What sound best evokes the quintessence of Britishness? A belting out of Rule, Britannia, church bells pealing in competition with the noise of a thousand lawnmowers revving into Sunday morning action, or perhaps the nocturnal whine of a hoodie screeching off on a stolen scooter? But none of these sounds can surely approach the wonky, discordant chimes of Greensleeves blasted from an ice-cream van. That noise has, since the ice-cream van heyday of the 1950s, been the sound of British summer.

Alas, the chimes are falling quiet, silenced by the modern neurosis about healthy eating and tubby children. The number of mobile vendors of 99s is sliding, in part because they can no longer push their sweet wares outside schoolgates. And that slide looks irreversible, unless Mr Whippy’s sushi and rocket salad vans unexpectedly take off.

This is terrible news. The British summer has already lost donkeys plodding on beaches and suffered the slow disappearance of knotted hankies, sprinklers in back gardens and the stripey windbreak (surely the ingenuity required to put them up was Su doku for a simpler age?). True, the important British style contribution of combining socks and sandals is a tradition that stubbornly refuses to die, but national identity and peripheral noise will be poorer for the loss of the ice-cream van.

We can only hope that mobile-phone manufacturers seize on the opportunity to make their unloved tinny ringtones loveable by plundering the chimes archive — if there isn’t one, there ought to be — of the Ice Cream Alliance. This British tradition cannot be allowed to melt slowly, silently, inexorably away.