The milkman doesn’t come on a Thursday. He usually brings two pints of milk on Mondays, Wednesdays on Fridays. Drops them off anytime between three thirty in the morning and four thirty. Sometimes I hear him, sometimes I don’t. A snapshot of Lincoln life in the year twenty twenty three.
I doubt that many people have their milk delivered anymore. Sometimes we supplement it with more milk purchased from the supermarket but ordinarily two pints keeps us going. It is mainly for tea with the occasional splash on breakfast cereal.
We don’t get anything else delivered, other than online purchases. There was a time when we received a Sunday paper but it is rare for us to buy hard copy these days.
This is a shame really. It is partly a reflection of the way society has moved. Buying a Sunday paper means you, presumably, spend time sitting down to read it. It was quite handy when it came to lighting the fire, especially when you needed to block off the opening to create an updraft. I might light the fire today. See how it goes.
I have been considering taking the Weekend Financial Times. It is a very good paper. Not just financial shit in which I am increasingly disinterested. Once met the technology editor of the FT in a hotel bar in Tokyo, fwiw. We got on well enough and arranged to meet the following evening in the same spot. He stood me up! Bumped into him on the bus to the airport and he was most apologetic. The editor had asked for ten thousand words on a very tight deadline so he had to drop everything.
That was two decades or more ago. Ma gurd. This cannot be so! I remember it like it was yesterday. I don’t really remember much about Tokyo. It seemed a bit of a dump to me. Concrete jungle. I do remember cellar bars and restaurants and not being able to understand any of the street signs. Navigating around Tokyo without a minder was, at least back then, not the easiest proposition. Ditto Taipei.
Singapore on the other hand was a paradise for Westerners. English signs and fantastic food and drink. I stayed a couple of times at the Hyatt Regency on Orchard. Great bar, like a gentlemen’s club, and fabulous rooftop pool.
Went to a sales meeting in Indonesia once. It was only a 30 minute ferry ride from Singapore. Air conditioned rooms but the public areas of the hotel were open at the sides. We were only sixty miles or so from the equator and spent every evening drinking pineapple daiquiris on the deck looking out at the blackness of the South China Sea. An occasional ship steamed slowly by, visible only because of its navigation lights.
I’d go back to Singapore although there are probably other destinations in the region higher on my list of priorities. It is a non-existent list to be honest but I’ve never been to Vietnam or Cambodia so if headed out there and wanting to visit Singapore it would have to be a two centre trip.