Mango Madness

Mango

How do you eat a mango?

Personally I like to strip off and get into a bath full of hot water and whilst I’m soaking away the day’s trials and tribulations I slice delicate strips off a nice ripe, juicy mango and savour the tropical luxurious taste. The hot water serves as a relaxant but also doubles as a cleanser for the volumes of sticky juice that runs down your arms and face and chin as you eat. Win win.

My husband wraps himself in paper serviettes, leans over the kitchen sink and eats a mango secure in the knowledge that that juice aint going no where but down the drain

Of the brief survey of people who eat mangos, I observed one thing they all had in common, no one eats them in public and everyone takes rather drastic steps to make sure the juice is contained.

Too big, too messy, too juicy, you look greedy, like a pig etc

So imagine my surprise this afternoon when I sat down in a ‘my lemon’ and was diverted from my usual book trance by the sounds of a woman ‘really enjoying’ eating a mango not 2 seats away from me.

There was a noise like a thousand starving pigs digging truffles out of a boggy forest floor.
Grunting and slurping and lip smacking, she had the mango wrapped in a plastic woollies shopping bag so it wouldn’t drip all over her and she had her face buried up to her eyebrows in it.
I have seen starving dogs with better manners. In fact she made a Labrador look like a June Daly Watkins graduate.
If you looked closely, you could see her eyes are glazed while her lower jaw methodically tearing bits of flesh off the mango while her upper teeth held the seed in place.
Her lips were acting as a drip tray for any stray juice or chunks of wayward flesh, her tongue was scooping up the slag from her bottom teeth and throwing it to the back of her throat where it was held until it was a full load. Her adam’s apple then, acting as a plunger, pushing all that pulverised pulp down into her gullet.
And worse, the clamour she was making. It defies description, but I’ll try (you knew I would)
Think an Olympic swimming pool, a huge drain hole in the middle with a plug in it. Fill the swimming pool with custard sauce and pull the plug. The row the custard would make trying to get down that plug hole is about on par with the racket she was making with that mango.
OR think giant dentists saliva sucker with a turbo booster.
Every time the guard made an announcement she would pause in her porcine performance with small bits of mango flesh hanging off her cheeks because even she couldn’t hear anything over her munching and slurping.

The other passengers are all in shock at this incredible display of – what – bad manners just doesn’t seem to cover it.

I have heard people say that a mango is the king of fruit, there is nothing to compare to the rich, sumptuous, silky taste, a fruit to fight for, a fruit to die for, a fruit to become a pig for.
Well, it’s true, proof is sitting just inches from me, she is already a pig, she is gunna fight me when I rip it out of her hands and she is certainly going to die when I shove it down her throat.