Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Simple pleasures

We drink a lot of milk at Hepworth Towers. Or rather, Dave drinks a lot of milk at Hepworth Towers. He drinks gallons of full cream milk. I drink gills of semi-skimmed. We don’t have a milkman but we do have a village dairy. The farm just off the main street has a tiny porch with a fridge where you can go and collect milk, and leave your money for it on the stone slab.

The dairy

Even though it is other people in the house who drink all the milk, it always seems to be me who sees we’ve run out. Why is that? It’s because my semi-skimmed begins to diminish at a mysterious and alarming rate. When the male members of the household can’t get their hard stuff they resort to using my “gnats' piss.” So then guess who it is who goes to the dairy, steaming and grumbling under her breath?

But as soon as I arrive, my bad temper lifts. The smells from the farm transport me back to my childhood. It’s like an aromatic magic potion and it works every time. I step inside the porch and put my coins on the slab, and open the fridge, and the farmer steps out of his kitchen or the bottling room and asks me how many I want, and finds me the old fashioned bottles with the fat necks, because he knows that’s the kind that we like. We exchange meaningless pleasantries about the weather and I step outside and sniff the air again – oh, those smells - and then I go home, a better woman.

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