Do you keep a cow?

We seem to be approaching something of a milk crisis in our house. Every second day breakfast can be a fraught affair as the last drops of milk are shared out between the cereal bowls. Why do we never have enough milk in?

You cannot underestimate the milk consumption of three growing boys and two adults. So many were the plastic cartons I was depositing at the dump one day last summer that an old woman gave me a glance and enquired, "Do you keep a cow?".

We really need to find out if we can get milk delivered to avert these morning crises. I hark back to the days of the milkman coasting through the streets of Glenburn in a wheezy electric milk float, taking away the empties (provided you had remembered to leave them out the night before - "are the milk bottles out?") and replacing them with one or two pints of fresh, creamy, silver-foil capped milk in its distinctive glass bottles. Of an evening there would be a knock at the door as someone came to collect the weekly "milk money". In this supermarket day and electronic age these regular visitors have long gone: no more insurance man or Spot the Ball man or pools collector.

I was fascinated as a boy to once find a Ladybird book that described the whole system for the colour coding of milk-bottle tops. We only ever got the silver ones so the notion of green and gold or red and silver were incredibly exotic. These are the sorts of things that should excite you as a child. I remember carefully prising tops off and flattening them for threading on to red string for Christmas decorations or to scare birds off a row of seeds.

The green and blue plastic caps we have now, aside from being impossible to recycle, are only fit for the children's "glueings" at nursery, which just delays their progress to the bin.

Being the one to get the "cream off the milk" was a bonus. Today's homogenized cartons deny the thrill of seeing the thick plug of cream in the neck of the bottle and the richness of it engulfing your cereal. It would probably be too rich for my taste these days. I can remember plucking bottles from snowy doorsteps and having to dig into a frozen plug of cream with a teaspoon handle to liberate the milk below. Similarly, I also recall the queasy realisation that a bird had pecked through the foil, now recognised as a cause of the spread of campylobacter.

So, it's off to the shops again to buy more 2, 4 and 6-pint cartons in the knowledge that they will be gone before we realise it. Maybe we should buy a cow?