Ice cream is a weather report

There is a gelato shop at the end of my street with a queue that behaves like a barometer. When it spills past the bakery next door, the weekend will be warm. When there are three people outside at eight in the evening, somebody is about to find their coat.

I started paying attention to it three summers ago and it has been more reliable than my phone. The forecast tells you the temperature. The queue tells you how the temperature feels to the people who live here, which is the only number that matters.

Reading the flavours

The flavours are a second signal. In early summer the shop sells mostly fruit sorbets: lemon, strawberry, blood orange. They are sharp and cold and people want them fast. By August the chocolate and hazelnut tubs are nearly empty by six, because it is hot enough that nobody is worried about feeling heavy afterwards.

When pistachio outsells lemon, the season has turned. People are eating ice cream for comfort now, not relief. That usually happens about two weeks before the first proper rain.

If the queue is longer than the shop, summer is not over, whatever the calendar says.

The last cone

The shop closes for the winter on the first Sunday it sells fewer than a hundred cones. The owner told me that once, and I have been counting ever since. It is not a scientific method. It is better than that. It is a whole neighbourhood voting with its spoons, and the result is always right.

This week the queue reached the bakery on Thursday. I am leaving my coat at home.