Some good news for a change

The year 2016 has been a bad one for celebrities and musical types. Another childhood icon, Prince, died this week. And poor Victoria Wood is gone now – a classic comedienne if ever there was one. Both of them were taken too soon.

And, visiting the European Dairy Association’s dairy policy conference did nothing to cheer me up. From Michel Nalet’s sad summary that the future is not bright at all, to the pleas from more than one speaker that the UK should stay in the European Union, I felt a bit downhearted on the train back to London. I found that eating the mushroom-shaped chocolates with my cup of tea did make me a bit happier, however. Oh Belgium, you get all the stars for chocolate-making.

But then I saw the news that Müller UK is not shutting the glass bottle plant at Hanworth, now that it’s taken over Dairy Crest’s liquid milk operations. It’s also planning to expand and rejuvenate its milk&more doorstep delivery service in the UK, of which I am a customer. I had been resisting the urge to hoard the milk bottles ever since Dairy Crest announced the closing of the site. Now I don’t have to.

And I thought, well, there you go. Liquid milk consumption is not dead, it’s just resting. In fact, I just upped my weekly order to accommodate the increased ingestion of cereals in the household. I will admit to probably paying over the odds for the pleasure of having my milk delivered straight to my stoop, but to me the price I pay may just about actually cover the costs of producing that pint in a glass bottle. Now, if we can only continue to convince the rest of society of the value of milk, we’ll be seeing an upturn in no time.