Say It Ain’t So, Joe!

The husband had been busy. Deadlines to the power of n. No time to go out even for the short spin that Covid-19 permitted us.

I’d begun to feel like a hamster on a wheel, doing the same two circuits for my walks. Admittedly, it was either along Swansea Bay or the tree-lined River Tawe, but after three months of playing either/or, both had begun to pall.

Then the sun came out. Swansea – and the UK – was having a freak blast of heat in mid-June. It has been known to happen. Those of you sweltering in +45-degree Delhi might growl disbelievingly, but believe me, if the UK can do cold, it can certainly do hot, even if it is for just ten days in a year. Something about the angle of the rays – I looked it up once, but it refused to stay with me – makes the sun hotter here than anywhere else we’d experienced, even Delhi. And the husband had no time to take out our solitary fan.

But he jumped for his car keys when I told him casually that Joe’s had opened for takeaways. And we found ourselves in a queue. Which snaked around the block. Note: Joe’s is rightly famous for its ice cream in Wales. But not, as we discovered, for business sense.

‘Gosh, when I think of how much money we spent at Baskin Robbins in Delhi, it must have been enough to float a small economy,’ said the husband contemplatively as we moved another two metres forward. Maybe it was the sun we were standing in, but that’s the husband for you – thinking of money spent when we were waiting to spend some more.

There was an interesting conjoining of the planets here, so I must digress.

One, the husband and I – and our extended family – love ice cream. If most marriages are made in heaven, ours was made in the ice cream churn. The Ma-in-Law is famous in many social media groups for her non sequitur, ‘It’s healthy, it’s only milk’, even in peak winter. Appa’s weekly treats of Kwality’s Cassatta still melt in my memory.

Two, summer is not really summer unless we go to the beach in search of ice cream cones. Rum ‘n’ Raisin, preferably. It’s a tradition, as is watching the troupe of bikers that throngs the ice cream shop with us. Mean machines parked to the side and fully geared up in leathers from head to toe – the bikers, I mean – weather roughened faces, pony tails, in short the kind of men you would not care to meet in a dark alley. All licking ice cream cones!

Three, Covid-19. No shops, no ice cream cones. We’d had to make do with Nuii’s latest flavour, Coconut and Indian Mango. We are patriotic, so we’d gladly made the move from Dark Chocolate and Nordic Berries. But Nuii offers only ice cream bars. Not the stuff that makes life worth living – the sundaes and the cones.

Enough digression. We’d reached the head of the queue. ‘Have you placed an order?’ asked the grim-looking woman at the door.

‘Sorry?’

‘Have you placed an online order?’ Not so patiently.

‘No.’ Hesitantly.

She looked beyond us, ‘Next!’

And that was that. Apparently, Joe’s required you to go online and download their app and place an order. You would then be given a day and a time slot in which you could collect your order. For ice cream? Seriously?

We’re back to Nuii’s Coconut and Indian Mango. With Ben & Jerry’s Birthday Cake as a palate cleanser in between. Joe’s? What’s that?