The Milkman

It is reassuring that, in the age of supermarket dominance, we still get milk delivered to our door by a local milkman. In fact, two rival electric milk floats compete for custom here in Dinas Powys. We use Jones & Sons Dairies, Barry.

Milk was originally delivered to houses daily because homes had poor refrigeration. This is no longer the case, but having food delivered to your door seems to have gained in popularity in recent years. When I was a lad it was mainly either regular pasturised or very creamy 'gold top' Channel Island milk. Now there's a wider choice of skimmed, low-fat milks, and organic milk; of course, all milk used to be organic.

I remember the returnable glass milk bottles. The birds used to peck the aluminium caps off, if you didn’t cover them, and when the milk froze it rose up out of the bottle. We used to have a bottle holder on the doorstep with a dial to tell the milkman how many pints we wanted each day.

Plastic containers are convenient for larger amounts of milk, of course, and plastic is now collected from the kerb fortnightly for recycling down our way. The thing I miss the most, however, is the creamy bit on top, because most milk is homogenized these days.

Here’s a song by Benny Hill about the life of a milkman called Ernie. I cannot show the original Benny Hill video here for copyright reasons, but if you go to YouTube and type in "Benny Hill - Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West") you can watch it:

J. Jones & Son (Dairies) Ltd., Dock View Road, Barry, Vale of Glamorgan CF63 4JP.