Times have been unsettling at the Watusi Spiritual Retreat. That ill-fated egging incident on Halloween had unforeseen ramifications and even now a horde of lawyers and trained thugs are trying to resolve matters.

I needed a break. Fiji was in the news, the phone was ringing off the hook, so I skipped out last weekend and headed to the islands for some R ‘n' R and exploration – And cocktails.
My Fijian guide, a friend of friends, went by the name of Solo. I never knew or asked if it was a nickname or real, but he knew everyone and everyone called him that. He was a big man with a bigger smile who works fishing cruises for tourists catching tuna and game-fish. His arms were massive, thicker than my legs, and down on the marina I watched as he effortlessly hauled a yellow-fin, a huge brute of a fish, onto the weighing machine in front of a chubby Auckland advertising rep.
Solo had never left Fiji, but through his contact with tourists had developed an insatiable interest in seemingly random areas of world culture. Conversation ranged from Irish writer Samuel Beckett to American revolutionary Tom Paine while skirting anything that had much to do with Fijian politics. I got the impression that no one on a village level is much worried about the military regime or its spats with the New Zealand Government; the politics that affects their lives is more local.
We sat under palm trees that evening with a bottle of overproof Bounty rum, a nasty and dangerous brew that costs a third of the price of imported alternatives, and watched a neighbourhood dance troupe going through their routines as the sun sank over the Koro Sea. Solo was obviously proud of their efforts, though to my untrained eye it seemed like nothing more than a less vigorous, slightly toned-down equivalent of what you'd see at any international hotel in Rotorua.
The traditional music also sounds like a softer cousin of traditional Maori music, with a higher falsetto range more prominent in the vocal harmonies, and I was struck again by the fact that both musical styles use only major chords. I asked Solo about that and he was silent for a while, listening as the song drifted to a finish.
He eventually replied, 'Fijians are such happy people that we don't need music that sounds sad,” but I didn't really believe that and I don't think he did either.
I've long wondered about that feature of all South Pacific music – the absence of minor chords. To generalise simply, there are two basic groups when it comes to musical chords, major ones which have a bright happy sound and minor ones which come across as darker and sadder.
Most songs are a mixture of both, though as far as I'm aware pretty much all South Pacific music is exclusively major. Conversely, music from some cultures, Eastern European Gypsy music for example, is predominantly minor. Perhaps they are not as happy. Perhaps it's the weather. But I do find it odd, that in the Pacific half the musical possibilities have simply been left aside, either not discovered or deliberately avoided. These are musics where the chordal component was added later in the process; guitars, ukuleles and the like only coming into the mix further down the historic track, so everything was initially built around melody and rhythm, but the complete absence of half the musical canon still seems surprising.
But many strands of musical development and connectivity are unusual or inexplicable. For years I've been struck by the similarities between traditional Chinese music and traditional Irish music; though no one I've quizzed about it, has ever been able to connect the two cultures' musical development, unless St Patrick took in an unmentioned Chinese sojourn during his world voyage or Admiral Zheng He, who allegedly discovered America and New Zealand in the fifteenth century, stopped off in Dublin.
Chinese traditional song is also almost always exclusively major, though Irish music is not, but they share remarkably common ground in melody and rhythm. I often drop by the Eastern Ocean restaurant on Grey Street for yum cha where they play a couple of delightfully bizarre CDs of Chinese music. Hearing snatches in the background you could almost be listening to trad jigs and reels. Only on a quiet day, when you can distinguish the distinctive musical characteristics, the unusual slides and swoops on the erhu, a two-stringed precursor to the fiddle, do the differences become clear.