The new Ghostbusters film passes the poor quality vanilla ice cream test

On Tuesday, Isla, Sean and I headed to the local cinema to see the new Ghostbusters. My son was the most reluctant because he had been swayed by what he saw as a host of negative reviews. My daughter and I tried to persuade him that the reviews were skewed by the man-whine factor and that the only thing to do was to see the film and make a judgement for himself. Isla and I were already of that mind. In the end, he agreed. I think what finally swayed him was that we ate out first.

This, despite the previous paragraph, is not, however, a review of Ghostbusters. This is about my love of vanilla ice cream. No, really.

The cinema we go to used to sell small tubs of locally made ice cream. I think there were three flavours: vanilla; chocolate; and strawberry. No longer. New management has introduced pretentious sundaes — at a huge increase in price, of course — which mean that there are sauces and toppings and it’s all served in someone’s old storage jar.

This is a prefect reflection of the tendency to take something simple and straightforwardly enjoyable and ruin it by complicating it under the rubric of adding value.

My first fond memories of ice cream were formed when we stopped off at the small town of Musselburgh near Edinburgh after family days at the beach at Gullane or further along the coast at North Berwick. This was back in the 1960s. The east coast of Scotland is not renowned for balmy days, no matter the season, but whether we had spent the day sheltering behind windbreaks or out on a boat spotting puffins around the Bass Rock, the day would end with the treat of ice cream at a famous ice cream shop — run by Italians, of course — in Musselburgh.

The ice cream — in retrospect — was simply wonderful. And although it was a treat at the time, I rarely thought of the ice cream as being special. It was what I was used to. It was how ice cream should be.

The way it was served, too, was great. When there were lots of us in the car my dad or my grandad would hustle into the shop and return with a bouquet of cones wrapped in greaseproof paper. Each cone was carefully extracted to the sound of the crinkling of the sheets of the paper. When the last cone was handed out, whoever was left holding the paper got to lick it clean of surplus ice cream.

Vanilla was the only option. We didn’t even it call it vanilla. It was just ice cream. If, for some reason, this wasn’t good enough, there was a choice of chocolate or raspberry sauce to dribble over the scooped mounds at the top of the cone. This was something only children would do, of course. Luxury was represented by a chocolate flake rammed at a jaunty angle into your ice cream.

The cones themselves were light and flaky. Holders only for the magic and not something that overpowered the treat of the glorious white silky cold ice cream itself. Today I find many cones too thick; they intrude into the pleasure of eating the ice cream. Like those fancy wafers that were popular in cafes and restaurants for a while, that stick into your scooped treasure like unwelcome brochures. Tasteless, hard work, and distinctly unrewarding.

This was the ritual of my young years. At thirteen, we moved south to England and I was never to experience that pleasure again. Over the years I made do with mass-produced alternatives. Finally, Häagen-Dazs appeared on the scene in the UK and it captured some of the flavour of my youth.

Around the turn of the century I spent a lot of time working on Long Island. My family came over for a week and we stayed with a friend from the UK near Mt Sinai on Long Island’s north coast opposite the Connecticut shoreline. He told me there was a famous ice cream parlour nearby. The kids were clamouring for ice cream, so off we went.

Inevitably, after selecting the complicated flavours that children seem to demand now — and which, to me, have nothing to do with ice cream — I asked the woman behind the counter for some vanilla. It was not one of the flavours on show in the small containers lovingly spread out beneath the glass. There was a puzzled frown before she seemed to understand. Although she didn’t quite say “Not much call for vanilla in these here parts” she said something that intimated the same. In the end, she had to retreat to the back of the store to their second freezer to uncover some vanilla. It tasted OK but it wasn’t really worth the fuss. I was surprised as much as disappointed.

I have three children raised in England who don’t even consider vanilla ice cream to be ice cream. The soft diarrhetic curling gloop dropped into thick cones from ice cream vans would put anyone off real vanilla ice cream. And there are no local ice cream shops with men in white coats and Italian accents working in an atmosphere redolent of strong coffee.

And the film? We all enjoyed it. Even my son agreed that it was fun and he was glad he’d seen it. It was a pleasant way to spend the evening in the company with my two eldest kids. What more would you want from a film that tries to be nothing more than a good time?

Apart, that is, from a small tub of perfect local vanilla ice cream.