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So now when everyone has remembered that having your milk delivered is a Good Thing To Do here are some shmaltzy memories from working on a milk round ages ago which are probably not that interesting but may raise a smile 1/11
The milk round I worked on covered a mixture of big wealthy houses and some very tough estates. By and large the people who lived in the tough estates had more milk, eggs and potatoes delivered and were usually better customers hashtag just saying 2/11
One Sunday morning at 7am I was delivering to a big house up a long drive and where you dropped the milk allowed you to see into the kitchen and down the hall. The old couple who lived there were just walking away with a cup of tea each, holding hands and totally in the nip 3/11
In a tough part of town there was one cul-de-sac where we dropped a lot of milk every day, we delivered to every house. One of the houses used to pay you from a roll of £20’s hidden in the ceiling lampshade. That’s because he was a naughty man 4/11
Anyway, turns out everyone gets their comeuppance if they haven’t been playing by the rules. He bought a stretched limo once and used to drive around in it which kind of drew attention and he went on ‘holiday’ for a while and we had to look for a new customer 5/11
Round the corner from him the people who lived there needed a bigger house but there wasn’t a bigger house available. One day the neighbours moved out so they knocked through. This is actually a true story not an urban myth 5/11
Our oldest customer lived to aged 103, lived at home until her death and used to drink a pint of green top unpasteurised milk every day. She sat by the kitchen window and you passed the milk in and said hello. “Go there, she’ll have the money dead right, she’s 103 you know” 6/11
Whenever the farmer milkman who I worked for got stuck with a customer who just wanted to talk we had a deal where after 5 minutes I would call his mobile and we would have a fake phone call in order for him to escape. This happened all the time 7/11
Our strangest customer drank loads of milk every day and ordered huge numbers of eggs and we were all scared of knocking for the money. He looked like that man in the Guinness Book of Records with the record beating long fingernails 8/11
My favourite customer was Jessie. She looked like Thora Hird and sounded like her too. She used to sit in the back room of her house by a very old range and it was like going back in time. She once told me her favourite pudding was ‘tis-a-miru’ and I loved that 9/11
If you’re well practiced and confident, it is possible to carry 3 glass bottle pints of milk in each hand. And with empties you can definitely carry 12 - 10 on fingers and thumbs and one under each arm but you can’t run very fast 10/11
This thread hasn’t done anything really except to remind me that being a milkman was for me the best job ever. If you have milk delivered now do continue to support them - it’s a community service as well as a food delivery and it should be cherished 11/11
