From the archive: Happy days – when the milk arrived at your door

Published: April 24th, 1967. Photograph by Gordon Standing

G et people talking about the ritual observances of the good old days, and sooner or later the topic of milk will rise to the surface.

Oh yes, we tell our grandsprogs: glass bottles full of milk used to arrive on the doorstep every morning as if by magic. When they were empty you washed them out and put them out on the doorstep, and the whole cycle began again.

The grandsprogs are appalled. They associate glass bottles with drunken violence. Also, they have health and safety objections. It is not okay to pick up a glass bottle which has been left on your doorstep by some unseen, Santa- Claus-style guerrilla operator, and imbibe its contents.

This photograph begs to differ. Taken in the spring of 1967 to illustrate a five-part series by Michael Viney called So Long At The Fair, it shows a milkman going about his daily deliveries in Kiltimagh, Co Mayo.

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Named after the song Johnny's So Long At The Fair, the series examined agricultural developments in the region. Kiltimagh was chosen because the town was considered to represent "the West at its most ordinary and most real".

How, ironic, then, that this picture wasn’t actually published – because it portrays a scene which, at the time, was about as ordinary and real as it was possible to be.

The little car crammed with milk crates. The empty bottles alongside the full ones. The houses and shops hunched against the wind. The footpath sleek with rain.

And the milkman – whose name, unfortunately, the photographer never recorded, and who was doubtless pretty startled to be confronted by an Irish Times photographer as he went about his business – captured as he steps on to the kerb, his manner relaxed and easy, his smile a ray of sunshine at the heart of the image.

It would almost make you yearn for the good old days. Arminta Wallace