Header image: A 99, for those who haven’t had the pleasure of enjoying one.
My friend Eimer had just pulled into Inchydoney Beach. I was in the passenger seat beside her and Fiona, Eimer’s youngest daughter, was in the back seat. Eimer had commented with her characteristic candidness that Fiona was her only daughter that still wanted to talk to and spend time with her mother (the other two having reached the age where they were experimenting with greater independence and finding their own space). It was July 2025, and I was back in Ireland for a visit, catching up with friends and family.
I stepped out of the car and immediately spotted this tragedy on the ground. It brought me back to what must be almost 40 years ago, when I dropped the lovely big 99 that my dad had just bought for me from Murray’s shop at the bottom of Mainguard Street. I have vague memories of Mr. Murray coming out of the shop with another one for me. He must have seen how devastated I was, and me after dropping my lovely swirly, creamy, vanilla soft serve, with the as-yet-untouched flake jutting out like a delightful little chocolate chimney.
I wonder if the disproportionate disappointment that comes with dropping your food is one of those universal human experiences. Have we all, when alone, dropped something that we were mere moments away from putting into our mouths? Have we all been surprised by the depth of feeling that comes with something sliding off a plate, or slipping through our fingers, and crashing to the floor? Something that we hadn’t know we’d been anticipating so much is suddenly thrust into a new light in the realization that we will now not get to enjoy it.
Or at least as we had originally expected. For, surely, having had such a misfortune fall upon us, we must also all have sought to rescue the situation. We fall to our knees, in the prayer of all those who hope that the food might yet be salvaged, that gravity has not entirely ruined our moment, and that we might scoop or scrape or spoon or skim our food back into some semblance of serviceability. We might look to the law for comfort, invoking the five second rule and dismissing the issue entirely. We might rationalize that we had vacuumed only yesterday and seek to mitigate the tragedy in that way. We might resign ourselves and go all-in by deciding to commit to the mess regardless, having worked too hard to prepare it, or feeling like we need or deserve it too much to let go.
But it’s not the same as it was. Our confidence is shaken. Our enjoyment is tarnished. We dropped the food and now, at best, we have less than we had. Our clumsiness sticks in our craw. Our butterfingeredness returns us the level of an infant. Humility is not a great condiment. The food will never be as good as it would have been before The Fall.
Seeing that cone on the ground at Inchydoney Beach that day, I felt a connection to the person who had dropped it. I feel like I could see their tragedy unfold. I felt their pain. It was our tragedy. Clearly, they’d made a good start on the 99. Most of it was gone, in fact, but that meant that they had almost enjoyed the whole experience. It looks like the work of an old hand too, like they had worked down to the point where they had bitten off the bottom and sucked some of the ice-cream out of the bottom. Was this when they lost control? Was this when tragedy struck? In the turning of the wrist to apply suction? Had they already eaten the flake or had they, as I and all right-thinking people do, pushed the flake down into the cone, using it as a kind of piston to push ice cream through the taper. There was no flake on the ground. I hoped they’d already eaten it. Or did they suffer the indignity of having to decide that they could rescue the flake but while abandoning the cone. Choices were made. Hard choices.
But, sure, look it. Sometimes our food gets away from us. It’s rough, but worse things can happen, I suppose.
I mean, don’t even get me started about bastard seagulls.
∞