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Monday, 18 August 2014

When I posted the above tweet recently I just thought that maybe the ice-cream man was having an off day and didn’t want me taking photos of his van. I tried to explain that I have a photo blog displaying badly painted Disney characters but he didn’t budge. As much as I hate to do it, I also tried to use my name and radio show to influence him. I figured that he might not know it isn’t a radio show anymore but a podcast, but it turned out that I am not generally known in the world of ice-cream. This afternoon on my way home from court I took these photos of Hong Kong Phooey from two vans, one in the city centre and one in the Forest. This is where the story takes a bizarre and sinister turn. It is a long held urban myth that ice-cream vans are a front for far less innocent enterprises but I don’t know of any actual case of an ice-cream man being arrested for any wrongness. When I lived in York we lived for a time in a less than posh area (the notorious Clifton district if you know York) and the ice-cream van used to come round at nine o’clock at night in the winter. As this is hardly peak ice-cream selling time I just assumed that a 99 with nuts and juice wasn’t the only thing you could buy when the chimes were heard. Do you suppose the really serious addicts were told a variation on the famous lie; when you hear the chimes, the ice-cream man has no more heroin.

The ice-cream vans I have photographed so far (or the cartoons at least) are all linked to the same team, which is why I am wondering if I have become a target. If they think I’m an undercover detective or something then I can understand why having their vans photographed would put their backs up. After taking a picture on the Forest I noticed the ice-cream man picking up his phone and making a call. Was he ordering that I needed following home? I made my route as difficult to follow as possible, (which isn’t easy because the Forest Fields/Hyson Green area of Nottingham has no Highway Code and it is legally acceptable to drive the ‘wrong’ way up a one way street and stopping at a red light is purely a matter of personal choice), even trying to confuse anyone following me by nipping on the tram for one stop to try and shake them off.

All evening I had an uneasy feeling that I have upset someone and that something might happen to me. Would they believe that I was acting in innocence and just acting on an obsessive collection? Going out the front door for a cigarette I noticed an ice-cream van parked a few doors away, it would be too obvious if he parked right outside.

This blog is a message to say that if I should go missing without explanation, or am found dead, then please show this blog to the police. They will need to arrest all of the ice-cream van drivers in Nottingham for my kidnap and murder. For the sake of a mildly amusing collection of photographs I have been mistaken for someone trying to expose their criminal practice. Don’t be put off the scent if it is reported that I took my own life because these people are clever enough to make it look like a suicide. I might be found dead in the woods hanging from a tree, or at the bottom of a river with bricks in my pocket.

Maybe I will be found in the back of an ice-cream van parked miles from anywhere, my dead body covered in strawberry sauce, hundreds and thousands, chopped nuts and a Flake in each nostril; it will look like I topped myself.

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