TODAY’S kids, in addition to their bloody phones, can pick any f**king flavour ice-cream they want. When you were a child these were the options:
Vanilla
To a generation, this was ice-cream. Bright yellow, simultaneously watery and oily, and in its soft-scoop version the invention of a young scientist named Margaret Thatcher, it tasted of nothing, was definingly bland, and was a top-echelon treat.
Strawberry
Pink version of above. The strawberry taste was sickly and disgusting but it was a sensation. You knew you’d had it. You’d boast about it at school.
Chocolate
Didn’t taste like chocolate but nothing chocolate-flavoured did back then. Drinking chocolate didn’t taste of chocolate. Chocolate biscuits didn’t taste of chocolate. Still, it was the right colour.
Neapolitan
Vanilla and strawberry and chocolate, all in one tub? Astonishing and only for special occasions, like your parents’ anniversary or a neighbour’s divorce. Allowed you to confirm they were all essentially identical, and to mix them together for a sweet, grey post-war reward paste.
Raspberry ripple
Blew minds. There are grown adults still reeling at their first encounter of vanilla ice-cream shot through – in picturesque ripples – with deep, flavoursome raspberry. How? Why? Was Thatcher involved again? Does eating this make me a scab? But God help me I cannot stop.
Mint choc chip
Unavailable to the general public for decades, only sold through specialists, this was your mum’s ice-cream of choice. Green, sophisticated, containing real chocolate, as adult as smoking in bed, as luxurious as Imperial Leather soap. An After Eight in frozen form, you imagined Princess Margaret would have one, in a bath. Too raunchy for the Queen.