As I travelled back from Oldham on the bus yesterday (having for once made a very good connection with the tram from Manchester so that I only waited a few minutes for my bus to arrive) I went past a shop, or possibly a cafe, that declared itself to be a dessert parlour. And I remembered that I had read recently that the number of dessert cafe and ice-cream parlours, and presumably those frozen yoghurt places, has increased greatly in recent years. Somehow I associate ice-cream parlours with seaside resorts (I am of the generation that thinks of ice-cream as a summer thing, not an all year round thing) but it seems they are popping up on high streets all over the place.
Dessert parlours and ice cream cafes are not the same as ordinary cafes. If the one which opened last year, or maybe the year before, in the park in Uppermill is anything to go by, ice cream is their main speciality and they only incidentally serve coffee as well, presumably for fuddy-duddies like me who don’t want ice cream in January or February. They don’t seem to have a range of cakes and definitely no sandwiches. And I suppose that dessert parlours operate on similar lines.
They are described as a good “chit-chat” places, where friends who don’t want to drink alcohol can meet, without the full formality of a whole meal, or where families can go for a treat. I know for a fact that my son-in-law, on the days when he collects the small grandchildren from school, often takes them to a favourite ice-cream place. The fuddy-duddy bit of me wonders what’s wrong with just going home.
According to some experts, such meeting places might be the saviours of our high streets, rescuing them from becoming nothing but a collection of charity shops and, increasingly, pawn shops. But I also wonder of they might not contribute to the country’s obesity crisis.
Incidentally, the ice cream cafe in the park in Uppermill is on the site of what used to be a public toilet. Public toilets everywhere seem to have closed down in the last few decades. Maybe they were too often used for nefarious activities. Anyway, this particular one stood locked for years until the news that it was to be converted, substantially extended of course, into an ices cream cafe. Oddly enough, one of the consequences is that there are now public toilets open in the park again … but only when the cafe is open. The same applies to the loos at another, more traditional cafe, in the neighbourhood, the Lime Kiln, at what used to be the Brownhill Visitor Centre which had a sort of museum of local artefacts and stuffed birds and animals.
Otherwise, if you need a loo while out and about around here, you have to go to a “designated public toilet” at one of the pubs.
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Here’s a linguistic anomaly: Granddaughters Number One and Number Two use ‘gotten’ rather than ‘got’ as the past participle of the verb ‘to get’. For example: “It’s gotten very cold” or “He’s gotten fat”. Now, I know that ‘gotten’ is old English. Shakespeare used it. All the same, it sounds odd to me, although it doesn’t bother me in the same way as ‘me’ and ‘I’ confusion does, or when I hear things like ‘he done it’. According to this article, however, some people have been getting very agitated about it.
Worse things happen at sea, which is I suppose how it travelled to America with the Pilgrim Fathers and has remained in use there. Now it’s come back across the ocean and into use with a younger generation here.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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