EVERY time I go to France I am shocked they don’t really do fresh milk – this is why they are so quirky.
They do dairy, lots of dairy, having a wonderful obsession with cheese and yoghurt.
But they hardly drink milk, and on the very rare occasions they do, it’s that UHT rubbish.
You cannot buy two-litre bottles of milk of any sort.
So it is not unsurprising that the coffee they drink is shockingly bad!
In nearby Denmark, for example, you can buy fresh milk (albeit still only in one-litre packs) but (shock, horror) their skim milk masquerades as regular milk.
In what is, apparently, the most unlikely of events in Europe – that anyone would want full cream milk – you have to ask and risk the condescending look of the shop attendant, clearly baffled by “who would buy that”.
Back in the UK, I like that the one-litre and half-litre bottles all have handles (I tend to focus on the important stuff).
We have been on a family vacation, not to study European milk consumption, but for fun. We jetted off just after Christmas for a month with only a 7kg day bag each, no suitcases or technology, and eight of us headed into a Scandinavian-European winter.
Four out of five children nominated Denmark as their favourite place to visit (Rohan voted for France).
We stayed in Copenhagen and then on the dairy farm of an old friend in Jutland. The farm milks 1500 cows 24 hours a day, averaging about 11,000 litres per cow annually.
They were one of the earliest adopters of robotic milkers in the world, nearly 25 years ago.
Last year they threw all the robots away and went back to milking in a plain old herringbone.
The cows sleep on an individual waterbed, cleaned daily, and most of the workforce is Ukrainian.
Diesel was just a tick under $3 a litre.
On the third day in France the boys in unison cried: “Dad, please, no more churches, museums or old buildings.”
While I did not have time to go to any farms in France, I should confess I did try as many local fromageries (fancy cheese shops) as I could find.
The boys ate breakfast at boulangeries (fancy bakeries). They got sick of croissants, but cereal with UHT milk isn’t really a breakfast option.
My trip highlight was Mont-Saint-Michel, an ancient tidal monastery, like something out of a fairytale.
Also, we stopped in at the town of Bethune in France. Our mob went from Bethune in France to the Isle of Skye in Scotland to Australia.
Hamish’s trip highlight was eating a hamburger in Hamburg, where we also tried cooling our drinks by placing them in the snow. We got cold long before the drink!
George, Rory and Rohan loved the white chocolate and marshmallow waffles in Belgium.
The kids couldn’t buy anything big on our travels as we couldn’t carry it in our bags.
To get around us they bought a key ring each at each destination (with their own money) and we now have 120 memento key rings.
Waterstones also held us up on our travels. These giant Bunnings-like bookstores called kept sucking us in the door – 10-year-old George managed to buy, and complete, all seven books in the Harry Potter series in the month we were away.
My other trip highlight was in London’s West End for a production called The Play That Goes Wrong, a slapstick comedy.
It certainly had Sally and the boys pig snorting with laughter.
We stayed for another week on a friend’s dairy farm in Somerset. Proper English folk are delightful, great hosts, incredibly polite, they have no use for our sarcasm and they do conversation better than Australians.
After all that, we came home.
The critical question I can hear you ask was where did you find the best chocolate milk on your travels?
So to answer, I added three parts Bethune Lane dairy chocolate milk with two parts ice cream, whizzed on high speed and tasted.
No competition really, it beats all comers.
