It looks as though the comfort levels have improved. I used to drive an electric milk float that was open to the elements and with huge heavy batteries and no power steering – it needed muscles like Popeye’s to manoeuvre the blasted thing. The only time it went at more than 20 mph was going down Wimbledon Hill!

Back at the beginning the local dairy (ok, milk distribution depot) was just round the corner but with increasingly large delivery lorries the inner city site became inaccessible and eventually the local dairy was bought out but a larger concern, sited elsewhere.

I think the current roundsman, who delivers three times per week, works from a depot entirely out of the city (Portsmouth) and for a company which operates nationwide. I don’t know how many deliveries he makes locally (or even if ‘he’ is indeed a he) as deliveries are done well before I get up.

For many, many years our milkman helped me make ends meet. I was careful and innovative but we had little money and sometimes in midweek I found things hard. Milkman to the rescue – I would buy eggs, bread and potatoes and know that I wouldn’t have to pay until Saturday which would be fine as my husband got paid on Friday night (by cash of course).

Even my childhood contains memories of milk bottles. No fridges; so a bottle would always be placed in the sink with cold water up to its neck in the summer. Hopes that we could get the bottles in before the blue tits pecked through the foil lid and dreading an oncoming storm which would ‘turn’ the milk without warning.

In the cold winters the milk would turn to ice and if it was really freezing the milk would force itself up through the lid making an ice chimney pot. Even London in the 59’s and 60’s was subjected to extreme temperatures – and our brave milkman carried on regardless – as people like Kevin still do.