“Want some ice-cream?” I asked her as we wandered around the small seaside town on the lovely south-coast of NSW. I asked her this, because this is the thing you ask your beloved when you’re having a holiday and wandering around small seaside towns.
What you don’t do, is name the fucken town or the ice cream shop. The last time I did something like that, named a pub and then proceeded to review its shitful bistro, its munted staff, and the appalling service they begrudgingly offered, I was deplatformed on Facebook.
Seems like Zuck isn’t big on truth being told about his advertisers. My bad.
So, in this instance, all I will do is tell you about our experience. If you ever happen to buy an ice-cream from this place, you’ll quickly work it out and say to yourself: ‘This must be the place he was talking about.”
But as we entered this gaily-decorated establishment – which I hasten to add is exactly how an ice-cream parlour needs to look – we just wanted to buy some ice-cream.
The place was on-point. It looked wonderfully ice-creamy, I thought. Dozens of flavours, and a great selection of gelato and sorbets. And I am a gelato freak. I fucken love that frozen Italian masterpiece. Goes back to the first time I was introduced to it by my mother. I was maybe five and we were at Sydney’s Centennial Park. My parents would take me to this huge and wonderful park once a month because we were poor and could not afford to go to zoos, movies, or the one amusement park Sydney had, the harbourside Luna Park. So, I spent most of my days as a small child playing in the street out front of our house in inner-city Glebe, or if there was parental supervision available for when I fell off the swings, in the tiny little park just up the street. Centennial Park, by comparison to my local park, was a vast and truly beautiful landscape – but all of that became as nothing to me the first time I tasted gelato.
The gelato was being sold out of a Mr Whippy van parked on one of the many narrow roads that criss-crossed the park. Mum recommended I have lemon, chocolate, and strawberry (which was all the flavours they had back then), a scoop each, on a big double cone, and she had a small cone of lemon. Dad had nothing. He didn’t do ice cream, and I felt the family park-budget was pretty much blown on my triple-cone extravagance.
And that was it. Gelato became the frozen hill I would now die on. Six decades later, still order chocolate and strawberry gelato when I have gelato. I seem to have gone off the lemon as I got older. But on general principles, ordinary ice cream can go fuck itself. It is as dust compared to gelato.
I’m only telling you this, so you understand how I am about gelato. I hold it dear. My wife knows this. She is my wife, so she needs to know things like this. And she has seen me eat a litre of it in one sitting, so she knows I am not fucking around.
Anyway, we’re in the shop and she is trying to work out which flavours she would like. I already know. Chocolate and strawberry. All that exotic pistachio, mocha, or mango-lime bollocks is wasted on me.
There is a lady and two small children in the parlour, and the kids, being kids, are excited by all the choices, and aren’t certain what they actually want. To make things even more complex for them, there are plastic representations of ice-cream “creations” they can have. These are scoops of ice-cream with various lollies on them, some of which are made to look like happy faces or clowns. Real kiddy-confusion shit.
The bloke waiting to take their order is in late middle-age, heavily tattooed, and completely not-with-the-program-of-serving-ice-cream-to-kids-or-fucken-anyone-really. He has a sour expression on his face. He is staring into the middle-distance over the mother’s head as the kids pick out their flavours. He says nothing. I was kinda feeling he could at least have smiled at the kids and their mum. But he was a sour-looking fuck. So, I understand that maybe engaging with them, or making cheery suggestions and trying to cleverly up-sell the little sugar-freaks on some lolly-filled creation would’ve been a bridge too far. But fuck me, champion, do you have to stand there and make it look like the kids and their mum are wasting your fucken time?
So, I was looking at him with no expression on my face. I have learned to do this, because my wife quickly sees an expression on my face, understands what follows that expression, then moves to head it off before shit falls off a cliff. I love that in her. But I have learned to adapt.
Meanwhile, my wife was making her decision about flavours. And it was at this point a lady appeared behind the counter, who somehow seemed to be even more pissed-off about being in the ice-cream business than the bloke.
“What’re you after?” she snapped.
“We’re still deciding,” I smiled. I am with my wife, so I remain unfailingly polite and nice to all sorts of people way past the point where if I was on my own, their day would suddenly become exponentially worse.
The woman huffed and rolled her eyes. It was the eye-rolling that got me. I forgave the huff. Maybe she had emphysema and processing salty sea-air was difficult. But rolling your eyes at customers? Bitch, please. Clearly, we were expected to immediately, upon entering the parlour, know what we wanted to order. As I have explained, I can do this. It’s chocolate and strawberry for me, every time. But my wife, like the kids, needs a bit of time to decide.
I’d also like you to understand we were the only people in the parlour. They were not at all busy. Customers were not waiting. A wan silence cloaked us all.
The kids had ordered their ice cream and the tattooed gronk had grudgingly handed it over, radiating active displeasure like a floodlight at the entire exchange. No “Hope you enjoy it, mate!” No “Gee, that looks pretty yummy!” Nothing that would indicate to a child the wonderful joy of the whole ice-cream experience.
By contrast, the old bloke who’d served me gelato in Centennial Park all those years ago was as excited as I was about the whole process. “You’re a lucky bloke!” he’d chirp as he scooped my gelato onto the cone. “That chocolate is my favourite. Here’s a bit more because you’re growing and you’ll need it.” I fucken loved that bloke. I wanted my father to make friends with him and invite him and his gelato van to our house. His attitude made the whole gelato-experience that much more special.
None of that was happening in the sea-side parlour.
My wife, ever-sensitive to other peoples’ vibes as well as my own, and how those vibes impacted upon her always warlike husband, decided she would have vanilla.
“One scoop of vanilla in one waffle cone, and a scoop each of chocolate and strawberry in another waffle cone, please, “I said to the eye-rolling old moll behind the counter.
The vanilla was slapped together with a muttered “fuck” under her breath. The tub was positioned at the front of the freezer, so the cranky bitch had to reach for it. A further problem arose when she then had to apply two different flavours to the one cone. My cone. You see, this required her to rinse the scoop between flavours. Good ice-cream practice indicates this. You can’t have traces of chocolate infecting the strawberry, right?
Fuck me. The way she carried on about this simple process, the slamming of the scoop into the rinsing container, the savagery of the scooping that followed, the breathless (but almost silent) swearing that accompanied it all was astonishing.
My wife kicked me. She could sense I was about to ask the old buzzard what her fucken problem was, and if maybe if she shoved that gelato and that scoop up her arse this would assist her in maybe being less of a noxious bitch. I have no idea how my wife senses these things, but I have long held her to be witch of great puissance. I kept my mouth shut.
My gelato was handed wordlessly to me. I took it in one hand and proffered my debit card with the other.
“Cash or card?” the woman demanded. She was staring over my head. I then held my card above my head so it was in her sight-line and waved it gently, hoping the movement would catch her dead eyes.
It worked. She punched numbers into the machine, slammed the machine on the glass-topped counter, I carded it, it went “beep” and we left.
“What a rude bitch,” my wife said on the footpath outside the shop. “Why would people like that decide they want to operate an ice-cream shop? Fucken miserable shits.”
“Maybe they use it as a front for laundering money,” I shrugged. “But you’re right. I don’t get it. You have a beaut ice-cream parlour, in a lovely town, on the water, lots of customers when its peak season, the stuff you’re selling makes people – and especially kids – happy because that is the nature of ice-cream, and you act like you’d be good with your customers getting hit by a car.”
“Why?” my wife asked.
“You know the answer to that question. It’s the same answer to the questions you ask me when I’m driving and someone else is driving like an imbecile, or when you see the cops hiding in the scrub so they can book people, or when you’re sold something that doesn’t do what it says on the box. Some people are just cunts.
“It’s that simple?”
“Yep. Nothing more to it. Accept this and move on. And don’t kick me so hard next time.”
