How to wake up your avocados, as they are climacteric fruit. This is initially about Mexican avocados, but the storage and ripening bits are interesting. I keep mine in the fridge and bring them out 2 by 2 to allow them to ripen.
Edit: do watch the comedy video at the end!
Just returned from breakfast and clicked into this reading “One of my favorite breakfast items is avocado on sourdough toast …”.
Well, well, this is what I just downed for breakfast:
Smashed avocado and poached eggs
chilli flakes, toasted seeds, grilled sourdough
(Dix Neuf, St. Peter’s Port, Guernsey)
Josh Johnson is hilarious!
And right about the avocado lottery.
I’ve spent fortunes buying avocados from Coop only to end up with either solid wood or instant disintegration. Love avocados, but have learned never to plan a meal around them. I think of them purely as serendipity. First slice the avocado, then in the rare chance I win the lottery, only then decide on the rest of the meal.
(FYI for anyone not familiar with Josh Johnson: He posts his stand-up routines on Youtube almost weekly. Well worth a trip down that rabbit hole, as well as taking a gander at his stints on the Daily Show.)
Yes, the fridge. Then wrap in a newspaper sheet and wait. Sometimes 1 night, sometimes 1-2 days 
and sometimes never. I hate those brown threads I often find in an otherwise perfectly ripe avocado, usually from SPA* (I don’t want to be sued). And wrapping them preserves the ethylene gas they produce for themselves, but sometimes it takes a while for production to ramp up.
The brown threads, aren’t the same virus than the one that attacks the mango trees? I noticed it in some avocados “extra” that I read on the small print came from China.
(those are the ones that you find ubiquitously in Central Europe - they are also so ‘unstable’, that they go from the fruit basket to the trash without passing through my dish…
No, they are vascular threads that appear in fruit from trees that have not yet reached their bearing years. They also occur in fruit that is picked far too early.
