It was 7am, the sun had joined the world, dependently and on schedule, as it checked in with the skies for its daily shift. Alex, Adam and I were striking a volleyball along the beach with our feet, imitating footballers of yesteryear. The cricket bat proved to be semi useless on the soft white sand and had remained in the backpack resting for a future performance. Our own individual worries and collective concerns that had seemed so poignant and had been so prevalent in the concreteness of London had evaporated and showed no sign of resurgence. It was a blissful Fijian morning, the ocean delivered a soft vibration in the background as if it was indicating its pure content in what it had to offer the world. The temperature increased incrementally and we began to drip in sweat while continuing to kick the ball to one another without the need for a purpose or goal in our activity.

A coarse voice bellowed at us from the shadows of towering palm tree.

We turned to discover a skinny man who looked as if he was somewhere in his seventies, wearing a loosely fitted white vest, smoking a hand rolled cigarette. He was sitting prophetically  in a squatted position that illustrated his knees were still functioning in good order. His wrinkled skin showed signs of decades of constant exposure to the same Fijian sun we had struggled to spend 20 minutes under.

Overzealously he raised his hand and beckoned us to come over to him. The three of us stopped kicking the ball and walked the 15 metres of sand that separated us. He began to speak and a sense of residing mischief and light-heartedness was evident in his voice.

We exchanged initial pleasantries and then sat down on the sand directly in front of him like three young students listening in to an accomplished professor. There was nothing studious about his topic of conversation as he vectored quickly into a lecture about his various sexual encounters with women whom had half the tan and more than half his age. He was a comical man, a storyteller who engaged his audience through crude comments and joyful discussion. Alex, Adam & I listened on to this man, the type of man who may well have headlined the Hammersmith Apollo if his birth dice had landed on the UK. His wealth obviously derived from other areas, his kids and the multiple women he kept on referring to.

As tourists whom he considered had money in abundance his story telling manifested into a sales pitch for what he described as ‘the best coconuts on the island’. We had invested a good 30 minutes into this interaction and thus felt somewhat obliged to purchase three of these ‘award-winning’ coconuts for our trio. Upon agreement, he catapulted himself from the beach to the top of a nearby palm tree with unbelievable speed, machete in one hand and his energy safely wrapped in his other. He hacked at the coconuts with impressive power and assurance for a man of his age and jumped back down with three large coconuts for his new customers.. He ferociously slashed them open and handed them over proudly to us.  The water that was stored safely inside the coconut, tasted like something my taste buds have never encountered, a liquid so sweetly refreshing that I felt like this everyday coconut held the divine power to reverse the ageing process. The dehydration that the morning sun had brought was immediately extinguished. It had been an obvious yet important lesson in answering the question of what to do when life gives you coconuts. Accept them, wholeheartedly.