CONE OF DELIGHT

I read in my newspaper recently that the ice cream cone has fallen out of fashion. Apparently it has been overtaken in public popularity by the ugly and bottomless tub, which implies that some people are eating much more ice cream - in one session - than they ever used to in years past. A triumph, as one writer put it, 'of gluttony over style.'
The evidence does seem persuasive. According to research by a grocery trade magazine, the sales of big tubs rose last year by nearly seven per cent, while those of cones fell by over five per cent. However, does this reflect a genuine countrywide pattern, or is this lamentable behaviour restricted to a London-centric clientele? This latter is a catchment area, remember, which a good many publications and media outlets elevate to the status of being the only barometer necessary in order to test consumer patterns of the entire UK.
Some of us in non-London habitats have our doubts, and my own recent non-scientific research merely underlines this hesitation. Here in our nice little seaside town, and thanks to an early seasonal improvement in the weather, several of the ice cream shops opened, placing hope above business logic. But open they did.
Thus a recent brief check of a favourite outdoor public eating place on the gull-haunted promenade overlooking the sea, and despite a rivetingly cold northerly wind, established that all four people huddled there were not only eating ice creams, but all of them were cones. Indeed, and now that the weather has improved even further and even more visitors are coming, a majority still seem to prefer cones.
A thought has just occurred to me. Perhaps this is actually why the visitors come. Perhaps they represent a countrywide movement whereby refugees flee the tubbist areas in order to seek the homelands of the cone. Or perhaps there is some sort of mystical relationship between the ice cream cone and the seaside.
There is, of course, a scarcely remembered victim in all this, and it used to be called the block. When I were a lad the rather gentile transport cafe opposite our home used to advertise Eldorado ice cream. You could get a cone (though we called it a cornet back then), when a tiny circular piece of ice cream was unwrapped and screwed into the top; or you could actually get a tub, a squitty little thing with a peel-back lid adorned by a wooden spoon.
True experts, however, actually preferred the wafer, or the block, simply because it was larger. You were handed an oblong block of ice cream wrapped in paper, and two ice cream-size wafers. The difficult bit was holding a single wafer in one hand while opening the wrapping with the other. Then you had to plonk the ice cream block on to the bottom wafer and slap on the top wafer while still holding the paper. And even before you could sink your teeth into this blissful Eldorado confection, you still had to find a waste bin in which to deposit the wrapper.
The block, therefore, was educational, teaching hand/eye co-ordination and, with a waste bin to hand, public responsibility. With the cone, of course, you eat everything because there is no wrapper. So it is much more environmentally friendly.
Even so, the block and the tiny tub seem to have largely disappeared, supplanted by the big tub, some of them (as with coffee) as big as buckets. Only the cone (or the cornet) stands aloof as a monument to civilised living. I don't think it is quite finished yet.