It’s a half-forgotten memory of three score years ago, resurrected by the warmth of this day, I can hear a pony’s hoofbeats on the street where I was born and harness bells a-jingling, bright and gay. A tenor voice is pouring out sweet “Santa Lucia” with truest Neapolitan verve and style, thus Mister Robbiatti, in his ice cream cart has come for the joy of it we’d run more than a mile. The singing ends and strangely then, ‘twould seem as if on cue, the pony stops on old familiar ground, customers gather round the canopied creamy coloured trap, with diamond mirrors mounted all around. Mister Robbiatti, every man was Mister then, two gold teeth flashing ‘neath his clipped moustache, took the lid off the tankard sitting on its bed of ice, ah, the richness of his ice cream was the catch. Two penny tubs and penny wafers, aye, even half-penny cones, he filled them all with great dexterity; see the faces crowding round with anticipatory smiles, - but a few showed looks of envious misery. For those were times, as each one knew, when to have it was to have, and not to have, meant clearly – do without - long before the modern fashion of deficit budgeting small boys learned what economics were all about. I have dined in high class places in this country and elsewhere and in some that laid no claim to haute cuisine, each dinner was topped off with delicious puddings or sweet, some were “so-so”, though some were really “keen”. Yet in all my travelling I have never come across the richness nor the flavour that I sought, no, take all those sweet concoctions and exotic-looking fare - Mister Robbiatti’s tubs would cap the lot!