Mango Season

At a recent dinner party for an emigre friend visiting from Florida, I remember Claudia Robinson describing the various Jamaican dishes for an American guest. "Eating Jamaican food is positively a sexual experience," she remarked as she went on to extol the sensuousness of the numerous subtle flavours combined in mackerel rundown.

The validity of her statement never really struck me until a day or so later while I was eating a mango - nothing equates oral sex as much.

Peeling off the skin with little bites and licking the juice as it spills is very akin to the preliminary teasing with teeth and tongue that initiates cocksucking. When the skin is completely off and the meaty body of the mango presents itself is equivalent to the tumescence of a full erection. Then the whole thing is engorged in the mouth, laved, sucked and nibbled. The lips are very involved at this stage, stretching and contracting as they wrap around the luscious object.

After this, when the seed is exposed, the vigorous sucking and pumping motions begin in earnest. The jaw muscles are brought heavily into play - effective exercise and practice for the real thing. The seed is sucked dry of every last drop of golden juice, until it is white (limp) from exhaustion.

The experience of eating mangoes is often not complete without getting hairs stuck between your teeth. Size queens, naturally, prefer Hayden (Beefy) or East Indian mangoes. The former are large, heavy and very full, while the latter are longer and more pleasingly shaped.

Given that mango eating is so much a a part of our culture, Jamaican males should be particularly good at fellatio. However, I have disappointedly found this to be not so. They may capitulate to being blown but show no interest in blowing. With all the practice they have had in sucking mangoes and with the well- developed jaw muscles that this affords, one would have thought otherwise. If I am wrong, I would love to be corrected. My mango is ripe and ready.