I remember my father jealously staring on from outside the kitchen, occasionally being shoo'd away by my mother. As mangoes stained, we were naked from the waist up, and, during the process, delirious with happiness.

My mother would slice of the cheeks (one each) and we would then fight over the seed like dogs over a bone. My brother and I were allowed to eat exactly one a day, no more, no less. Golden skin, soft to the touch and the exact kind of sweet, tangy, buttery and smooth that gave my mother shivers. Every year, as a child when the prized Indian mangoes made their way to South East London, my mother, brother and I would travel on the long train into town to purchase a single, precious box. Indian Alphonso mangoes have a desperately short season and, to make matters worse, travel terribly. My mother liked mangoes of the Alphonso variety - Indian in origin, very sweet, slightly tangy, but buttery, smooth and not at all stringy. Because, well, that's what a mango was like in West Africa in 1979. My father likes his mangoes, as he does, a little stringy in texture and very slightly tart. Which, unfortunately for him, was not enough to grant him rights to eat mangoes in our house. It reminded him of his adolescent summers on the beaches of Sierra Leone with his father (my grandfather), with white sand, deep blue waters and endless palm trees. My father, a half African, half Spanish British-born sports-playing, story-telling-man-about-the-house saw the mango simply as a delicious and slightly nostalgic piece of fruit. My mother, an Indian by birth but very much British in most other ways, saw the mango as a symbol of her superior cultural heritage. One of the stranger things about my childhood was that my father was not allowed to eat mangoes.

Bun cha ha noi sf