Carol’s Column

Ice-cream cone syndrome is incurable

SOME people are born lucky. Then there are others. Like me.

When I was a cute little gap-toothed six-year-old with braids, knock knees, flat feet and ears that stuck out at right angles, my mother told me I was an ice-cream cone syndrome child.

Her philosophy was as follows: "Five children buy an ice-cream cone and one will have a hole at the bottom so that all the ice-cream spills out and messes her dress. That's you. You are a classic ice-cream cone syndrome child."

Which probably explains why everyone else's life runs on a smoothly lubricated path while mine jogs along a boulder-strewn goat track.

As a child, I was always the one who slipped and fell while ice-skating. The one who nearly cut her throat when falling out of a tree, whose hockey stick broke while she was scoring a crucial goal, whose strapless bra always fell down, who got mumps on the day of the matric dance.

"Don't worry, you'll grow out of it when you're big," my mother would say sympathetically.

"But Ma, 23 is big," I'd answer desperately as yet another disaster befell me.

The ice-cream cone syndrome does not improve with age and it definitely worsens with marriage.

Judith married a millionaire who took her skiing in the Himalayas.

Natasha's husband owns his own Lear jet and thinks nothing of whisking her away to Turkey for a little weekend shopping. Greta's husband has bought her a 78-roomed chateau in the Bordeaux winelands of France and Agatha's husband brings her champagne and orange juice to wake her in the morning.

And Sophie, lucky Sophie, her husband bought her a small island in the Indian Ocean so that they could holiday there when it got a little chilly in Johannesburg.

"Count your blessings," my good friend Betty would say as she helped me pack the ancient army tent and the portable toilet for yet another exciting camping holiday in the middle of nowhere.

"Look, it's your own fault," she remarked the other day as we discussed the problem. "Your aspirations are too low. If all you want in life is a dishwasher, that's all you get."

I should be so lucky.

It was the ice-cream cone syndrome that made me swallow my contact lens when it fell in the chicken soup and it was the ice-cream cone syndrome that made me marry when I was 13 instead of waiting until I was a more mature 74.

The other evening as I sat in my lounge on my re-sprung lounge suite I felt not a little depressed.

"You mustn't let things get you down," said my alter ego as I gazed at the pair of takkies on the piano, at the carburettor of Jamie's car on the coffee table next to Nicky's history project, at Mahoney sleeping on the couch and at the goldfish swimming in the vase because the cat had overturned the goldfish bowl.

Just then my financial asset joined me. "Did you have a good day?" he asked, sitting down and opening the paper before I could answer.

"Just after I got a speeding fine I smashed the car on the corner of the carport which is why the carport is lop-sided. There is a warrant out for my arrest. The stove doesn't work, the plumbing is blocked, the swimming pool is leaking. I don't want to ever go camping again. I want a dishwasher. We need a new stove with an oven that works, the sliding door is stuck. Mahoney's chewed a piano leg and I think I have plague."

"Good, good," he murmured abstractedly and turned a page.

"Listen to me," I screeched. "I'm talking to you. I've had enough. I want some glamour in my life. Excitement. A dishwasher.

"I want a life where everything works. Children who are good and clean and fresh, who put their washing in the washbin and eat vegetables.

"I want a husband who is romantic. Someone who'll sweep me off my feet, bring home a bunch of roses. I'm tired of being given a bag of fertiliser and told to grow my own. In other words, I want a little caviare in life. I'm sick and tired of ice-cream cones with holes in them."

There was a stunned silence.

My husband was aghast. "But surely a cone with a hole in it is better than no cone at all," he said.

You can't win.

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