Nostalgia

I found out today, by accident (ok, it was the lure of the red "this week's offer" sticker) that Mövenpick still do their maple walnut ice cream. Sigh.
Why should you care about maple walnut ice cream, you ask? Maybe you needn't, but thirty years ago, when my parents planted the seeds that would have me coming to seaside resorts (albeit in the UK), we'd spend summer vacations on Norderney, one of the (fx: rolls dice) eight? islands in the North Sea. And while I do remember the classical concerts that may have come free with the mandatory tourist tax (not with any amount of affection, though, because, well, I was six, sitting in silence for hours on end isn't fun when you're six), and remember fragments like Smitty's news agent, the weekly test run of the air raid sirens (this is the mid-eighties, we're still prepared to be a bump in the road so the US can defend the Rhine and then we get turned into a big glazed parking lot that glows in the dark), trash bag zeppelins, shards of memories like the bag of broken waffle cones one of the stores would sell (so I guess you can call me waffle-brained), one of the things that somehow sticks with me was the occasional treat of splitting a tiny (80ml?) single serving plastic container, tiny spoon glued under the label, of Mövenpick maple walnut ice cream between the four of us (though I have a feeling my dad might have often given up his share for us), deliciously sweet ice cream with the occasional quarter-walnut glazed in maple syrup, the quarters drawn into the rectangular box like tiny lines of demarkation, and lucky person who'd guess best where most of the walnuts were, huddled up in a strandkorb (they don't only exist for G8 summit photo ops), sometimes watching a seagull walking on top of it (strategically placed bread would help with that), sometimes sitting in there sheltering from the rain, kept quiet with crosswords and connect-the-dots games, and this has gone far far away from ever being a grammatically sound sentence, hasn't it.
Ah yes, things that were. So when you see Mövenpick's maple walnut ice cream in your local grocery, treat yourself, share it with your loved ones, but be careful, some parts have more nuts than others. ;)