Posted by Peter Ceresole on December 06, 2006 at 05:50:38 from 80.177.22.49 user PeterC.
In Reply to: UHT milk posted by Mike Field on December 05, 2006 at 21:53:46:
Oh, for the days when as kids we used to wander into next-door's dairy and come back with a billy full of milk still warm from the cow....
Wasn't that just lovely? Not just warm but still frothy and with a sweet taste... When I was little (about 7, I reckon) we'd stay with my aunt in her chalet in the Jura mountains, in Switzerland. No electricity or running water- that was collected from the roof, into a barrel and hand pumped into a header tank, which was a daily chore. A real chore... And where I first became familiar with the hell of washing in soft water... Getting the soap off... Impossible. We walked to the farm and collected the milk every day. It's still a vivid memory... The soft light from paraffin lamps. And in the mountains, lying in bed during the thunder storms, just my nose poking out from under the sheets... Whispering reassurance to my little sister. You're much closer to the action, up there, and the thunder is jolly loud.
There was a wood burning stove in the kitchen. I seem to remember that it worked jolly well. There were several cooking positions on the top, two of them at least with concentric rings of iron that could be removed to vary the direct exposure to the flames. There was also an oven below. My uncle spent a lot of time cutting and splitting logs, and there was what seemed to me a huge store of wood stacked along the side of the house, under the broad eaves. The whole chalet smelt wonderfully of pine resin and wood smoke. Not smells I get a lot of in London these days, but totally evocative of childhood.
It was idyllic for a holiday, playing with the streams and in the woods on the soft carpet of pine needles and marshalling the red ants into pathways- and avoiding their bites. But those wooden chalets were absolute tinderboxes; a spot of carelessness with a lamp and they'd go off like a rocket. Every year you'd learn about someone in the region who'd lost a barn or a house. Nice to have been there, done that, and now as an old fart I enjoy my mortar, bricks and broadband.