Blog: Dave, you started in 1996. That was the peak of the grocery store juggernaut. Why start a milk route then?
Dave: (Laughs) Stubbornness, mostly. Everyone said, "Dave, milk in bags? Milk in jugs? That’s the future." But my dad was a milkman in the 70s. I remembered the respect he got. In '96, I wasn't selling convenience. I was selling memory. People my age (back then, I was 28) wanted to feel like kids again.
Blog: What was the 4:00 AM vibe in the late 90s?
Dave: Quiet. The good kind. I had a Ford Ranger with a bad muffler. I’d listen to static-y AM radio. The biggest hazard wasn't dogs—it was teenagers TP-ing trees. You’d see the Titanic posters in windows. I remember the morning after Princess Diana died. I left a white rose on every porch. Nobody asked me to. It just felt right.
In 1996, Arthur Haliday was the unofficial mayor of the morning. He drove a blue-and-white electric Smith’s delivery vehicle—a silent, boxy ghost that glowed under the sodium streetlamps.
Interviewer: Take me back to a Tuesday morning in 1996. What does it feel like? Interview With A Milkman -1996- -2021-
Arthur Haliday: (Laughs, shakes his head) Cold. Always cold. But a good cold. In ’96, we had that big freeze in February. I remember the milk was freezing in the bottles on the step before people woke up. The cream would push the silver foil cap up like a little white hat.
But look, by ’96, the papers were already saying we were a dying breed. The supermarkets had been hammering us for a decade. But you know what? I had 422 customers. Four hundred and twenty-two households that trusted me. The milk wasn't just milk. It was gold-top [Jersey cream-on-top] for the old ladies on Acacia Road. It was semi-skimmed for the young families in the new builds. And it was orange juice in the little cartons for the hangovers.
Interviewer: It sounds like a social service, not a delivery route.
Arthur: It was. That’s what they don’t understand now, with the apps and the driverless vans. In ’96, Mrs. O’Leary on number 14 had a stroke. She couldn’t phone anyone. But I saw her curtains were drawn at 7 AM. She always opened them at 6:30. I knocked. Saved her life, the doctors said. You don’t get that from a Tesco delivery drone, do you?
In 1996, Arthur’s depot employed 14 milkmen. They had a banter system ("the float boys"). The glass bottles were washed and reused fifteen to twenty times. Arthur earned £280 a week, cash in hand, plus tips at Christmas that would cover the entire holiday feast. He knew which houses had the aggressive Jack Russells and which had the women who would answer the door in a flimsy robe. "Tuesdays were for collecting the money," he says. "You’d knock on the door, the kitchen would smell of bacon, and they’d hand you a jar of coins. It was a human economy." Blog: Dave, you started in 1996
By [Your Name/Publication]
The clink of glass against pavement is a sound that has largely vanished from the suburban symphony. In 1996, it was the background noise of Britain; the reliable 5:00 AM percussion that signaled the world was waking up. In 2021, the silence is louder.
Arthur Penhaligon, 68, hung up his white coat and sold his round last year. We sat down with him to discuss the death of the doorstep delivery, the evolution of the cow, and why he misses the dogs.
By Thomas Ashworth
There is a specific silence that exists at 4:00 AM. It is not the silence of sleep, but the expectancy of labor. For 25 years, Arthur P. Haliday knew that silence better than the sound of his own wife’s voice. He was the milkman for the eastern crescent of a small post-industrial city in the North of England. His route—from the depot on Mill Street to the last cul-de-sac in Harpsden Vale—spanned exactly 18.4 miles. He retired in the summer of 2021, not with a bang, but with the quiet click of a key turning in a lock that no one remembered was there. By [Your Name/Publication] The clink of glass against
I sat down with Arthur in his greenhouse, surrounded by geraniums and the low hum of a radio tuned to Radio 4. He is 67 now, with hands that look like cracked porcelain—blue-grey veins mapping the decades of carrying wire crates in the freezing dawn. This is his story, told in two breaths: 1996, the year of his prime, and 2021, the year the electric float finally died for good.
There is a specific, melancholic nostalgia attached to the figure of the milkman. He represents a relic of communal trust—a time when doors were left unlocked and fresh produce arrived before the world woke up. In the conceptual text piece "Interview With A Milkman -1996- -2021-," this nostalgia is weaponized to create a stark contrast between two distinct eras of human existence.
By juxtaposing the years 1996 and 2021, the text does not merely document a job; it documents the slow, agonizing death of a certain kind of simplicity.
By: Emma Hartley Date: April 20, 2026
There is a sound most of us have forgotten. It isn’t a notification, a ringtone, or the hum of a smart fridge. It is the clink-clink of half-pint glass bottles knocking together in a plastic crate at 4:30 in the morning.
For 25 years, Dave Mullins was the source of that sound. From the summer of 1996 (when Space Jam was in theaters and everyone was afraid of Y2K) to the winter of 2021 (when the world was learning to live with masks and mRNA), Dave walked a specific four-mile loop in a small town in Ohio.
I sat down with Dave in his garage—still smelling faintly of dairy and bleach—to ask him what it means to watch a quarter-century of American life unfold, one doorstep at a time.