Peak Ice Cream

My "date" has stood me up, although she did ring the cafe and pass on her regrets.
After waiting 20 minutes: editing photos, smiling at babies and instinctively looking up at every passing motorbike, I could hardly leave without ordering something. Several times today I remembered that my original plan upon waking and before the "date" had been arranged, was to take the bus down the mountain to the coast. I wanted go to Ventimiglia solely to eat Italian ice cream, so I ordered the smallest ice cream on the menu. Within minutes my very obliging waitress placed in front of me a glass of water containing a long handled spoon and a tall sundae glass filled with ice cream crowned with a huge peak of tinned whipped cream which temporarily supported one of those long tubular biscuits.

I'm not an aficionado of whipped cream in any form, so I excavated around it, careful not to offend the young woman who had constructed it. The chocolate ice cream was delightfully rich, the coffee contained crunchy roasted beans and I choked noisily on the biscuit. After waving to an Italian baby and watching two older women, who were probably my age, light up as their lemon sorbets with vodka and a frilly red metallic pompon arrived at their table, the whipped cream had de-aerated and was a tiny pool of white at the bottom of my glass.