Some myths are best perpetuated, e.g. 'nobody will ever need any more than 640K' (paraphrased) and in the UK there is a pretty good myth about Margaret Thatcher 'inventing' soft scoop ice cream. In some circles it has been repeated often enough to be as good as true.

One story that I wish was a myth is how ice cream used to be made from pig fat in the UK. Yes, pig fat, not dairy fat.

If you lived in Gloucester then you could see how this worked. The Walls Ice Cream factory was next to the Walls bacon factory. And they didn't have many deliveries from distinctive Milk Marketing Board lorries entering the factory gates. For vegetarians this 'secret' was not obvious, food labelling wasn't entirely required during the 1970's so one was assuming rather than knowing that the product was dairy based.

This did change and Wall's Ice Cream moved on from pig fat to palm oil. This was not to end the 'Aushwitz for pigs' aspect of the Gloucester factory, it was just economic realities. The pig fat could be sold at a premium on the global marketplace for such things and substituted with the cheaper, rainforest-destroying palm oil shipped in from the other side of the world.

Put together, I do wonder if any Wall's employees ever thought about the realities of what they were doing sending their vans around housing estates.

So first of all the product - cheapest sugar mixed with pig fat and padded out with air. Not exactly the ice cream product that people imagine it to be, not exactly great for diabetes and clogging arteries, not that it matters with kids to get them forming such life habits. They don't need vitamins when there are perfectly good preservatives to give them ADHD.

Then the ice cream vans themselves. Belching out fumes of lead at child height. Plus the noise pollution, spoiling the tranquillity of a children's play area with the throb of some poxy four cylinder engine not to mention the 'music' played over the PA system. Not all the drivers had a healthy interest in young children, but in those days we didn't have the words we have today for describing or reporting such characters. The mobile chicane created by the ice cream van could also bring death to the roads in the pre-speed bump era when housing estate speed limits were 60 mph and nobody had seat belts.

There is also the pester-power and FOMO aspects. What a heartless killjoy a parent would be if they didn't give their hard earned money over to their kids to fritter away on some pig fat whilst getting gassed with neuro-toxins at the ice cream van, to spoil their appetite for dinner?

At the time Walls had an advertising slogan that was a variation on the slogan the condom manufacturer's used. So, for ice cream you had 'Stop Me and Buy One!' and for condoms you had 'Buy Me and Stop One!'.

Despite all of the above people have extremely fond memories of ice cream vans.