We don’t have an ice-cream van coming around here anymore. It used to come just once a week, on a Sunday afternoon. But when I was growing up an ice-cream van came every night about 7 o’clock and I was often sent out to get whatever people wanted.

Sometimes I was sent out with a jug, and the ice-cream man who was Italian and just recently arrived from Naples would fill the jug with vanilla ice-cream. That was easy, but it wasn’t so good when family members all wanted different things.

In Scotland an ice-cream cone is called a pokey hat. It’s obvious why – turn it upside down and it looks like a pointed hat. It was fine if everybody wanted pokey hats but things got precarious when it was a combination of pokey hats and sliders, which is what ice-cream wafers are called. It wasn’t so easy to cross the road with a whole load of different shaped ice-creams.

In those days Cadbury’s sold cream eggs the whole year round, none of this modern nonsense of them only being available between Christmas and Easter. They used to come wrapped in all different coloured foil too – pink, green, blue, yellow, and for some reason it was important to get the colour which you really fancied at the time, as if the cream egg was going to taste any different in a pink wrapping. The van man was not happy about that!

Those were the days when the most dangerous thing in the ice-cream van was the calories but nowadays, in the less salubrious areas, they sell drugs – allegedly!