Talking therapy: How ice cream is helping people discuss difficult topics

Annie and her eye-catching Fandangoe Whip van

Artist Annie Nicholson believes a good place to start a conversation about loss is over a scoop of ice cream. Her work has centred around grief since losing members of her family in a tragic accident 11 years ago.

Mini milks, choc ices, a 99 with a flake - and a chat about loss.

The sweet, soft, sugary taste of ice cream does not usually sit alongside the pain and devastation of grief. Yet Annie Nicholson's ice cream van was designed to break a taboo.

Annie, 38, from London, had the idea for the van when the Covid pandemic struck. She wanted to encourage conversations about grief - something she already had experience of.

On 4 October 2011, Annie woke up in the night. She'd had a bad dream and turned on her phone.

"I had so many missed calls," she says. "This had already been on the news. All these people telling me that they were sorry. I didn't know what they were sorry for.

"It was just unreal. Someone tells you your whole life as you know it is over and you can't compute that."

Four members of Annie's immediate family had been involved in a tragic accident in New York.

Her parents, Harriet and Paul, had travelled there to celebrate her sister Sonia's 40th birthday. Sonia was in the city with her partner, Helen.

"It was a surprise for Sonia that my parents were going," says Annie - who had also been due to fly out, along with her sister Amanda. But, because of work commitments, both had to cancel at the last minute.

Harriet, Paul, Sonia and Helen had boarded a helicopter to take a sightseeing trip around the city - but just after take off, the aircraft crashed into the East River.

Paul had been sitting in the front. After freeing himself from the wreckage, he tried to search for his family in the blackness of the river.

"They had to pull him out of the water in the end because he just wouldn't leave them," says Annie.

Sonia had died instantly, while Helen and Harriet were taken to hospital. A week later, Helen died. Harriet died four weeks after that.

Paul had been diagnosed with terminal cancer several years before the New York trip. He survived the accident, but died in 2016.

Annie says ice cream can help bring about togetherness

The accident flipped Annie's life upside down.

"I wasn't sure if I was going to survive this sadness of losing them," she says, "because it really was so brutal and so many people that loved me unconditionally were actually dead."

For a long while, Annie felt unable to make art and instead worked as a teacher. But gradually she returned to it, and during the pandemic in 2021 she bought her van and chose to focus on ice cream.

Annie describes herself as the "Fandangoe Kid", after the affectionate nicknames her parents used to call her. Her candy coloured van became known as the "Fandangoe Whip". She took it - complete with a loudspeaker playing a welcoming jingle - to art galleries, festivals and parks.

"In the packaging of the ice cream we'd have questions around grief and loss, and how you've managed 2020 and the pandemic... questions to prompt people." After that, those who wanted to could open up about deeper feelings or sign up for workshops run by trained professionals.

"We've all experienced a loss of sorts in the last couple of years," says Annie, "and that doesn't necessarily have to be a bereavement even. It can be a loss of lifestyle, but we've all experienced a real kind of derailing from previous lives."

It is important to have coping mechanisms and ways of gently talking about it all, says Annie, and ice cream is a great way to bring this about.

"It's ageless and classless," she says.

The van toured from June to October 2021. Some of the ice cream flavours - lemon and buttermilk, coffee and Earl Grey tea - were provided by a local Portuguese restaurant. That connection was all the more special because Annie's parents had lived in southern Portugal and, after family meals, they would often walk to the local ice cream parlour.

"Getting a scoop of ice cream and walking along the seafront was a real mark of togetherness," she says.

After the van's success, Annie wanted to continue her work on a bigger, more sustainable scale. The "Fandangoe Skip" was created, an ice cream kiosk that looks like two skips - one upturned on top of the other.

Annie's Fandangoe Skip was a collaboration with Caukin Studio, Skip Gallery and The Loss Project

It appeared in Canary Wharf and on the Greenwich Peninsula in London this summer - and then a new incarnation of it appeared thousands of miles away.

On the anniversary of the fatal helicopter crash in October, a Fandangoe Skip was set up in Lower Manhattan opposite the World Trade Center. It resembled a North American version of a skip, known as a dumpster.

It was "very much a full circle journey" says Annie.

Skips, or dumpsters, are places where you can offload things, says Annie, and metaphorically it was a place to offload emotions.

A Brooklyn-based company made the crumbled cookies and cream, salt-kissed caramel, and summertime strawberry-flavoured ice creams.

Ice cream was served beneath the sunshine in New York

Annie's partner, writer Lara Haworth, ran a "letters that will never be sent" workshop. People could write letters to a lost loved one or those who had broken their hearts.

At night, tunes like Mr Brightside by The Killers and Ed Sheeran's Galway Girl filled the air - as Annie hosted "grief raves" where people could play music that reminded them of those "they had loved and lost in any capacity".

It was all in honour of Annie's sister Sonia who "loved a good dance move and a good mix tape".

The grief raves have fed into Annie's next project - the Fandangoe Discoteca. A touring mini club that encourages movement and dance as a way of maintaining good mental health.

"We're holding so much in our daily lives at the moment," says Annie, "and I can't remember a time when we were holding more in my lifetime.

"So it's a way to come together without necessarily being expected to talk. I do know in trauma that movement therapy is such a valuable opportunity for letting go of some of those feelings."

When she first started out as an artist, Annie never intended to focus on loss - but she now wants to help as many people as possible find ways to express feelings of grief.

"In many ways," says Annie, "my work has been a love letter to [my family's] legacy over the past decade."

Heart and Soul: One Scoop or Two is available to listen to now on BBC World Service