We are always trying to find Coco de Mers but, as a rule, they make prices too fabulous for us but hardly surprising for all the reasons they have been seen as marvellous throughout time. This one at least seemed within reach as a very exotic present indeed and one still touched with magic and mystery. The Coco de Mer is a mythical object, once thought to be the forbidden fruit of the tree of life, adrift from Eden, or the plaything of sea gods, grown on an extraordinary submarine tree and washed up eventually on some deserted shore. And why not? If you have seen mermaids and sea monsters, travelled to lands where ‘here be dragons’ and others where the fantastic baobab grows, apparently upside down, anything might be possible. No wonder the rare and bizarre fruit of the female Lodoicea Maldivica, the Coco de Mer, that grows only in two small areas on the Seychelles Islands, should become an object of wonder and fascination and the mysterious begging bowl or kashkul of the wandering mystics of the past. So much the better perhaps that its erotic shape when complete, like the lower half, belly, buttocks and thighs, of a female torso, might raise the eyebrows of more puritanical religious.