When I was growing up, everyone seemed to have their milk delivered in glass bottles, with foil tops, by the milk-man who drove a funny little milk float around.
The milk-man would normally leave your required number of bottles in a milk caddy outside your front door. It was then up to you to bring the milk in before the birds started pecking at the top to see if they could reach the cream.
I remember with great pride that one day the milk-man knocked on our front door and asked if he could borrow me. His milk-float had broken down and he wanted me to sit in the milk-float to make sure nobody tampered with it, while he walked down to the nearest telephone box. I was so excited sitting in the front of the milk-float while all the other children were jealously looking on.
I know what you are thinking – Caramel is old! Well, I am not that old. I was born in the eighties, and back then hardly anyone had a landline telephone in our street, nevermind a mobile device. If you wanted to use the telephone, you would walk down to the nearest little parade of shops with your bag of ten pence coins. The world has just started to move at a super-fast pace. All the developments in technology make me look old, when I start to talk about they way things were when I was a lass.
Many of us have fond memories of the milk-man. However, in the area I grew up in, the milk-float disappeared from our streets at one stage, which I think was around the time that new 24-hour supermarkets and budget supermarkets were appearing. People now had their own car and would go down to the supermarket and spend over £100 on the family shopping and stock up on large plastic containers of milk. I have never had to do a big family shop, but I have seen people in front of me at the supermarket with a full trolley of food for their family spend between £200-£300 at a time.
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I was pleased to find that in this little pocket of London, there was a very lovely milk-man when I moved here, driving round in a sweet milk float and delivering foiled topped glass bottles of milk (and even groceries if you put in an order). There is a little milk caddy outside my landlady’s front door and she sets the dial to say if she wants one pint, two pints if she has guests, or nothing if she is going away on holiday. She always has semi-skimmed milk.
I don’t drink milk – I seem to have a bit of a lactose intolerance or something. I buy soya milk, cashew milk, almond milk and occasionally lacto-free milk at the big supermarket instead. But nonetheless, I did love seeing the milk-man in his milk-float! Those who have their milk delivered by the milk-man like to support a much loved traditional part of the community – the local milk-man.
He was a chirpy chappy who always had a jolly greeting for you. He was faithful and reliable. The milk was always there, rain, hail, and shine (I don’t think he came when it snowed…I cannot remember to be honest). But you get the point, we all thought he was wonderful!
Then one day the milk stopped coming. No milk for two weeks. Just empty milk bottles sitting outside the front door waiting to be collected. We found the contact details for the milk suppliers and called them. Apparently there was an outstanding amount owed on the account. This seemed strange because normally the milk-man would leave a note to say how much was due and my landlady promptly left a cheque for him.
It turned out, we had a new milk-man. Nobody knows what happened to our old milk-man. We have asked all the neighbours. It appears nobody knows what what happened to him. It is a mystery. The mystery of the missing milk-man.
Now you may think I should put this mystery out of my mind, however, there is more, much more. I am going to continue this mysterious puzzle in other posts. I have to go out to work now and will not be back at the little nest until midnight.
I have been observing and making deductions and I have several theories to explain the disappearance of our old milk-man. I am eager to share with you my investigative conclusions in another post. The finger of suspicious is pointing straight at…THE NEW MILK-MAN!!!
Have you ever had a cleaner or house-keeper tidy and clean up either your own home or your work premises? If so, do you ever think about how often they might be “going the extra mile” for you?
Now this is a strange thing: I cannot for the life of me remember our next house-keeper. Ever since I received head injuries I have holes in my memory. It is an odd thing. I rejoice in how many memories I do have. It is one of the reasons why I feel writing is so good for me. I love what I can remember and feel rather excited when I can remember something in brilliant detail. But I find it strange when friends and family realize that there are some events and some people that I have no recollection of at all. Especially those they say were a very important part of my life.
Anyway…my post today is about appreciation for all house-keepers do, that you might not realize they do. We always showed appreciation for our house-keepers, who we were aware were regularly going the extra mile and tackling things we did not expect them to. We regularly left thank you notes and a gift, or even a slice of cake we had made, to make sure they knew we had noticed and were very appreciative of their thoughtfulness.
I have at times worked as a cleaner/house-keeper. I KNOW, I truly know the unexpected horrors that a house-keeper might come across. As a house-keeper you face the decision as to whether to deal with something inconceivably gross or leave a note for the occupant to draw their attention to it! 99.9% of the time I would tackle it myself. There is only one situation I am not brave enough to deal with myself, and that is something like a dead mouse. I cannot do it!
It is hard not to notice the difference in the various standards of tidiness of the employees that occupy desks. Some are absolutely immaculate and it is so easy to clean their desk. You look for little ways you can say thank you, like twirling their phone cord neatly, or turning all their pens the same way round in their pen holder.
Then at the other extreme are the desks that you are afraid to touch, because it look as if the stacks of paper and files might all go flying. I do love it when the owner of one of these desks leaves a note saying: “Dear House-Keeper, Please do not clean this desk”. It makes me laugh, because that is the type of desk it is impossible to clean anyway. But thanks for the note!
There are some things that I have seen and been in a dilemma over whether to clean or not. There was one desk that I always dreaded. When I first started working there, I decided to throw away all the mouldy fruit in a bowl on the person’s desk. But I noticed the fruit was replaced and then over the next few weeks it gradually mouldered away again. It kept on happening, so in the end I decided if this person wanted to buy ornamental fruit and watch it turning blue and fuzzy I was not going to participate in this farce anymore! There…I could not bring myself to remind you of what mouldy fruit looks like, you might be eating breakfast. So here is fresh fruit instead.
I was told that the inside of the staff fridge was not my responsibility. Indeed there was a sign on the door reminding staff to sort out any items that belonged to them each Friday. One day I opened the fridge because there seemed to be some juice leaking…I removed the juice, and then as I looked up, I saw a container with some food that seemed to have been long since abandoned, and had now become a curious scientific experiment.
Then came flowers. Once they had well and truly faded, they would stay in the vase for weeks. My supervisor told me not to touch them, because apparently one house-keeper had chipped a vase when trying to be helpful, and the desk-occupant had been furious. So I did not touch them, but I was baffled at these shrivelled up flowers sitting in putrid water for weeks.)
But it was the bins under desks that took ages to empty. There were three of those bins that I used to dread. They were always overflowing with things that should have been put in the recycling bin in each office. Only I couldn’t put the papers in the recycling bins now that the desk-occupant had thrown coke, ketchup, and crumbs all over the papers. Not only were those three bins always over-flowing, there were also items of rubbish all over the floor under the desk. So it took longer to empty the bins because I had to crawl under those desks and retrieve all their crisp packets, banana peels and nail clippings.
Well, there is a definite limit to the horrors I am willing to share with you. I don’t want to make you all feel ill! But if you have a house-keeper or cleaner who cleans either your home or your workplace, bear in mind that they may be often going above and beyond the call of duty and tackling horrors you may not realize were there.
Caramel 