Raw Milk

I went to Oxford, on the northern side of the Waimakariri River, in search of a dairy that sells raw milk. Very few farms have a licence to sell raw milk. I found it easily and drove in to the sales shed. It held two high-tech vending machines, one for milk and one for bottles. I had to buy a bottle because I hadn't thought to take one after fifty years of buying contained milk. It was all very whizz-bang.

The milk tastes fresh and sweet, without the cooked flavour I have become so used to. Until I left home at the age of seventeen I'd had nothing other than raw milk. I used to collect the family's milk in a billy from the nearby farm shed where the cows were milked. I loved the smell of the Jersey cows and the milk, the the cow's lowing mingled with the hissing milking machine, and the friendly greeting.

In the place we lived before that the milkman came to the door carrying a milk can and he dipped the milk out and poured it into the milk jugs. Before that Dad milked our own cow. He squirted the warm milk into my mouth straight from the cow's teat. My mother did not approve of this. She insisted I take my little blue mottled Bakelite mug when I went with Dad.

What a lot of happy memories the taste of the raw milk brought to me.

On the way home I stopped at the Eyre River, hoping to photograph the wild flowers that are on the riverbed, but floods have made a new channel, cutting access to them.

My movie, ,
which looked good when I sent it to YouTube, but lost the detail in translation.