One evening when I was about six years old, my family – grandad, grandma, uncles, aunty, my parents and me – were all sharpening our teeth to tuck into a big feast in my grandparents’ house.
Covering the large dinner table, freshly cooked crabs, lobsters and fish were piled in a steaming display on my grandparents’ finest china. They lived near the sea in a small town in the west of Myanmar (Burma). Sea food was cheap and fresh and there was plenty of it.
The military government at the time was still so busy selling off other parts of the country that the local crabs and lobsters were still happily enjoying their freedom. They had no idea that, in a decade or so, their descendants would all be travelling abroad straight into the gaping mouths of foreigners.
That particular day, my grandad was very proud to have managed to get hold of a local speciality: turtle eggs. 
Turtle eggs were luxury food. You could only get them once in a while. Maybe that’s because the turtles routinely missed their appointment with the midwife. Popping their eggs out on the move meant they couldn’t carry their eggs wherever they were going. They’d have to dig holes in the sand and leave their would-be offspring to their own devices. The really slow ones would be dug up by humans, only to end up on our dinner table. But at least we had a keen sense of justice: we promised to eat them with as much gusto as we could muster.
So anyway … Everybody was looking forward to sampling some of these rare turtle eggs.
At the ripe old age of six I’d never tasted – never even seen – turtle eggs before. I was fascinated with these small white squishy balls.
Grandad, who was still beaming at his wondrous achievement, was sitting next to me. With great ceremony, he placed a couple of them on my plate. He even squashed them for me with his fork so that I could mix them in with my rice. Slowly but surely, the cute little white balls morphed into a gooey slimy pulp.
I was absolutely disgusted. With total abandon, I shrieked, “Yuck! It looks like my snot!”
Travelling like wildfire around the table I heard various sounds of choking and spluttering. Nervously, I looked up and my worried eyes met my mum’s which were glaring icily at me. (No mean feat for a tropical country!)
To this day I still can’t remember what those turtle eggs tasted like. All I can remember is the look of horror on all the grown-ups’ faces.