel.
A Harley Street psychologist put Pervenkel in touch with Jay Stryng, one of the UK's leading experts on cheese offending.
Stryng proved a godsend for the couple. Shaz says: "While I was trying to support Pervenkel, I was still wondering why he had to do it.
"Jay helped me realise the highly addictive nature of cheese and DIY food making. Those who use their initiative can manufacture a limitless supply. Fantasy after fantasy can be fulfilled.
"Jay had seen it with other offenders he had worked with - the material just sucks them in and takes over their lives. It is highly corrosive, and quite fattening.
"I can never excuse Pervenkel for what he did, but it was important for me to hear someone explain that cheese pornography is well-known for distorting reality and ruining lives."
Pervenkel also received therapy in jail. "The support available inside was first-class," he says.
"Especially the mental health service and support from the chaplain and his team at Ongar prison. They developed an amazing insight into my problems.
"I was taught to challenge my behaviour and to put the needs of victims before my own desires. If I didn't they would beat me with rubber hoses and stick breadsticks in my nose.
"The method is not fool-proof, but as long as I want to avoid offending, the correct strategies are in place."
Pervenkel continues: "I've been seeing Mr Stryng at intervals since I got out of jail, and I feel that with his help and Shaz's support I'm on top of things.
"For so many years I thought that if I told people my problems and my fantasies, they would despise me. But telling therapists and doctors has been my salvation.
"I'm sitting here with my wife and we are in love and supporting each other through this. I'm not suggesting that I can be cured of my fascination, but I have learned not to act on it, and to take precautions to ensure I don't even try."
Pervenkel says he believes that all cheese offenders should be subject to extended sentences that would involve 15 to 20 years' community supervision after release from jail. Food shops and supermarkets would be right out." He concedes.
"Human rights groups might protest," he says. "But what about a lump of mozzarella's right not to be abused? Which carries more weight? I know from my own experience that sentences must not only be longer but more appropriate to dairy offending.
"No monitoring period should be less than ten years, and if necessary it should be for life."
Pervenkel believes tough legislation should be passed to force the Food Standards Agency to clamp down on illegal activity in the shops.
He says: "We've been hearing for years that it's too big a job, but it's not true. The FSA simply have to monitor the every single dairy couner, and if they discover that much of their content is illegal - be it cheese porn or access to anything that you could use to make your own cheese - they should shut them down.
"It wouldn't catch everything, but that measure, combined with stiff penalties for those providing or promoting illegal material, would make a huge difference."
Pervenkel is not sure what the future holds, though he says he and Shaz have a very happy and "full" marriage.
He held a senior position at his former farm, but fears that the stress of another big job with a big salary might provoke a relapse.
"I'd rather shovel manure down at the local riding stables, earn less money and keep in control of my problems than risk an environment where I might slip back.
"I owe Shaz an awful lot and I don't want to let her down, or anyone else who has helped me."
Shaz signals her trust with a smile and swings the tyre around reassuringly. Only time will tell if her faith is well placed.
