We’re not Boomers, okay?

My first year at school was the last year of the milk.

- RUSSELL BROWN

 I have a hazy memory of it arriving in crates and being left to curdle in the Canterbury sun. There can’t have been many more deliveries before New Zealand’s Milk in Schools programme ended its 30-year run in 1967.

Looking back, it seems emblematic of the generation I was born into: we always arrived just as the train was leaving the station. We grew up sheltered, then watched the guarantee of national prosperity dissolve. I turned 11 in 1973, the year of the first oil crisis and of Britain joining the European Economic Community (now the EU). Carless days followed in 1979, then, in 1982, the government imposed a freeze on every wage and price in the national economy. The wheels had well and truly fallen off by the time we saw it all finally dismantled in 1984, when I turned 22.