To the group of teenage girls nearby who didn’t laugh, thank you. After all, there is something ridiculous about a middle-aged man struck dumb as his ice-cream cone cracks, goes plop and falls on the pavement never to rise again.
Even the seagull nearby seemed stricken.
The tragic saga began a little earlier. An elderly lady sat solitary in the sun, the definition of contentment, as she savoured her swirling ice-cream cone. “I’m having what she’s having,” I thought.
The ice-cream van was nearby with a queue, six feet apart in the very best Covid way. It moved slowly. Inside the van was a big, strong lump of a fey, seemingly gay, young man with flamboyant ways who clearly was in the wrong body, not that he cared. He bantered with his queuing fans, which was charming at first but began to pall as the afternoon sun reached its peak.
Then a small woman with little English and a long order was at the top of the queue. One cone with chocolate sauce, another with strawberry, a tub of ice–cream, a cone with marshmallow toppings, an Americano coffee.
“What? In this heat?” muttered a fed-up woman behind me. By then I was burning too, inside and out. The small woman asked for a receipt, promoting an involuntary “Jaysus!” from myself (apologies to those further up the page).
She retreated with her melting cargo and we resentful ones followed with heated gaze as she presented her booty to two similar women and a young man in a wheelchair. They were carers and we, abjectly, felt our ire dissolve as quickly as her cones, to be replaced with timid regret.
My turn, and I asked the young man for a plain cone. As he caught its swirls from the dispenser, he turned and shouted at me, “Flake.” Thrown momentarily, I wasn’t sure whether it was a comment on myself or that he had read my thoughts and assumed it was my judgment on himself. It was neither.
“Plain please,” I said, probably too hastily.
I had hardly walked a yard when my cone split, tipping all that lovely, swirling ice-cream on to the hot pavement below. And the teenage girls passed by.
Couldn’t have luck.
Flake, from Old English flakka, for "flat, level, particle".
inaword@irishtimes.com
