Why do I feel sad when I see people eating ice-cream?

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Sometimes I watch other people eating ice-cream and feel sad. I don’t know why I feel sad. Maybe, when I was very small, some of my ice-cream dropped out of the cone and splatted onto the street, and that is what I feel now. But surely I would have remembered such a terrible thing.

It’s summer in London, which means the songs of the ice-cream van circle the estate, inharmoniously vying with the emergency services' sirens. I remember being very much smaller and feeling a sense of panic at the ice-cream song, because I had seen the ice-cream van drive away on previous occasions, and my hysterical logic dictated that it would do the same to me just as I approached it. But it always stayed, possibly because I sprinted ferociously up the window each time, clutching hot coins in a sweaty palm and arriving so out of breath I was unable to order anything for some time.

London is hot. I remember other summers, the smell of barbecues and dusty vine tomatoes and the scent of sweat and grass-seeds washed from my body under a cold daytime shower. I think of pinging crickets leaping suddenly from grass-stalks, and the shimmer of a hot mirage on a sticky tarmac driveway, and eating squashy peaches in the bathtub. I begin to think that when I see other people eating ice-cream I don’t feel sad, but wistful. I realise that I do, indeed, want an ice-cream, and that I have wanted one for a very long time.

This is only the second time in my adult life I have bought an ice-cream from an ice-cream van, and I can confirm now that I’m an adult because tonight I reasoned with my adult logic that, upon hearing the song of the ice-cream people, I could indeed finish the washing-up and then walk down the stairs at a leisurely pace and the van would still be there, because the man driving it needs to make money and thus will stay for some time. This is a pleasing deduction, I think, because it demonstrates that I am both more logical and more relaxed as an adult than I was as a child.

By the time I arrive at the van I am sweating again, despite my recent cold shower. I peer into the gloomy backend and see a bright brown smile beaming back. I pay for my ice-cream and hope that he has charged enough to make it worthwhile working in this heat.

As I walk back to my building, the ice-cream man drives past me, and we wave and smile at each other. I sit on my balcony savouring the cold sweetness, and I reflect perhaps that this very moment, in all of the moments of time, is the perfect antidote to everything that is happening to my city: a nice man in a nice van serving others during Ramadan, while London burns.

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