According to this article the ice cream van is disappearing from the streets of England, a victim of “health campaigners and local authorities, which have stopped them operating near school gates, or set up ice-cream exclusion zones in shopping streets.” Not living in Blighty anymore I don’t know how true this is but I hate to think so, it’s depressing enough seeing part of your childhood become a relic but even more so when it’s deemed unsuitable or even dangerous by the No Fun Police. Ice-cream exclusion zones? You’d think Mister Whippy was a child molester or something.
I’d never heard this story before though:
In one of those stories told largely for their allegorical content, whipped ice-cream was supposedly invented by Margaret Thatcher when she was a young industrial chemist working for Lyons. She discovered a method of injecting more air into the ice-cream, making it easily freezable as well as using less ingredients. What a wonderful metaphor for the “free” market, getting us to pay for air! But actually Mrs Thatcher was only a junior member of a team that did the initial research on “fat extension”; I’m not sure we can pin Mr Whippy on her.
Great though this would have been if it was true, I’m not sure if I could have dealt with being thankful to Maggie Thatcher for anything.
Download: Ice Cream Man – Tom Waits
Buy: Closing Time (album)
cryingallthewaytothechipshop.wordpress.com 
I haven’t noticed any crackdown here in King’s Lynn. In fact, there’s a van in the “Vancouver Quarter” (i.e. the precinct) every Saturday.
Our local van carries the name Mister Creamy, which seems slightly wrong.
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Nonsense! We’ve had one down our road daily all through the summer holidays and I am regularly beset by the buggers whenever we decide to take the daughters out ‘for some fresh air’.
Has The Grauniad been on the Daily Mail headline generator??
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That’s a link btw, that ‘Daily Mail headline generator’ bit: it don’t show up as one in a diff colour here though. Must be the cutbacks.
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I did think it was rather Mail-esque, especially blaming do-gooding health Nazis.
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Grauniad lurches right with Clegg I suppose.
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there was never an ice cream man on my block while i was growing up…so whenever i’d be at the beach and the ice cream man would pull up, i’d flip out completely…two words: choco-taco
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