Once upon a time, a long time ago, in our far away home at Wooloowin, milk was actually delivered to the back door of our home each day by a friendly neighbourhood milkman. Now milk only ever came in those one pint glass bottles, where the lighter cream content of the milk would naturally separate and settle into the top third of every bottle. Way back then, homogenized milk was a concept far too sci-fi to even contemplate, let alone pronounce. Well the square squatty shaped Brisbane city bottle certainly made the skinny long neck Rockhampton model look rather weird at first glance. Anyway, whatever their signature shape, all bottles had to be returned to the vendor for refilling rather than just being disposed of in rubbish bins like the milk containers of today. Their gold, blue or red stripy alfoil tops were meant to be removed by carefully lifting a small side tab and tearing across the top. David typically reasoned that if God had already created a milk bottle opener in the form of a thumb, then it should be fully utilized as such by the downward spike through the seal and into the thick creamy ooze there, access problem solved! Now it was also considered quite bad form to pour from the bottle onto your morning porridge, without making at least some attempt to mix the longed-for top settled cream back into the general milk body. Still what Tom don’t know Tom don’t miss. So it was creamy rich luscious porridge for Sam and low fat skim lite milk porridge for Tom. Just looking after your health I was, Tom really! Now the other strange thing about milk in the 60s is that you also got it for free every morning at school. Small little milk bottles were delivered to the school in heavy metal framed crates with bits of melting ice scattered throughout. Each student was expected to consume his/her allotment or else. It seemed like a sort of Government forced calf-fattening exercise for my whole generation, under the strict scowling supervision of the on-patrol teachers. Oh the envy I had of those class mates whose mothers provided them with a chocolate or strawberry flavoured straw through which to consume this by now sun-warmed white medicine. Well over the years the milk name has not changed only it’s taste. As quality gives way to the pressures of speed, marketing and convenience, then taste is the resultant looser. Just like that other symbol of life’s food staples the loaf of bread. It was quite common to arrive home and find that the local baker had also home-delivered a loaf of bread to the top of our back steps. There it sat, two mountain humps of dark baked crusty bread wrapped in a white tissue paper shroud and emitting an enticing aroma incapable resistance by any small person within 10 feet. I wonder if.? was a sentence that was never really completed, because you could not keep your hands from feeling the texture and warmth of this glowing ‘kryptonite for kids’ – I bet is has just been baked! was the expectation and was mostly proved true and evidenced by the loaf’s radiant warmth and home-cooked bouquet. Now, like most things the real delicacy actually lay within. See, by separating the two half loaf humps, you could expose the delights of the warm fresh baked bread inside. So by peeling and devouring the white fleshy strips that were exposed at the face of the separated halves, one could experience a taste of pure rapture. Sadly by continuing to pursue this forbidden desire led to a rather interesting phenomenon a hollowed out loaf of bread where the outside remained intact and untouched but housing a hollowed out centre created by a small ravenous intruder. The obvious solution to the wake-up reality of the damaged caused by the uncontrollable urge, was to stick the half loves together again with the white paper shroud and walk away as if nothing had happened. Still, there was no escaping mum’s yell from the kitchen as she cut the bread for the evening meal and simply peeled off slice after slice of dark bread crust quoits. The game was up and the kid with the guiltiest look got the appropriate verbal hammering whilst all of the remaining siblings kept their heads down least they be identified as an accomplice to this heinous crime. A crime that my English mum told us, would have seen you in the 1800s deported to Australia as punishment. Some crime! Some punishment!
