‘Why’s it called an ice cream cupcake?’ I asked. ‘That white
stuff obviously isn’t ice cream.’
‘No, but it’s ice cream flavoured.’
‘You mean vanilla?’
‘Yes, it’s a marketing ploy to make them sound better. It’s
like the raspberry ripple ones. There are no raspberries in them, but they
taste fabulous.’
(Methinks this girl is
confusing the point a little.)
‘OK, I’ll have an ice cream cupcake.’
‘75p please.’
It didn’t taste fabulous; it was pretty ordinary, really.
But it did lead to a startling revelation. It occurred to me that you never get
ice cream and cake in the same parcel, and the reason is obvious. Ice cream
starts to melt below about -15°C. If you brought the whole thing down to that
temperature, the cake would be rock hard, wouldn’t it? That’s the sort of thing
they ought to be teaching in schools instead of unusable stuff like calculus
and quadratic equations. It is.
* * *
So then I went into the hardware store and asked an
assistant why the range of paint colours had suddenly become so diminished. It
turned into a conversation lasting half an hour on subjects like music,
singing, the HSP phenomenon, human relationships and life in general. Seems she’s
an operatic student at a leading music school in Manchester, and is working at the hardware
store as a summer job. And when it got to the point where I said that my own form
of self-expression is writing, she did the light-bulb-moment look and said ‘I knew you were a writer.’
Isn’t that nice?
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