The very act of licking your ice cream always transports us back to those early days of childhood when you were always allowed to play out in the fading light of a summer evening and life must have been idyllic but always was anyway in later life for ever. Ice cream always had the capacity to make us feel good about ourselves since it represents some zenith of our early youth. It couldn't get any better because it just seemed that way. Life is indeed sweet.
You remember your first introduction to ice-cream. You were busy scurrying around the back roads of your home almost over enthusiastically because this felt like the perfect liberation after a strenuous and stressful year in school being steeped in academia. Finally mum, who so dotingly cared for you and monitored your welfare from either the comfort of her kitchen or the back garden, looked out of the living room window just to ensure that all was well. Your lime green bike would be dropped onto the pavement like some playful distraction and mum would rush out of the home.
There were the echoes of laughing, happy go lucky four or five year olds, gleefully abandoning themselves to the joys of school summer holidays rather like chastened kids who had suddenly been told that they could now come out of their bedroom after refusing to tidy up their clothes. Childhood and ice-cream were somehow synonymous with each other rather like bread and butter, inseparable, together for life, permanent reminders of who we were when ice-cream was somehow good for you, the healthiest of all tea time treats and something to be celebrated.
But today folks it's National Ice-Cream Day. Oh wow! You're salivating for an ice cream even though this is the wrong time of the year to be even contemplating this perennial pleasure. You wish you could eat ice-cream for breakfast, lunch or tea, maybe a satisfying snack between tea breaks at work, school or wherever you happen to be when somebody mentions that sweetest of delicacies. It should be compulsory at every meal, something we could devour with unashamed relish. It's the perfect dessert, nirvana in a cone, oozing with piquant flavours and textures and so simple to eat.
So there we were on innocent days during our school summer holidays when suddenly a loud nursery rhyme jingle would reverberate around our road and mum knew exactly what that meant. In a matter of minutes a Rossi's ice cream van would suddenly turn into the road of our Essex home in Ilford and this would be the cue for a stampede for the said ice cream van. Mum would smile warmly and before you could blink there was a momentary apprehension because mum was short of a couple of shillings and pound notes and maybe you'd have to wait for another day.
The scenario though was a familiar one. Small huddles of loving mothers would slowly make their way to this cream coloured van steadily and uncomplainingly because it was their duty to keep their sons and daughters happy at all times. Besides, they were our parents and they just wanted to us to know they'd always be there in moments of either crisis or adversity. Then mum would dig out her purse and suddenly hundreds of mums would converge on the vehicle, arms folded, purses in one hand and deep affection in their hearts for their precious offspring.
And you'd ask for either an ice cream or its common ally the humble lollipop and particularly the ones with hundreds and thousands and a veritable rainbow of colours. There was the reliable 99, the ingenious creation of somebody who recognised immediately how easy it would be to keep the kids quiet and pre-occupied with something that formed the essential backdrop of your life and was woven into the fabric of your primary school years.
While trawling through your mind for those sugar coated memories you can hardly forget just how important it felt to be a child who craved nothing more than a 99 vanilla ice cream with that famous cone. It was regular as a clockwork and something to savoured pleasantly at your leisure. No matter that the ice cream would invariably start melting as soon as you wrapped your lips around it. Suddenly waterfalls of vanilla ice-cream would race down the cone in some breathless quest to just to reach the bottom of your obsolete cone now on the point of complete disintegration.
Memories of your mum and dad, grandma and grandpa appear in the forefront of your minds. After a hard day's intensive sunbathing at Westcliff in Essex near Southend, you would polish off your lovely grandparents groaning shopping bag of sandwiches and then venture out into the seaweed that completely adorned the shore, waiting patiently for the sea to arrive before anticipating the sea's arrival at roughly lunchtime. Better late than ever.
We all remember those halcyon days of being free to do whatever you liked without caring at all about anything at all. You can remember swimming vigorously in the Essex sea with your wonderful dad and gulping huge quantities of salt and brine at the same time. Then you realised it was Sunday and the weekend was rapidly heading towards its conclusion so regrettably you traipsed wearily back to your parents, dried off with seemingly hundreds of towels and then revelled in the glow of fitness
It was at this point that we all headed to Rossi's, a restaurant that has been firmly established in the same spot since the beginning of time although that might be a slight exaggeration. And this was the point when you expressed a preference for a 99 with a chocolate flake. Nowadays of course there are so many varieties of ice cream flavours that maybe we've been spoilt for choice. There's coffee, pistachio, rum, chocolate of course, rum and raisin, lime and lemon, orange and a vast selection of the sublime and ridiculous.
There was of course that famous ice cream sketch performed by two of the finest comedians and double acts of all time. It was The Two Ronnies, whose glorious shows on the BBC did so much to leave us in the land of laughter almost indefinitely. So here's the scene. Ronnie Corbett walks into an ice cream parlour quite casually and confronts his hilarious comedy partner Ronnie Barker who was about to launch into quite the most delightful exchange. Corbett simply wants an ordinary vanilla ice cream and nothing more. Barker, in a miraculous feat of memory, starts rolling off a whole sequence of absurd flavours such as bacon and lettuce, cheese and pickle and barbecued flavoured ice creams while Corbett just stands there in shock and stunned amazement. It is magical comedy gold.
And yet where would we have been without ice cream. Your mind also recalls the Arctic Roll, a gorgeous confection of sponge encasing a lovely slab of ice cream in the middle of it. There were the apple pie and ice cream teas that were irresistible as a young kid. There were ice creams that rolled around your tongue seductively like a guilty pleasure, the ones that dripped decoratively down your new T-shirt, the one you had to buy when the summer heat was at its hottest.
Ice cream relieved the pressure, reinvigorated, soothing fevered brows when temporary anxieties had to be held in check. Ice cream had the most profound of meanings for all of us because they represented an integral part of your childish pleasures. So here's hoping that you've all enjoyed National Ice Cream Day. Nobody deserves it more than you.
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