Ice Cream Passion

I don’t have a sweet tooth. Never had.

When I was little I didn’t like chocolates, cakes, toffees, lemonade. You name any sweet thing and it’s on my NO list, even mints and raisins seemed too sweet. When I was three, at a large family celebration I was found in a pantry looking for some pickled gherkins, as I sincerely confessed.

Totally different story was ice cream. 

I can’t remember, how I met it for the first time, but it seemed to be in my life forever. As soon as summer was approaching with warm sunny days, I just wanted ice cream. Often nothing else but ice cream. Any flavour as long as it was cold. Probably I just needed to cool down after all that running around, climbing trees and fences, digging and jumping, dancing and generally just being a hyperactive little torpedo.

When we were going for walks, mum, dad and I, me often on dad’s shoulders, I was just looking out for ice cream trolleys, freezers on wheels that somebody was pushing around. After my second ice cream, mum and dad started pointing out to me passing dogs, cats, pigeons, seagulls, anything that was moving around the place on the opposite side of us from those ice cream trolleys!

Later when I started school, all my pocket money went to ice cream. We had a small kiosk selling ice cream near the school. It was one that had an ice cream man was weighting into a waffle cone. Different flavours. Spoiled for choices. Divine!!!

Later my interests grew wider, I was buying books and, guess what, ice cream!!!

Now, when on a summer day I go out with my daughter (that's us above), it’s always an ice cream and black bitter coffee day. No sugar, just ice cream. It's sweet enough for me. Rum and raisin is my favourite. I don’t like rum or raisins individually, but the ice cream makes them taste amazing.

I don’t know what else I can add to this never ending story of love and passion. It’s complete. I’d better go and get an ice cream for my breakfast. Just kidding, I had porridge with blueberries.

The ice cream will be for the brunch. If you want to talk to me, just look out for nearest ice cream parlour. See you there!!!

Maija

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When Shops Didn't Open On Sundays

I spent half of my childhood growing up in a city, and although I love nature and beautiful places, that city (and my parents) taught me how to seek out these things when they aren't offered to you in abundance. Whether it was my Nan showing me the dewdrops gathered on a spider's web or Sunday afternoon walks down a disused railway line - we found pockets of wildness to excite our young minds.

The Sundays of my childhood, the ones before shops started opening, were about family. Drives out to the Cotswolds to clamber and collect crab apples, walks around the closed city centre and visits to my grandparents. These days were full of simplicity. They were inexpensive, and yet they are perhaps some of the most memorable days.

Many of my childhood memories include my sister - with her only being eleven months younger than I am, I don't remember life without her. And despite us almost being polar opposites of each other, I'm glad I had a friend to explore the world with.

Pocket Money

On Sundays, my sister and I would walk
around Coventry’s concrete city centre.

Shop shutters down and locked for the day.

Her trainers would flash red at the heel
as she skipped in front while my eyes shifted
like a magpie, looking for the glint of something shiny.

With two Safeway carrier bags and a magnet
we collected aluminium cans, clattered
and clunked through the empty precinct.

In a supermarket car park on a Saturday
our efforts would be weighed and costed:
one type of metal for another.

My sister would spend hers: buy penny sweets

counted into a white paper bag;  a 10p Freddo
if she was feeling reckless.

While I would slip my coins into a ceramic pig,
saving bronze and copper-nickel,

until loose change became a paperback book.

Thank you for reading,

Lara

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