Ice Cream in February
The kiosk on the east prom opens at Easter and closes at the end of September and this has been the arrangement since Yusuf's father bought it in 1989.
There is nothing to argue about. Nobody buys ice cream on the east prom in February. The wind comes down that beach in a way that people who have not stood on it do not believe, and the town has about four thousand residents in winter, and Yusuf has done the sums and the sums are not close.
The exception
On one afternoon in February, every year since 2011, the kiosk opens from two until four.
It is not advertised. There is no sign. Yusuf drives down, opens the shutter, turns the machine on ninety minutes early because it needs it, and stands there.
He sells, on average, between eleven and twenty.
How it started
In February 2011 he came down to check the roof after a storm and there was a man on the prom with two children, and the man asked, as a joke, whether he was open.
Yusuf said no, and then thought about it, and said give me half an hour.
The children had ice cream on a February beach in a wind that took the tops off the waves, and the man stood there while they ate it, and when he paid he said thank you in a way that Yusuf did not understand at the time.
He understood it in about 2014, when the same man came back, on his own, on the same February afternoon, and had a coffee and stood in the same place.
What Yusuf knows now
The man's name is Colin and his wife died in January 2011, and the ice cream on the beach was eleven days after the funeral, and it was the first time either of his children had asked for anything.
He told Yusuf this in 2017, in about four sentences, and has never mentioned it again.
Who comes
It has grown, which Yusuf did not intend and has not encouraged.
By 2015 there were about eleven people. By 2019 there were thirty. Last year there were, he thinks, about sixty, which is more than a summer Tuesday.
Nobody organises it. There is no page and no group chat that Yusuf is aware of, though he assumes there must be one by now.
The date moves. It is the second Saturday, usually, but not always, and Yusuf decides it in January based on the forecast, and tells four people, and it gets round.
Why they come
He has never asked and would not.
What he has, standing in a kiosk for two hours a year, is a view of about sixty people on a freezing prom eating ice cream in coats, and a fairly clear sense that the ratio of people who are there for the ice cream to people who are there for something else is not favourable to the ice cream.
There is a woman who comes with her sister and they do not speak to each other much.
There are the Fenwicks, who bring their grandchildren, who are now teenagers and who come under protest and who have never missed one.
There is a man of about forty who comes alone and buys one, every year, and eats it looking at the sea, and leaves, and who Yusuf has never spoken to beyond the transaction and never will.
And Colin, who is seventy-one now, and whose children come with their own children, so that the party from that one family is nine.
The economics
He takes about a hundred and forty pounds.
It costs him, in van diesel, in running the machine, in the mix he has to buy in for a single afternoon and mostly throws away, something like two hundred.
He has done this calculation once, in 2016, and has not done it again.
This February
The forecast was bad and got worse and Yusuf moved it twice, which he has never had to do.
On the day it was four degrees with a wind that made it feel like minus two, and horizontal rain from about half past two.
Seventy-one people.
They stood under the awning and along the wall and some of them in the actual rain, and the queue at one point went past the closed arcade, and the machine — which is thirty-one years old and which Yusuf's father bought second-hand — held out for the whole two hours and then died on the Sunday.
He has ordered a new one. It cost nine thousand pounds and will not pay for itself until 2029.
He has told the finance company it is for the summer season.