Cath 🚫HS2 #StoptheStink

For 60 years the blue tits of Britain broke into the milk on your doorstep, and all they ever took was the cream. It was first seen in Swaythling, near Southampton, in 1921. A blue tit landed on a bottle, pecked through the cap and drank. By the 1950s every tit in the country seemed to know the trick. Housewives put out saucers, stones and upturned cups. The birds learned to follow the milk float down the street and be waiting at the next step. You will remember the bottle. Silver foil on top, and beneath it 2 inches of thick yellow cream that had risen overnight, with the white milk underneath. The first one down in the morning got it on the porridge. That cream was the whole point of the burglary. A bird cannot digest milk. It has no means of handling the sugar in it. Cream is nearly all fat, with very little sugar, so the tits drank down to the line and stopped. A wild animal weighing 11 grams, with every bird table and berry bush in the street to choose from, worked out how to open a sealed container to get at butterfat. Then the habit died, in about 10 years. Nobody trapped them or changed the caps. The milk changed. It was homogenised so the cream no longer rose, then skimmed so it was hardly there, then moved to a plastic jug in a supermarket. The blue tits inspected the red top, found nothing in it worth stealing, and went back to the hedge. They were the last creatures in Britain to judge a pint of milk on what was actually in it.

In 1967 Britain had more electric vehicles on its roads than every other country on earth put together, and they were all delivering milk. There were tens of thousands of them. The milk float: open sided, battery under the floor, top speed of about 15 miles an hour, and a whine you could pick out in your sleep. It was charged overnight at the depot and was back there by lunchtime. It carried glass bottles. Each one was collected from your step the next morning, washed and refilled. A bottle went round like that 20 or 30 times before it broke. The foil cap went for scrap. There was no other packaging. The milk had come from farms within a few miles, through a local dairy, and was on the step before 7. So here is what the country had. A zero-emission delivery fleet. Reusable containers with a return rate any modern scheme would kill for. No plastic. A supply chain you could cycle the length of. A man who noticed if an old lady's bottles were piling up, and knocked. It was dismantled in about 15 years, because a supermarket could sell milk a few pence cheaper in a plastic jug as a way of getting you through the door. Every piece of that system is now the subject of a government target for 2040. It was running in 1967, silently, in the dark, and nobody thought it was worth a mention.