Chime’s up

Ice-cream vans are melting away, from 250,000 in the Seventies to fewer than 2,500 today. A particular feature of modern life is blamed for sealing the fate of these tuneful harbingers of summer: triple-glazing. No child, and certainly no parent, can hear a note of the “Mister Softee” theme or “Pop Goes the Weasel” from behind hermetically sealed glass. But the itinerant ice-cream seller was becoming an odd man out in any case. Like the chestnut-seller’s brazier or the mysterious drum of the seaside candy-floss maker, the painted van, topped with its titanic plastic cone, must trundle into the Valhalla of lost childhood. It is irrational to mourn it when the ice cream of your choice can be fished out the freezer at any hour. But perhaps it’s the spontaneity of the van, and the childish joy of reaching it in time, that we shall really miss.