Ice Cream & Irises

Lazily gazing at the flower-seller’s daughter, I flicked my tongue across a Piccadilly Whip.

I was not of a mind to contemplate kipper salads, long-limbed spinsters, or the unknowable depths of another’s despair. No, not when I was languidly suspended in a bi-sensory heaven.

The heat of the day was a blanket that suffocated sound and inhibited movement. Floating motes of dust, encased in sunlight, looked like tiny bubbles of air trapped in glass. The streets flickered like a faded home-movie unfurling in slow-motion, a surreal dream-sequence swimming in muted hues.

I was sitting on the kerb opposite the flower stall, one elbow resting on the scorching fender of Miss Wetherby’s (next-door-but-one) plum-coloured Karmann Ghia, savouring my frozen treat. As its icy sweetness assailed my synapses the girl’s smooth, elegant movements appeared to emit slowly-dissolving trails of light, hypnotic patterns that shimmered and overlapped as though contained within a kaleidoscope.

In the aftermath of this clammy hallucination, the cogs of the Maurice noggin began a-turnin’. I concluded that just as the mind may become enlivened by psychotropic substances, so the eyes could become intoxicated too if the sights they absorbed were potent enough.

With such a bewitching vision before me, I had to blink to stay sober.

It was captivating to see her so wholly immersed in her work, tenderly plucking leaves from erect stems, and lovingly fondling swollen blooms. She raised a crisp and vivid carnation to her nose and inhaled its perfume, before nuzzling it like a post-partum beagle with an unlicked pup. You could see her senses devouring her.

I surveyed her alluring wares: endlessly seductive, eternally out of reach. With frustration I wondered why it was that some flowers spread their petals and allowed themselves to be penetrated by an eager proboscis, whilst others remained tightly-closed.

How does nature’s dating game operate, I pondered? What are the elusive rules of attraction and when will I learn ‘em? Are we mere, besotted stooges in some metaphysical Blind Date? Lovelorn puppets of a scheming celestial Cilla?

Realising that I was stretching my bijou thesis way beyond its capacity to endure scrutiny, I allowed the dilemma to disperse into the woozy Fulham air, like cottonwood fluff being teased from a branch by a tentative breeze.

Sucking lustily on my honeyed fingertips, I felt a small resolve begin to stiffen. I stood up and, palming away the dust of crumbled wafer from the weft of my pin-striped tufnells, determined to act on this slowly solidifying notion.

See, I had read about these pheromone characters in one of Mr. Rutter’s (antiquated bookseller) enigmatic tomes. I’d purloined it from the racy stash he keeps under his stall. But I didn’t need a book to know that if a theory cannot sustain itself in practice then it is worthless.

So, hands in pockets, plaid cravat askew, I strove to attenuate my limp as I aspired to a nonchalant swagger in her direction. I sincerely believed that I was reviving, right there on North End Road, the effortless dash of a Grant or an Astaire. Once up to speed, I strained to achieve the erotic chemical excretion that I had read about.

The ensuing sniggers and guffaws suggested that I was channeling Hugh rather than Cary. Those unwitting market-goers must have believed they’d stumbled upon the West Fulham heats of the Disabled Pimp Olympics. How hormones warp one’s self-awareness is one of evolution’s enduring cruelties.

A confluence of lush floral scents rippled from the stall and mingled with the dry, musty heaviness oozing from the market’s pores. It begat a somewhat curdled confection, suggestive of a drenched Afghan Hound on the rampage through the Selfridges perfume hall. Together with the heat and embarrassment, and a debilitating post-sugar dip, I was becoming somewhat light-headed.

However, approaching her sumptuous display I rallied. I feigned a casual fingering of the cuff-links, and began to whistle the opening bars of “If I Was A Chocolate Flake Would You Be My Ice Cream Cornet?” I felt that I was being consumed by fire, and struggled to maintain the melody through my sticky, sugared lips. I glanced directly at her, pleading silently for some connection but she was in thrall to her inner world.

Despite failing to penetrate her intimate circle, I was praying that the sentiment behind the song might nestle subliminally within her bosom. Buried there, perhaps it might find her rising one morning possessed of an irresistible urge to hunt me down, transport me to a secluded arbour in Bishop’s Park, and proceed to delicately weave fresh irises through my barnet.

With the tune dying on my lips and my hopeless strut unraveling, the entire conceit crumbled like a punctured meringue.

I was beginning to wonder if I should abandon what was increasingly looking like a unilateral romantic quest. As Mr. Rutter is wont to say: “When your horse dies, get off”.

Who knows, maybe it’s nature protecting me and I’m simply not ready for a paradiddle on Cupid’s kettle drums. Or even a little fiddle in the string section.

Yes, it was another one of life’s lead-filled gloves to the solar plexus.

I suppose, my black-and-white acquaintances, that by now we should be used to the unrequited love of a capricious mistress but, like soppy, forsaken spaniels, we keep coming back season after season, don’t we.

But can there be a purer love than that?

Scallions. Flamin’. Fulham. Up The.