Then after a busy few days and nights God created Man, in His own image. This is the gospel truth, which then has to mean ipso facto that there’s a feminine variant of God …
Now flash forward some years (about six thousand by some counts, about 14,000,000,000 by others) to ME in the here and now:
Little Olivia and the Vikings
‘Daddy!’
‘Yes, little Olivia?’
‘Please tell me a story! You owe me a story, I’ve been good for a whole week.’
‘Then climb upon my knee, bonny child, and I’ll tell you a tale of the fish of the sea—’
‘Can them fish, Pops! I want economics, and thrilling stuff like current affairs and world events—’
‘—or, if you like a tale of the Viking hordes—’
‘Yay! Oodles of rape and pillage, bloody violence, an ‘X’ certificate?’ Read More…
WE TAKE OUR DAILY DOSE OF MILK FOR GRANTED, don’t we?
Milk is white juice in plastic bottles from the supermarket; pasteurised, homogenised, discombobulised, calcium enriched, lo-fatted, nuked, devitaminised, revitaminised; ideally suited to turning black coffee white or reducing crispy wheaten things to a soggy grey goo.
At the back of our minds the thought may lurk that there are animals in the loop somewhere—large gentle ruminant beasts with eyelashes to die for, that repose in languid pastures and blissfully convert mouthfuls of lush vegetation to golden cream.
But such thoughts are distant. Reality is the here and now: fill the trolley and move on. Few of us are aware of the other, hidden, side of milk … the HUMAN face of milking.
Needing an extra buck, I found myself alongside a Southland dairy farmer standing to the very immediate south of five hundred north-facing cows on a rotary. New title: Trainee Relief Milker …
