The first rule about eating a mango is that you don’t buy mangos when they first come on the market at the beginning of the season.

You’ll walk into Coles and see the first of them – thirty-nine dollars for two or twenty-eight dollars each. As a seasoned mango eater do you succumb to the temptation? Hoh no. you go home and enter your pantry where on the top shelf beside the Vacola Bottling Outfit you still have three of the two-dozen bottles of mangos you preserved last year.

Then it’s simply a matter of waiting until the end of the season when everyone’s trying to get rid of their damned mangos in a ute on the side of the road – nine dollars each or forty for thripence.

Because as anyone who has had anything to do with mango trees knows – they grow huge and they are abundant. Abundantly over-abundant would not be exaggerating the situation for mango tree owners – or golfers trying to find their ball in the mess of mangos under the tree on the ninth.

So when the time is ripe and you bring home this year’s mangos it is a question of how to enjoy them.

Some like them cut in to dinky squares while still on the stone. Some manage to get them into slices. The danger with all this is of course that you can cut too close to that white stuff that covers the seed under the flesh…and you’re never sure that it isn’t deadly poisonous – probably used by the South American Indians to make Curare or something.

No; real mango eaters grasp them firmly, tear the skin off, stand preferably in a wet area and cleave their way through the juicy slippery suckers using primarily the two top front teeth rather like one would imagine a rabbit eating. Or perhaps a prairie dog.

Yes, one could imagine a prairie dog being a good mango eater.

You know it’s the mango season when you call on friends and neighbours and they say hello revealing yellow fibres stuck between their two front teeth.

After that, you are faced with days of trying to remember how to preserve the vast quantities of mangos littering your life. Although truth-be-known that preserving never really works the way you want it to. Even the experienced Mrs Perrin at Bolivia in 1956 used to not put enough sugar in the mix or something, and the fruit was never as good as you could get in a can. Although being twenty miles on a dirt road from the nearest store meant usually that it was preserves or nothing. Anyway Mrs Perrin didn’t preserve mangos because she had no mango tree on the farm. She preserved lots of other stuff…but I suppose there is no point in going into that. I’m sure she could have preserved mangos though…if she had any, which she didn’t.

I hope that helps.