Ivan and his Ice-Cream van

Hiccup and I have found this blog a great way to begin introducing his 26 teddy-bear friends.

He is so anxious for me to tell of them all and for a long while I explained that I wanted to keep them ‘up-my-sleeve’ until ready for each story to appear.

Only now, having shown the illustrations of Harry and Dreyfus it would seem an ideal time to begin to introduce them all without spoiling the fun of reading their stories.

That, I hope, will follow in due course.

When Hiccup had to leave Harry after his misadventures in Hobberdy Hall, he was taken to meet Ivan who owned an old Ice-cream van.

The illustrations were produced well before the individual books and form the basis of what was to follow.

Ivan was a jolly Italian teddy-bear who was happy to spend some time with Hiccup and show him his ice-cream van.

‘Why do you have an old van?’ was Hiccup’s first question to me when I told him what we were going to do.

I told him that modern things don’t stay modern for very long and that ‘old things’ are far more interesting to look at, and anyway Ivan was an old-fashioned teddy-bear.

That kept him fairly quiet until . . . .

. . . ‘Is that why you often draw things that are old?’ Hiccup then asked me.

‘Yes.’ I agreed with him. ‘I do that often and partly because I do like old things because they are so much more fascinating … and the stories won’t seem so old in a few years time.’

‘Are you old?’ He never gives up.

‘Yes.’

Well I am not young, that’s for certain.

The illustration shows Ivan on the south coast of England and in the picture are lots of things beginning with the letter ‘I’.

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