Kevin Read has been delivering pints for 47 years – and playing a bit of bass guitar

“‘MUSTN’T grumble’ – that’ll probably be on my gravestone!”, 47-years-a-milkman Kevin Read says, at the end of a long week on his rounds.

Some might think his doorstep-delivery profession was all but dead, but far from it.

More and more people are taking a stand against profiteering supermarket giants’ obsession with harmful plastics. And the UK-based Facebook group “Old Milkmen Will Never Die” boasts more than 3,500 members.

Mr Read told me: “I remember when the supermarkets first started whacking everything out in cheap plastic bottles in the 1980s and 1990s.

“People don’t think about it much, but it means they don’t have to deal with the empties.

“It passes that problem on to the councils, who have to put up your council tax for recycling. We get all the bottles sterilised, washed and reused.”

He said: “And around the same time as everything went plastic, they also abolished a system that fixed the retail price for milk. Supermarkets and milkmen had sold it at same price, and everyone got a fair living out of it. But the Milk Marketing Board was disbanded [1994] and the supermarkets were able to start selling it as a loss leader.”

He added: “Wholesale they are paying around 90p for four pints. That has to be taken by a lorry, pasteurised at a dairy, put into a plastic bottle, transported again. If they are earning anything from milk, it is fractions of pennies.”

Mr Read recalled a bygone era when bakers sold bread in wax-wrap packaging, butchers’ meat in greaseproof paper, grocers selling spuds in paper bags, and you would walk down the chippy instead of soullessly ordering on Deliveroo or Just Eat.

“We’re still old school, we try to always phone our customers rather than email,” said Mr Read. “There’s a woman… she will call up and say she wants her order cut down to five pints twice a week, and then back up again. And I know her kids are back from uni.”

Mr Read, who started working as a “milk boy” for the Express Dairy aged 13 in 1978, is self-employed and works rounds that he built up himself over the years that are now owned by Parker Dairies (deliveries to east London, City and West End).

He said his typical shift starts around 8pm when he goes to the dairy to pick up and fill out paperwork, before going out on the road from midnight to around 6am to 7am, a lonely graveyard shift listening to a Greatest Hits radio or “anything on the World Service”.

He said: “I know in the films it’s always 7am when you see the milkman delivering.

“But, in truth, we are working through the whole night. We changed that because people were complaining they were getting their milk too late.

“Then it’s back for a couple of hours’ kip and see my three daughters – and hopefully not hear any of their AI-generated music.

“On the weekends I’m up to see my wonderful girlfriend Karen, in Mansfield. We met in 2022 on Facebook on a site discussing 1970s music, and we’ve been a couple since then.”

He said he was a big punk fan and played bass guitar in the early-1980s band Anti Establishment.

Mr Read – originally from Walthamstow – had a lot to say about parking restrictions in central London, urging: “Don’t get me started on LTNs.”

While milk use has declined over the years, demand for dairy alternatives is on the up, despite initial scepticism in the profession.

“I remember in 1984 when semi-skimmed first came in we all thought ‘who’s gonna drink milk with half the fat removed?’

“Oh how wrong were we? The same with organic milk, ‘who’s gonna want to pay extra for milk from cows that have been fed on greener grass?’

“And yet again we were all proved wrong! Oat alternative – ‘just a fad, like almond, soya, coconut, hazelnut. It will fade away!’

“Mind you, we got it right in the late eighties when we said that Vital milk with added calcium wouldn’t take off. Well we had to get something right!”

Mr Read also delivers fresh bread, fruit juice, compost, soil conditioner, potatoes, eggs, yoghurt and water.

He describes himself as a “Cinderfella” single-dad with three grown-up daughters who are still living at home, adding that the long unsociable hours of his job had taken a toll on his relationships.

But he said: “In my life I’ve had two 13-year relationships, sandwiching an 11-year marriage. My parents both died fairly young and I’ve lived in Harlow, east London and Dagenham. I’ve owned about 20 different cars.

“I’ve lived life’s ups and downs but the one constant in my life has been my job. It’s been the corner­stone that has always been there for me. I love my job and it loves me.”

You can get your morning dairy delivery from him by contacting the Parker Dairies at www.parkerdairies.co.uk