One thing you London types don’t understand at all, and for completely different reasons us Brummie Provincials find hard to grasp, is the milk thing.
I really miss milk in glass bottles. Back in the stix, even if you didn’t have it delivered, you could stroll to your local corner shop, et voila, bottles of milk! Glass bottles. Loads of them.
London’s too ‘trendy’ and ‘high-speed’ for that. I have the most corner-shoppish corner shop you ever saw in your life down the road, but… no milk in glass bottles. It comes in plastic bottles. Very small ones, medium ones, huge ones. All plastic.
And the thing is, I hate this stuff. Even when I open a new one, it doesn’t SMELL as fresh as a glass bottle. And eight times out of ten, it turns thick and lumpy a day or two before the alleged ‘best before’ date printed on the side.
Glass bottles are cool. I want milk in glass bottles.
I was surprised your part of Birmingham still had them.
They must have disappeared from Northern Ireland around 1988 – I was living in Greater Belfast at the time, about five miles out from the city. They continued to re-appear only on door-to-door deliveries, and still do as far as I am aware in some areas.
Working for the now defunct Milk marketing board I saw the changes in the depots close up – in Bangor town there was a huge triple warehouse size depot from ‘the day’ still around in 1994, but pulled down by about 1998. The neighbouring Newtownards was a similar size, geographically and of just smaller population, more rural. They used Bangor’s milk depot, but had their own, the size of a small garage. Possibly, it held about 180 crates of 34 bottles (at most). I’m not sure what became of it after the Bangor one was torn down.
“Why are you throwing partially drunk milk bottles through my window ?”
“Well, you havent got a doorbell now have you ?”
-Reeves and Mortimer, The Weekenders
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