Another Blog Entry Almira Won't Read

Of late I have taken to bathing in goats milk.  I feel like a cut price Cleopatra wallowing in the decadent luxury of anointing my body with fluid squirted from the nipples of a passing ruminant.  I need only a degenerate military thug as a lover and  the sound of an ill-ruled nation falling to pieces in the background to complete the image of historic romance.


OK I haven't exactly been bathing in goats milk but I have been smearing it over my body.  Adorning the soap dish in my bath is a large chunk of what the wrapper proclaimed to be goat milk soap.  I must admit, the precedent of Cleopatra notwithstanding, I've never really thought of milk as a cleansing product.  When milk is presented to me in large solid lumps my mind immediately thinks of butter rather than soap.  Despite this the manufacturers obviously expected me to rub this over my body in an attempt to clean it and, in deference to the word "soap" on the packaging, I obediently did so.  I can't help suspecting that if the manufacturers had put the word "feta" on the packaging instead I would cheerfully have crumbled the same product on my salad.


This goat milk soap was (according to the label) made in Australia.  I'm pleased to see Australian goats getting employment opportunities in these difficult times but I did have certain questions.  Such as how did goat milk (which I presume is as runny as any other kind of milk) wind up as a large white lump?  The answer was in the small lettering on the label which discreetly proclaimed the presence of certain vegetable materials in the soap as well.  I have a vision of a room filled with terrified goats and random plant clippings while workers are frenziedly squeezing goat udders and pureeing vegetables and slapping the resultant mess together into something semi solid that can be wrapped in plastic and inflicted on the unsuspecting public as a cleansing product.


Why is goat milk considered a cleansing product anyway?  Are goats particularly clean?  And why goat milk rather than goat bile or goat blood?  When I was a child soap had the texture of scented sandpaper and one could imagine the dirt being removed along with the outer few layers of your skin as you washed.  Nowadays apparently you can rub pretty much anything on your body and come out "clean".  I strongly suspect that most modern soap doesn't really work at all.  You stand in the shower and the trickling water washes your body clean.  The soap and the lathering is really just to give you something to do while you're in there so you feel as though you're making a contribution.


As I stand in the middle of my bathroom goat and plant detritus trickling off my supposedly clean frame I can take comfort in the fact that I have at least reached ancient Egyptian levels of hygiene.  What the goat thinks about the whole process is open to debate but I'm glad I'm not the one who has to explain what happened to the milk when hungry baby goats start demanding dinner.