14 MANGOES
by Owen Jones
I have always liked mangoes, but living in the UK, they were not always available and, not liking shopping, I probably missed them sometimes when they could have been bought. They were always rather expensive too.
Fast forward thirty years and I was on holiday in Thailand. There were mangoes everywhere, but there was such a choice of fruit unknown to me that I rarely ate them. It is certainly no exaggeration to say that there were dozens of types of fruit on the market stalls that I had never even heard of before.
A Thai woman that I got to know, a farmer’s daughter, seemed to know everything there was to know about food. She knew which part of Thailand the best examples of all the fruits came from and how to tell if they were ready to eat or not.
We often had
