Germany calling

By various names, that little building has been around for more than 100 years. A nearby four-finger signpost, we’d recalled, had pointed to beach, village, Bungalow and (slightly more improbably) Germany.

Though Alan Vickers recalls that the sign to Germany was removed during the Second World War – our boys doubtless knowing the way already – and replaced thereafter, last week’s photograph showed the sign again to be trifurcate. Whatever can it indicate?

Eric Lambert sends a 2008 image showing the four-way split still to be intact. Is this yet another example of perceived political correctness, or of what’s called the German bite?

NOW familiarly lemon-topping, the Pacittos weren’t just in Redcar but – as Margaret Hunton recalls – in Scarborough, too.

They’d go there as youngsters, Margaret’s parents always setting up camp near the ice cream stall so that it might act as a landmark should the plodging bairns become disoriented.

In the 1960s, she worked at weekends for award-winning ice cream makers Frank and Tony Knowles – “queues out of the doors on Sunday afternoons” – in Thirsk, where still she lives.

“We used to offer monkeys’ blood on cornets and, it’s just dawned on me, never worried that the description might upset children, or even scar them for life. They just loved their monkeys’ blood.”

SO why a 99, especially as it may be covered in hundreds and thousands?

Theories vary, none convincing; Chris Willsden offers the most appealing.

The ice cream flake, he says, was named by Italian ice cream sellers after the final wave of conscripts for the First World War, born in 1899 and known as I Ragazzi del 99, the Boys of 99.

“The chocolate flake may have reminded them of the Alpine regimental hat, with a long dark feather cocked at an angle.”

It sounds authentic. Awaiting the man from Gabriele’s back on the mean streets of Shildon, we were called ragazzi – or something very similar – as well.

JOAN Collinson, now 88, recalls the Berconsini family – “I don’t know how you spell it” – in Bondgate, Darlington.

Now in North Cowton, Mrs Collinson lived up one of the yards nearby. “I was brought up there and in a banana box on Darlington market, where my parents had a stall. It toughened you up a bit; living in the yards never did me any harm.”

The Berconsini family, she says, tended to keep themselves to themselves – “their daughters hardly ever played out” – but sold lovely ice cream, cut into squares and wrapped in paper, from a wheelbarrow.

“I was only four, but I can see them still. Better still, I can almost still taste it, too.”

IT was Eddie Rossi’s death which started all this. Clearly that family spread beyond Bishop Auckland, too.

Jean Harrison recalls Rossi’s in Lynn Street, Hartlepool – and how, just like the Bishop café, they had what might be termed a stock-in trade in Oxo and a dry cream cracker.

“I remember with great delight being served a knickerbocker glory for passing my 11+,” says Jean, and that had monkeys’ blood, too.

Could it, she wonders, have anything to do with the great Hartlepool legend, that hanging participle.

Probably not.

THE Stokesley Stockbroker, meanwhile, notes in the Court Circular the funeral last Tuesday of Mr Carlo Napolitano, who sounds like he could have had an ice cream van around Trimdon or somewhere, but was the Royal Pigeon Loft manager at Sandringham. The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were represented by Mr Marcus O’Lone, the President of the United States of America apparently having precedence.

Only yesterday, two letters arrived marvelling at the omission of Dennis Donnini VC – his family ice cream sellers in Easington – and it is something to which we will return.

FOR the moment, time to change the menu, and firstly a PS to last Saturday’s At Your Service column on Jonathan Ruffer – the most charismatic and most generous of men – whose £15m gift has saved the Zurbaran paintings for Auckland Castle.

Though he plans to spend much more time in his native North-East, Stokesley-raised Mr Ruffer – hobbies “opera and sleeping” – really does live in the village of Ugley, near Stanstead Airport.

There’s even an Ugley Women’s Institute, of which his wife was asked to be president. “She thought it better to decline,” he says.

We forgot to ask if he had a sister. IF not quite an emergency, then the County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust’s directions to the University Hospital of North Durham – still Dryburn to the patient – appear to be an accident waiting to happen.

John Heslop has a friend who was sent a leaflet before an appointment.

There’s a taxi number, directions from the railway station – “five minutes drive” – but no mention of buses, though dozens pass every day.

Still, those flying in to have their boils lanced will no doubt be grateful to learn that the hospital is “approximately 25 minutes drive from Durham Tees Valley Airport”.

If the NHS believes that anyone can reasonably get from Teesside Airport to Dryburn hospital in 25 minutes, they’d best save a bed in accident and emergency too.

JUST days before an elderly American Bible basher forecast the end of the world – incorrectly, as happily it transpired – Jo Kelly spotted these number plates, below, while on holiday in Scorton, Lancashire.

L2CUM, she says, belongs to a local clergyman. L2KUM may be a fellow minister’s or possibly, muses Jo, belong to the first one’s wife.

In Barton, near Scotch Corner, on Sunday morning we clocked K9LES.

It’s greatly to be hoped that the owner breeds Cruft’s champions or, at the very least, runs a decent boarding kennels.

Failing that, of course, Leslie may simply be a dentist.

…and finally, it may not greatly resemble the subject as taught in the third form at Bishop Auckland Grammar School, but we are nonetheless grateful to Ivor Wade for a valuable English lesson.

Chap on his 80th birthday gets from his wife a gift certificate to the local clinic, rumoured to have a miracle cure for what politely is termed erectile dysfunction.

The old guy is given a potion, warned to take only a teaspoonful and, when he does, to say “1-2-3”.

In turn he asks how he stops the medicine from working, is told that his wife must say “1-2-3-4”

but that, if she does, it’ll be another year before it does the trick again.

Back home he discovers that it appears, indeed, to be most wonderfully efficacious. His wife joins the excitement but before proceeding asks: “What was that 1-2-3 for?”

A perfect example, should ever it be needed, of why sentences should never end with a preposition.

􀁧 The column now takes a two-week break which should not (yet) be confused with retirement. Jim Jennings in Durham, among many kindly readers anxiously anticipating that possibility, insists that already he has collected 37,828 names on a petition urging a rethink. The editor, it’s feared, has 37,829 urging the opposite.

Back, touch wood, on June 22.