The good boys and girls at MJ Towers are big fans of the television series The West Wing, which chronicled the lives and loves of the White House under the administration of the fictional US President Jed Bartlet.

And one of our favourite episodes, The Crackpots and These Women, takes its cue from a real-life event, when in 1867, President Jackson had a 1,400-pound block of cheese hauled into the main foyer of the White House for an open house with citizens and his staff, where they discussed the issues of the day while carving off slabs of cheddar.