Engaging with a milk-bottle - some tips (and wrinkles)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

29 April

Caveat (1):

Since I could easily establish no gain in having a bottle of milk that had been left on the doorstep all day*, precisely because, on a warm or warmer day, that might render the product if not toxic, then unpleasant, it has not been a form of packaging with which I have been much in contact**.

Therefore, although not a tyro, I do have to admit that I am not 'in' with the latest ways of bottle management***.


Anyway, on with the trashy observations:

* Milk-bottles generally defy being cleaned, even if you have what passes for - and was probably sold as - a bottle-brush****

* The bottlers will, no doubt, claim that a rinse and an attempt at cleaning is all that they need to work on, with their industrial, high-pressure cleaning, when the bottles are gathered home to where they may once have been, side by side, waiting to be filled... (End of lyrical indulgence)

* The offer of delivery of (no t.v. celebrities intended) cheese in a bottle (and thus cutting out the middle man already alluded to) did not prove popular with householders, whereas that of orange juice did

* Odd that someone, without enquiring as to what it was (despite the fact that red leicester, for example, is pretty much that colour), wanted to buy some juice that is orange in appearance (but not, we notice, red juice or green juice)... (End of especially fruitless - pun intended! - indulgence)

* Back with milk-bottling, those foil-caps, even more than the bottles, refuse to be cleaned - hence the similar cheesy odour when someone seeks to do their duty of recycling the blessed things

* The date on the cap used to be much more clearly embossed than I found yesterday, when confronted with several bottles in a fridge, and, unreasonably, wanting not to deposit cheese into the planned cup of coffee that had set me off in search of milk (Winnie-the-Pooh, of course, is fearful of finding cheese at the bottom of a jar of hunny - make of that what you will, unless you are bound by the rules of Freudian interpretation)


* The foil-cap loves the bottle, and there are various stages to the romance:

** How to depress the cap, and thereby release the seal*****, without (a) deforming the
cap beyond its redemption in sitting on top of the bottle when in the fridge, and (b), almost in consequence, losing a goodly part of the milk - which only matters because said milk, unless cleaned up properly and thoroughly, yet again imparts that odour of mouldy cheddar to the home

** Especially overnight from when you first opened the bottle, the bottle neck / lips and the cap (Freudians sit up now: this is what you were waiting for all along!) will be glued together more firmly than, even though you know it happens, you can quite believe

** Forget wood glue (though I do wonder, now, what it is made from...******), and the claim that it is stronger than the wood that it binds! The Pandarus, which the milk has been initially (up to you which is Troilus, which Cressida), still serves to make them inseparable, because the cap does not want to come off, and you urge it, crying Come on!

** This can continue, with degress of ardour (depending on (a) how often you need to revert to your pinta, and (b) the related matter of dosage, which, by Degas' transformation, yields a broad measure of how quickly you consume it), almost ad nauseam

** When bottle and cap do have to part, because you want to recycle at least one of them: they show that they are still in love with, and missing, each other by both being near impossible to void of the liquid that brought them together


On which note, Salve, and may your chosen fluid keep pleasing you!



End-notes

* I forget why - one posits the combination of an early start and a late milk delivery, or some such.

** And, unlike other collectors, have not curated a library of the different designs...

*** Some, addicted to the new ways (if arguably no better, not to say worse, than the old ones), would suggest following my relative Marmaduke's Twitter account (he wanted @milkbottlemanagement, but - so naïf is he - that, in fact, he ended up naming it after himself).

Caveat (2): Do so at your peril!


**** Hence that aroma of cheese at the homes of the collectors already mentioned.

***** NB This is not, I advise, a good excuse for tweets from Edgar the Dolphin!

****** Those in the know may already have thought of There's Something About Mary (1998).


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