Living for Disco

“Can I have a go?”, I ask, as our host expertly squeezes torrents of milk from the udder of an uncomplaining cow. I’m thinking, ‘yeah, I can do that. I was brought up on a farm you know’*.

He sits back, as I kneel and grasp the teat. It is unexpectedly clammy. Imagining how I’d feel if somebody grabbed my boob and squeezed it as if it were a stress toy, I gently pull on the teat. Nothing happens. And again. Nothing. I can feel the teat filling with milk, but whenever I touch it, the elusive contents retreat back up into the udder in horror.

It’s horrifying to realize how extremely hard you have to pull on the cow’s bits to get anything to come out. I failed utterly**. I’m surprised the cows aren’t hobbling around in perpetual agony, their hind legs tucked under their armpits (legpits?) to protect themselves from the onslaught – I’d be bent double 100 percent of the time if I had to go through that twice a day.

However, drinking fresh milk that has just been decanted, frothing and warm, from a live animal, is quite something. I even enjoyed the gasps of horror from my friends, who expected to have to cart me to hospital, writhing in alien-esque convulsions, within the hour.

Pussies.

*A very small farmette, with only 70 sheep, two chickens, two geese, and no cows whatsoever.

**udderly. Hee.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Under African Skies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.