actually, I prefer sublimation

If you'd told me, three years ago, that I'd deliberately and wantonly spend half an hour serving ice-cream cones to 11 children under the age of 10, I would have snorted derisively. Today, however, was the first birthday party of my Nice New Niece, and now that Aunthood has descended upon my hapless shoulders, I am forced to contemplate these new experiences. As a direct result of this I am empowered to bring you the following vital* cultural observations.

• Filling a cone with ice-cream is actually not nearly as easy as it looks, and will render the operator sticky from knees to eyebrows.
• Small children know exactly how they want their ice-cream cones filled, the precise patterns of jelly tots they require and the exact composition of the covering of chocolate vermicelli, and are silently contemptuous if none of the above are adequately forthcoming.
• Either acculturation is a real bitch or it's genetic: little girls actually do have an inbuilt preference for pink, which they will indicate by gestures and snarling if they're not yet old enough to speak.
• The experience of seething hordes of small children is made materially more bearable by the application of champagne.

It strikes me, you know, that the experience of your average toddler these days must be very confusing, in the sense that they tend to experience the adult world from the knees down, and these days about three quarters of it is wearing jeans. No wonder we're all about the postmodern angst: we're all imprinted on indistinguishable, featureless blue denim.

* if you're facing a ravening horde of toddlers requiring ice-cream, or any parallel set of bizarre and unlikely circumstances.