Summer Ice Cream

I'm so in the mood for a huge helping of ice-cream, thick creamy vanilla with swirls of chocolate sauce in it, just soft enough so that a spoon will sink into it and oooooooooh, the ice cream melts smoothly on the tongue.

I'm not really crazy about sweets and can go days without any at all and then a craving like this will hit. It's mostly an ice-cream craving and sometimes a chocolate cake craving.

Oh to be ten years old again and have as much ice-cream as one craves and not to have to worry about 'a moment on the lips and a lifetine on the hips'. To be ten years old and not have to worry about anything much, especially during the summer. When we were kids, during summer holidays our house would fill up with cousins of myriad sizes and shapes - you had the long thin ones who were good for lifting you up on to the parapets or getting the cake tin down from the top shelf in my grandmother's store cupboard or for lifting you down from wherever you were stuck,the short small ones who could run between everyone's legs and snatch a handful of the day's snack from the kitchen table, there were the greedy ones who would eat anything, even the poisoned egg put out to kill the rats - this ended in a trip to the hospital and a stomach wash for the unfortunate one and a lifelong label of 'the greedy one', the 'oh god when will this child return home' ones who smoked the bidi stubs my father's office manager used to throw out of the window, or jumped off the first floor terrace to see if they could survive the fall or hid an older cousin's rhinestone-studded "vaaaairrry expensive' stilettos on the roof or played dart board using our compasses and dividers and tore up my mother's cushions in the process, there were the girl cousins who played house quietly and there were the girl cousins who fought the boys, there were the perv cousins who liked to stand in the doorways and pinch your cheeks everytime you went past, there were the strong cousins who turned the handle on the ice-cream bucket and so on...

Summers were fun, with a lot of noise and stuff and a lot of going and coming. We used to make our own ice-cream - not me, the guys, the older ones and it was the best ice-cream ever. I don't really know what they used to do but it involved a churn with ice in the outer bucket and cream in the inner one and a lot of hard work turning the handle, the end result being glorious glorious ice-cream. I searched for the bucket all over the attic beore it was dismantled, but it's lost. So I did a search on google and found a picture of the original ice-cream churn. It looks a lot like the one we used to have.