Something Lacking.

I decided today that my system needs ice cream, so I bought a box of choc ices in the supermarket. (I wonder whether they have choc ices in America. Don’t suppose so – not fancy enough or big enough, probably.) Choc ices used to be one of the three staples available from the women with trays and frilly caps in cinemas – choc ices, tubs and Mivvis. The tub was usually my favourite, although the abiding memory I have of them is not the taste of the ice cream, but the taste of the wooden spoon they used to provide to eat them with. I remember sucking the spoon for a long time after the carton had been scraped clean. It was a way of extending the experience in a world with relatively few material pleasures. I think I even imagined that I could still taste the ice cream on it. I expect the spoons are plastic now, and plastic doesn’t taste of anything.

I just had a choc ice and a cup of coffee. I thought it would make a suitable mid evening repast that was gluten-free, just in case the doctor’s right about this celiac thing. It got me musing on the subject of memories again – how, as life moves on, it becomes increasingly replete with memories and correspondingly short on prospects.

So then I read the Wikipedia article on The Blitz, and it depressed me. Last night I read the Wikipedia article on my home town. That depressed me too. There seems to be a pattern emerging here. I think I need either a hobby or a handmaiden. Ice cream doesn’t seem to be doing the trick.