The speed of light

A young man in blue overalls with a white logo is climbing up and down the telegraph poles in our street, shifting his aluminium ladder methodically from one pole to the next, heading towards our house. His progress is relaxed but steady, which is the Gomeran way of doing things when everything’s going well. On the street lies a large coil of flimsy black cable which he is gradually unrolling to string along the tops of the poles, joining the confusion of other cables already there.

I pop my head out of the door now and again to see how he’s getting on. It occurs to me to wonder what the Spanish word is for those poles he’s climbing and I’m delighted to discover they are postes de telégrafo, telegraph poles just as in English, a name that goes back to the very beginnings of long-distance communication in the mid-nineteenth century, the old railway signalling system and the beep-bip Morse code. These poles are living history! They still serve the same purpose and are as close to nature as they always were, just slender trees with all their branches lopped off.

It takes the young technician over an hour to reach our house. He handles the coils of his cable very carefully because this is the latest and cleverest modern technology and therefore very delicate. It will carry light into our house and the light will carry signals at unimaginable speeds. We are about to get a fibra óptica connection to the internet. Optical fibre.

When we first came here some thirty years ago optical fibres were something scientists in white coats played with and wrote incomprehensible papers about. Now they’re everywhere, even here on this little Atlantic rock 350 kilometres off the coast of Western Sahara.

After he has threaded the cable through a hole in our wall the technician spends the best part of another hour connecting it to an enigmatic black box on the sideboard which reassuringly has the word FIBRA embossed on top. Peeling off layer after layer of protective sheathing from the end of the cable he eventually reaches a core no thicker than a hair from my head. ‘Increíble, tan finito!’, so thin, I comment, predictably. He shakes his head: there is still another layer to remove.

Light works in a different way from the old-fashioned electrical signals, of course. Thirty years ago you could see and hear communication taking place. During our annual winter escapes to La Gomera, Janine and I continued working with colleagues in the UK by the then-current technological miracle of fax machines, which chugged out their printed messages and diagrams line by line over the plain old telephone system, fondly known as POTS. One Christmas, two employees of an agency I worked with faxed me a photograph which began with three pairs of feet and over the next half hour worked its way up the legs and beyond to reveal three curvaceous young women in bikinis. The guys still laugh about that so it seems nobody ever made them pay the phone bill.

In our earliest visits we didn’t even have a POTS of our own. Most of the public phone boxes were limited to calls within the Canary Islands, or to mainland Spain if you didn’t mind the echoes, and the nearest telephone capable of transmitting speech across the Atlantic was in a cabinet a steep climb up the hill from our house. There was another in the centre of town, from where I phoned my Mum on our first Christmas Eve here surrounded by a street party and still wearing shorts from an afternoon on the beach.

Ah, those carefree days of youth, when everything was new and wonderful! But there is still new and wonderful to be found if you keep up with it. Finally the fibre man completes his optical connections with a dinky little oven to weld two fibres together and we are ready to see if it works.

The black box on the sideboard now sports four winking blue lights. Unfolding his portable computer the technician connects by wifi to the black box and then to his home base by the new cable. He measures the velocity at which signals travel outwards and inwards. They’re supposed to be the same and very fast, because this service is called banda ancha simétrica, symmetrical broadband. Frowning slightly, he reads the figures then announces that we’ve got around 100 megabits per second.

‘It’s supposed to be three hundred,’ I complain churlishly.

He nods a little sorrowfully. ‘You’d be very lucky to get that. Maybe if you were in town, near the exchange.’ It’s all the bends in the cable, he explains, they slow things down. You wouldn’t think light would be bothered by a few bends but it is, this is the unavoidable physics of optical fibres, which is why he has to be so careful not to introduce any outright kinks as he’s stringing the cable.

‘It’s fast,’ he assures us. ‘A hundred is fast.’ Of course it is, it’s ridiculously fast: 100 megabits per second is 100 million twinkles whizzing through the cable every second. At that rate we could download the whole of Walt Disney’s The tortoise and the hare in a matter of seconds.

Looking back, the old ways such as fax and the postal service now seem only quaint. It really is so much easier to do the same job by clicking a keyboard and sending a PDF file through the internet to arrive at its destination a moment later. There is, though - and the world has discovered this far too late - a huge downside to this efficiency. When you can exchange documents so quickly everyone expects you to work faster. Schedules shrink from weeks to days while the working day expands from eight hours to whatever it takes. Janine and I both suffered from this towards the end of our working careers.

Gomerans seem to resist such pressures fairly successfully. Office workers still go out to a cafe for their mid-morning desayuno (breakfast) of coffee and a snack. They still go out for a sociable lunch in the proper manner and there is a notable absence of little white vans delivering sandwiches to be eaten at desks. (How sad they are really, those damp, lonely sandwiches!) Symmetrical broadband is fine and dandy and everyone’s got it, but there’s much more to life than optical bits, even if they’re mega.

-------------- NOTES --------------

For anyone who really wants to know, the broadband part of this technology refers to the transmission of many different frequencies all at the same time, which greatly increases the carrying capacity of a fibre optic cable. Symmetrical refers to the transmission speeds being the same for sending and receiving.

Meanwhile, the poor old fax machine has joined the venerable ranks of ancient technology. To my knowledge the only people who still use them are lawyers, whose livelihood depends on keeping things as arcane and complicated as possible.

For many years they were run a close second by the UK’s National Health Service whose Supply Chain department was still providing fax machines to its users in February 2019, on the grounds of patient data security or some such excuse, but someone finally decided it was time to move on.

What noise annoys?

'Good morning! Do you live there, in the village?'

We were cycling homewards as he called to us, in English, from the open window of his car. In San Sebastián it's not unusual for a car to pause briefly to exchange a few words with a friend as they pass a bike or a pedestrian or another car, and drivers following behind will generally indulge them without hooting. (Don't try that in Madrid.) In this case there was no hurry because we were already out of town, on a quiet local road where only a couple of sheep showed any interest, looking up briefly from the dry riverbed with weeds dangling from their mouths.

The car driver was a young man in a hired Fiat Panda. We told him, yes, we lived in the village. His response took me aback: 'How do you stand the noise?'

'Noise?'

Our village is near the town but definitely rural, no lorries rumbling through or noisy markets or wild parties at three in the morning. It's a small, quiet, country village.

'I was hoping to find somewhere to rent here for a few weeks,' the car driver continued, 'but I've changed my mind. The dogs!'

'Ah, the dogs...'

'There's always a [beep] dog barking. Listen!' A high-pitched yelping in the distance obliged him with a demonstration, floating across the village from someone's flat roof. Occasionally a deeper, throatier bark responded from someone else's flat roof.

I've discussed Gomeran dogs in an earlier story (Try not to look scared, 16 June 2016). They have progressed from being either hunting dogs or guardians of goat sheds and garages to much closer integration into family life as pets. Everyone's got one, except us. Many live cossetted lives within the house, others are housed more traditionally on a flat roof or in a garden kennel made from wooden pallets and scrap metal.

'You get used to it,' I told the English visitor. 'We don't really notice them.'

He pulled a face, shrugged and drove away. A towny, I thought, slightly miffed. He'd be happier with the roar of a motorway or aircraft taking off over his head. In our earlier existence in England we lived briefly under one of the flight paths from Heathrow Airport, where Trident jets and Boeing 707s screamed overhead every couple of minutes, drowning conversation. Our next-door neighbour would stand in his garden shaking his fist at them, face red with rage. He bought a noise level meter so he could phone the airport to quote decibels if a plane exceeded the permitted limit.

What's a barking dog compared with that? Today, newly sensitised, I registered the welcoming barks as we arrived home and felt strangely protective of them. These creatures endure boring lives for most of the day and the arrival of two people by bicycle, opening a door, unloading shopping and perhaps greeting a neighbour is a big event. Why wouldn't they bark? Sometimes we see a black-tipped snout peeking above the wall of a flat roof, a pair of ears pricked up to capture any disturbance.

Everywhere's noisy, in one way or another. In our village there are also cats, of course, which sometimes yowl mournfully at night until I open the door and hiss at them. There is also a flock of hens nearby with their strutting rooster that cock-a-doodles throughout the day, sometimes causing English city-dwellers we're talking to on the phone to pause in astonishment: 'Is that a cock crowing?!' This particular cock's predecessor crowed all day and also throughout the night, but not for long. 'Crowing at dawn is fine,' its owner commented, 'but not at three in the morning. No, no, no. Into the roasting tin for you, my lad.' You'd think that the process of evolution would by now have eliminated such over-enthusiasm in roosters but evidently there's an occasional throwback.

Nobody, as far as I'm aware, got impatient with the parrot that lived in a cage on a neighbour's balcony and was able to bark like a dog, yowl like a cat and wail like an ambulance siren. This was straying a little far from nature, if you want to nitpick, but constantly entertaining. Unfortunately its owners moved away before I could teach it to whistle the Colonel Bogey march.

-------------- NOTES --------------

The title is a reference to that immortal childhood tongue-twister, What noise annoys a noisy oyster? A noisy noise annoys a noisy oyster...

So, what noise does a dog make? It goes woof, doesn't it? Woof woof! Or in the case of Snoopy in the Peanuts cartoon, arf arf!

Spanish dogs don't do either of those, they go guau, guau! In my unbiased judgement this is more authentic than either woof or arf. Pronounced correctly in Spanish it goes something like goo-OW! with a very gutteral 'g', right at the back of the throat, and is about as close as you could get onomatopoeically.

Spanish cats go miau which sounds much like the English meeow, so that's a draw, but for roosters I think English wins. A Spanish rooster is supposed to say quiquiriquí or kikirikí which sounds something like kee-kee-ree-KEE - and to be brutally frank, I've never heard one say that. Cock-a-doodle-DOO isn't very accurate either but - here's the key - it improves greatly if you slur it as though appallingly drunk. Try it, go on, it's fairly convincing. Cheers.

Colour it blue

Waiting briefly on the pavement at a zebra crossing - drivers are generally very helpful here, they often stop even before you're ready to cross - I was waylaid by a voice close beside me: 'Usted es el señor Drake, no?' You're Mr Drake, aren't you?

It was a man of similar age to me and clearly Spanish. I didn't know him, or at least I didn't recognise him, but this was not unusual in the strange era of Covid-19. A face mask, sunglasses and sombrero leave little more than a couple of ears for identification. While I searched for clues in his size, shape and general gait, I briefly fought a flashback image from Live and let die where an intelligence agent watching a New Orleans funeral procession casually asks the man next to him, 'Whose funeral is this?' to which the guy equally casually replies 'Yours' and produces a long, thin knife.

I admitted I was señor Drake. The man nodded and said he'd read an article about me in GomeraNoticias, an online news site, and recognised my hat from the photo. This I could understand: the photograph, which was specially commissioned for the article, captures me posing self-consciously in the park and the hat is by far the most interesting feature. It has a broad floppy brim, a chinstrap to prevent escape and a certain rumpled insouciance in its bearing, which its owner tries and fails to emulate.

We drew back from the kerb and chatted for a minute or two, with difficulty through our face masks and the noise of passing traffic, but I understood his reference to my professed love for the island which the article emphasised. 'Do you know there's a folk song about someone like you?' he asked. 'It goes: an Englishman came to La Gomera, saw the blue sky and didn't want to leave...'

My hat being recognised by a stranger was my first taste of fame. It only lasted a week and I never got chased by hordes of adoring females, but it was fun anyway. The article was one of a series about members of a local arts group, El Viaje Interior (The Interior Journey), that I was invited to join on the basis of this blog and the paperback book it spawned. During my week of glory the hat was recognised by one or two more strangers who glanced at me as though trying to remember something, by a few casual acquaintances who hadn't known I was a writer, and by some friends here or abroad to whom I forwarded links to the web page. And that was that: my hat and I walked off into the wings, upstaged by the next featured artist.

However, I was intrigued by that alleged song about Englishmen getting ensnared by the blue skies of La Gomera. To how many had it happened? I can think of only a handful. Even if you broaden it to 'foreigner', which would include one or two Scots, Germans, Dutch, Belgians, French and what-have-you, we don't seem numerous enough to merit immortalisation in a folk song. So I asked around among my network of informants – did they know of such a song?

Indeed they did, more or less. It turned out to be not specifically about La Gomera but the Canary Islands in general and celebrates not a man but a woman, described as a dreamer. It's a very short song, just a single verse, and seems to be a popular component of potpurri medleys by Canary folk groups. This is how it goes, translated literally:

To the Canaries came one day

An Englishwoman dreamer

Who wanted to see the sky

Always blue and at every hour

Always blue and at every hour

She wanted to see the sky...

(repeat)

It's not Bob Dylan standard but it has the great merit of being old, probably dating back to the late 19th or early 20th century when many well-to-do English took their holidays in the Canaries, mostly on the much larger island of Gran Canaria. The lady in question was probably a particularly enamoured London socialite who not only stayed in hotels in Gran Canaria but built one there as well.

Being also something of a dreamer (aren't we all?), this song got me thinking - was it the blue skies that drew us to La Gomera and caused us to tumble so hopelessly in love with it?

In part, I suppose. There's more to it of course - you don't just fall in love with someone's hair, or even their hat - but blue skies are certainly important. A blue sky is an enabler, it lifts the spirits, inspires people to get out there and do things. It helps shape the character of the people who live beneath it. I remember a fellow villager, a Gomeran, once commenting that he too hated the days when clouds covered the sky. They depressed him. It doesn't happen often, though, and as a visitor you'd be very unlucky to spend a whole day without even a glimpse of sunshine.

So, yes: we came to La Gomera, we saw the blue sky, and we wanted to keep on seeing it... Along with everything else we enjoy here of course, but let's keep it simple, a song is a song.

-------------- NOTES --------------

The song works a little better in Spanish than in English:

A Canarias vino un día

Una inglesa soñadora

Que ver el cielo quería

Siempre azul y a todas horas.

Siempre azul y a todas horas

Que ver el cielo quería.

As for the blue skies: a song can never hope to capture the magic, and even in a painting it's remarkably difficult to reproduce the joyous, uplifting quality of a blue sky. Artists frequently have a go at it here in La Gomera, with varying degrees of success.

It's much easier to capture the dismal grey skies of northern Europe. For example, during a brief flirtation with oil painting many years ago I learned that the first essential for painting a Lake District landscape is a plentiful supply of Payne's grey, which is a colour created by William Payne in the eighteenth century and now universally available in oils, acrylics and watercolours.

All you need to do is slap it generously across the upper half of your canvas then stand back and admire the authenticity of the effect, perhaps wearing a damp Barbour raincoat for the full experience. I never learned to like Payne's grey.

Instinct for survival

There are moments in life when the clock seems to pause as it waits for a life-changing decision. Some are benign: will this house be our new home? Shall we buy that little black-and-white puppy? Some are more perilous, inviting adventure and potential catastrophe.

Halfway down the slope, Janine hesitated for a moment, looked around her, gazed down into the valley far below, and sat on a rock. 'I'm not going any further.' A truly life-changing decision, in the sense of avoiding death.

Along with two other people - Tino, our Gomeran guide, and a friend from the village, an Englishwoman who had settled here long before we did - we had left the path above and were scrambling downhill through scrub and rocks. I was now faced with meekly following our friends further downwards or rebelling like my wife.

We were on a steep slope. I like my steep slopes to be of the variety that level out as they descend so if you slip you will glide gently to a halt further down, as on a children's playground slide. This slope was of the malevolent kind that gets steeper as it goes and would reward your slip with a free launch into space like a hang glider.

A short while ago we had climbed to the top of the ridge on a genuine pathway, wide and winding, which Tino informed us had in earlier days been a camino real, a royal path, a sort of motorway for donkeys. An elderly neighbour long ago told us his father was the local postman and used to deliver letters by donkey, climbing up this very path to reach the settlements further inland. As supplementary evidence our guide pointed to a large hollow in a rock face that looked like a rough-hewn horse trough, which is pretty much what it was, a water trough for donkeys.

Not far away he pointed out something that I would certainly have missed otherwise - a series of small hollows in the top of a low rock, each about the size of a saucer and not much deeper. If I'd noticed them at all I would have put them down to natural weathering, but no, they had been carved out many hundreds of years ago by the guanches, the pre-Columbian indigenous Gomerans. 'Probably to make offerings to the gods,' Tino told us. 'They would pour goat's milk from a bowl into the top hollow and it would flow along these channels to fill the others.' I'm sure he told us more about that but I've forgotten the details.

He also showed us, on an isolated boulder protruding from the high plain above the valley, some crudely scratched lines. They were clearly artificial, too geometric to be natural, another trace of the guanche culture. There are many more such inscriptions around Gomera and the other Canary islands but nobody knows what they were for, whether they served a useful purpose or ritual, or just meant 'Steve loves Monica'.

And then he offered to show us a guanche burial cave. There are lots of these around the island too, many of which originally contained mummies but those have long since been removed. The common feature of such burial caves is that they are almost completely inaccessible for anything other than a gecko. I can't imagine how the guanches managed to deposit a dead body in a hole halfway up a vertical cliff face.

However, Tino assured us that the chamber he had in mind was perfectly reachable on foot, with good boots and a steady nerve. This, from a Gomeran, is a statement to be considered carefully then rejected. Gomerans are astonishingly sure-footed, they're born to it, and have no fear at all of heights, but Janine and I at that time lived most of the year in the flat fenlands of East Anglia where our house stood on a hill one metre high.

I picked my way carefully down the increasingly steep hillside to try and catch up with our two friends. 'We're going to chicken out,' I called to them. 'Janine doesn't like heights.' Tino had already turned left to disappear behind a large boulder with nothing but blue sky behind it, occupied by a solitary kestrel hovering expectantly. 'And I'm not so keen either,' I confessed. Be true to oneself, fear is not something to ashamed of, it's a healthy animal instinct.

I turned around. Decision made. The clock started ticking again. Janine and I scrambled back to the top of the ridge and sat down to wait. Half an hour later we were still peering anxiously down the slope. 'Hope they're alright.' I tried to suppress the wild imaginings, those terrible 'what if...' images it's hard to quell when looking over a cliff.

We were seriously beginning to plan how best to call the emergency services (no mobile phones in those innocent early years) when we heard a long, warbling whistle from much further along the ridge. Our friends had traversed a gecko track along the side of the hill and climbed up by a different route. And in another perfect demonstration of guanche culture, Tino had alerted us by the famous Gomeran whistle, the silbo. I don't know what message he whistled at us but it was probably something rude.

-------------- NOTES --------------

The guanches remain strangely mysterious. The most likely theory is that they were originally Berber migrants from North Africa but there are competing theories even for that. Their rock inscriptions have never been definitively decoded. It's known that they worshipped the sun, moon and stars as well as various minor deities, and their sacred sites tend to be in high places that offer a closer approach to the sky. But I think that's about as far as I should go in this discussion, being a leading non-expert on guanches.

However, I'm on safer ground in mentioning the other absent protagonists of this story, the donkeys, because I have personal experience of them. There used to be six donkeys in our village, each of which would greet any passer-by with that hilarious in-out bellow that donkeys make, like a bull elephant trying to clear a hamburger stuck up its trunk. They've all gone now, and I miss them.

The bite of an angel

 Gossip, rumours and alternative facts of the ex-President Trump variety - these are a lot more fun than factual truth and will spread rapidly through any small community.

One morning last December we went for our usual morning swim from a beach in San Sebastián, where the sea had lost its summer warmth but was still fine at around 20 degrees. Not an ideal temperature for floating around lazily on inflatable plastic swans but that’s not what we do.

Pause for reflection: I’ve never actually owned an inflatable plastic swan. Nor even a bright green alligator. In those hazy, distant days of childhood in England we used old, patched inner tubes from car tyres, supplied mysteriously by my grandfather. But no, the point of our daily swim now is to keep fit. Muscle tone, bone strength, lung capacity, cardiovascular health… Regularly immersing your head in cold water can even stave off the dreaded Alzheimer’s, I’ve read somewhere. I think. Can’t remember where.

So it was a little disturbing when someone passed on the gossip, rumour or alternative fact that a swimmer that very same morning, at that very same beach, had been bitten by a shark. This was so obviously ridiculous that it had to be a joke. Look, this isn’t Bondi Beach or Hawaii, this is La Gomera! We don’t do sharks.

We do have fish in the bay. People with black neoprene wetsuits, snorkels and goggles swim out to observe them, especially further from the shore where there’s a line of sunken rocks designed to protect the beach from rough seas or Russian mini-submarines. Sometimes we see a shoal of tiny fish as we enter the water. Sometimes we see a larger fish leaping into the air with its tail wagging, perhaps to escape from an even bigger one, or just for the joy of being a fish. Occasionally I detect a fishy smell in a patch of water as I swim through, suggesting that something has eaten something else and left a few bits and pieces behind. This is real life in the marine environment and a hopeful sign that not everything out there has died from ingesting plastic bags. But sharks! Oh, come on…

That same evening we read in one of the island’s online newsletters that the town council had closed all the beaches, cordoned them off with red-and-white striped tape, because someone had been bitten by a shark. Oof!

Arturo in his café, at coffee time the next morning: yes, it was true. Bitten by a shark. She trod on it.

Well, at least we do things differently here. I had never heard of anyone treading on a shark, not even an Australian. Details emerged gradually from Arturo and others. The victim was a long-term resident here, a woman who swam regularly, and she’d trodden on the shark as she was walking into the water. The good news was that this was not the Bondi Beach kind of shark that takes a large mouthful from your leg then backs away to await results, this was something most people wouldn’t recognise as a shark at all. It’s called a tiburón angelote, angelshark, and is similar in shape to the little angelfish that people buy for their tropical aquaria, with a broad, flat body. An ambush hunter, its mottled brown colour enables it to lie unseen on the seabed until its luckless prey swims over, when it springs up, grabs it with double rows of needle-sharp teeth then sucks the whole thing in like an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.

This particular angelshark had not hoovered up Helga in her entirety, it had merely fastened its jaws around her thigh and tried hard enough for her to feel the suction, but she’s a lot bigger than an angelshark and quickly beat it off. She thinks that she stepped on it without realising as she was wading into the sea, quite far out, and it began to swim away but then she launched herself into an energetic crawl and it thought she was attacking it, so naturally it retaliated. Not the fish’s fault.

I thought it was very understanding of her to see it from the creature’s point of view in this way, but then, foreigners who choose to live in La Gomera are of course extraordinarily wise and understanding people. The Gomerans themselves dismissed the event as being of little consequence and the beaches opened again the next day, once the identity of the perpetrator had been established. The angelote is not really a shark in the everyday sense of the word and they will never attack as long as you don’t tread on them. ‘Look,’ said Miguel, another daily swimmer, ‘if you tread on a dog’s tail, what’s it going to do?’

We’ve never seen an angelshark in more than thirty years of living here. Normally they hunt much further out from the shore, where non-expert snorkellers may mistake them for rays because they look much the same, but we have now taken to splashing more enthusiastically as we walk into the water, just in case. Helga has two rows of little toothmarks on her thigh to boast about and a good story to tell her future grandchildren, who won’t believe her. Bitten by an angel?! Oh, granny...

-------------- NOTES --------------

Our angelshark is of the species squatina squatina but there are many more in the same genus, squatina. They’re found over large areas of the globe, including the coasts of Britain, but this one is classified as an endangered species. They are fished commercially for food, and overfished as is normal practice these days, but catches are now regulated to try and conserve them.

Scrapings and crashings

Early in the morning, in the dark hours before dawn when all sensible people are still asleep, we woke to the deep rumble of a big engine somewhere very close. And the clanking of heavy machinery, the scraping of metal against stone, the crash of rocks tumbling.

‘It’s a pala,’ said J, sitting up. A pala is a spade or a shovel but in this part of the world it’s also a mechanical digger, an excavator. Palas come in various sizes but they are always yellow and they are always Japanese.

Beep-beep-beep! - reversing to attack from a different angle. The cacophony of sounds made by a pala is unmistakeable. It’s not unusual to hear one working early in the morning but usually they’re down in the valley. The council sends them to clear the access road after rain has loosened rocks from the slopes. Occasionally a pala will spend a day or more levelling the dry river bed to form a temporary car park for a village fiesta, which is one of its more exciting tasks.

We also hear them working further away, across the valley or up the hill. Palas have multiple uses depending on what’s fixed to the end of their big yellow elbow, from cutting narrow trenches in roads to re-profiling the sand on the beaches or breaking up large rocks into smaller ones. As a friend once remarked, Gomera wouldn’t be Gomera without the palas.

Palas are also heavily involved in tearing down old buildings, but not usually this close to our house. In the clear air of early morning it sounded like an army demolition team clearing our neighbours’ homes out of the way in order to reach us – there they are, they won’t get away! Had we forgotten to pay this year’s Property Tax? Still in my pyjamas I peered out of the back door. I could see a monstrous yellow elbow rising and falling, a really big one. It was destroying Vicente’s old farm cottage, tugging rocks from the top of its walls. The roof was already gone.

We knew this was going to happen but it was still shocking to watch. This was part of my life being torn down. We often used to chat to Vicente in our early years when we came only for the winter months and he always greeted us on arrival with the same question: ‘When are you going home?’ What he really meant, I hope, was ‘How long are you staying?’ This is the kind of innocent misunderstanding that can cause people to post vitriolic reviews about their holiday hotel after a brief exchange with a cleaner.

Vicente was gone now and his widow had moved away to live with their daughter. The family had decided to clear the land and build a new house, perhaps two. I showed one of his sons a photograph I took years ago of Vicente sitting on a bucket surrounded by his chickens and turkeys and goats, laughing happily at the camera. His son smiled at the photo and told me he’d already got a copy, found among his dad’s possessions.

Watching the pala biting chunks out of the building that used to be the goatshed, then later razing the old house itself, I couldn’t help feeling sad. A treacherous little voice inside my head was playing the role of concerned foreigner poking his nose in where it didn’t belong – cultural vandalism! History being destroyed before our very eyes! Someone could have turned that into a charming old cottage! – but I didn’t listen. I’d got over all that many years ago when, talking to another neighbour, he told us with great pride that there were now only five old cottages left in the village. All those humble old hovels were disappearing one by one to be replaced by smart, modern buildings with proper kitchens and bathrooms. I’d decided he was right.

On the one hand it seemed such as shame, but the reality is that an old house like Vicente’s would be a nightmare - and very expensive - to try and update into anything approaching modern standards. Traditional cottages typically had no windows and only a single, low door which you left open if you wanted to let in a little light. Smoke from your fire exited through the gaps between the roof tiles. The walls were nearly a metre thick, put together stone by stone with nothing but gravity to hold them together. Try putting a window into a wall like that. A typical cottage comprised a single room with a flimsy divider to separate the sleeping space from the rest, in which heroic parents would raise five or ten children. You can understand why those children might want to do things differently.

The sound of a pala, in other words, is the sound of progress. This is not something to be regretted, it’s to be welcomed as not only inevitable but good!

Up to a certain point, of course. The rash of air conditioning fans spreading across walls here, as in the rest of the world, is not good at all, it’s bad, bad, bad. Climate change! There are so many better ways to…

Sorry?

Okay, you’re right. Stick with the message. Progress is good. Except…

Why the silence?

A fair question. There has been a gap of three months between the latest story (Scrapings and crashings) and the previous one on 3 September. Normally I’d been producing one every five or six weeks. What happened? Lazy slob…

Well, Covid-19 for a start. Although this island has faired better than many other places, we did have our lockdown and we still wear our masks everywhere. There’s much less happening than usual, much less life in the town and our village. It puts a damper on things.

The other excuse is that my paperback collection of stories from this blog (available on Amazon) has taken on a life of its own. It got me invited to join a local arts group which is planning an exhibition early next year, with a splendid catalogue for which I contributed a couple of stories.

Also it seems that Spanish people enjoy the book, which I’m delighted about, but of course they have to understand English so I’m now going to produce a Spanish version. I’m translating the stories myself (pause for disbelieving guffaws of laughter - no, wait, wait) with a Spanish native speaker on board to turn my nearly-Spanish text into the real thing.

All this has taken up a lot of my spare time and… well yes, it's a lame apology. Must try harder.

A few website links

Paperback Do they still whistle? on Amazon UK:

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B085HRZ4CF/

(on Amazon websites for other countries, just search for the book title)

Article about me (in Spanish) in local online newsletter:

www.gomeranoticias.com/2020/11/20/peter-drake-la-mirada-de-un-ingles-en-la-gomera/

Facebook page for the arts group El Viaje Interior:

www.facebook.com/El-viaje-interior-111119467291640/