Of course, having said Thailand is no longer exotic, I only have to look around my hotel room to realise how daft that was. The proof lies in a bowl of fruit. You just don’t get it like this anywhere else. Even when it’s imported - the taste isn’t the same.

This is the fruit bowl in the Dusit Thani’s executive club. I would show you the one they left in my room but I, er, ate it. Those round purple things are mangosteens, which do get imported into the UK, and dry and tasteless they usually are. Not here. The prickly things (which aren’t actually prickly) are rambutan. The brown grape-like things are longan. With all these three you peel away the skin and get a delicately-flavoured fruit inside, pale and fleshy, a bit like a lychee but much, much better. With the mangosteen you eat the nut; the rest you leave the nut to one side.

These are just the starters. In Thailand fruit also means rose apples, mimusops, zalacca, Indian Jujube, jackfruit, tamarind and carambola. They are all astonishing. I only draw the line at durian (stock phrase handed out to tourists: ‘tastes like heaven, smells like hell’). Never made it past the smell… sorry. Though I gather from the nice book distributors I met in Singapore there is now a neutered version designed for the faint-hearted that has had the smell bred out (and some say the taste too).