Flowers, but where's the fish?

The waiter wandered over. 'Está bueno, is it good?'

It's fine, we assured him. A starter dish of brandada de bacalao, which Janine and I were sharing. Fortunately the brandada came packaged in two small parcels of filo pastry, easy to share without mess, nestling cosily on a bed of mushroom sauce. Boletus sauce actually, because this was a smart restaurant, and there were flower petals sprinkled over the top of the little parcels.

This is not our usual kind of food and I had no idea what a brandada was, but swift online research revealed that we were eating salt cod mashed with olive oil, garlic and probably a few other things. It's a favourite dish across the north of Spain and open to interpretation. We were celebrating the anniversary of our arrival on La Gomera as permanent residents, a huge event in our lives, so it seemed right to indulge in something special.

'I can hardly taste the fish, though,' Janine commented after the waiter had floated away.

'No, it's…. mild. Subtle.'

I dipped my fork into the mushroom sauce, just on its own. Mild. Subtle. I thought I could detect cinnamon, perhaps. Or was it cumin?

Subtlety in flavour is, of course, an indication of an expert chef who doesn't try to hammer your palate with taste explosions. Well, some of them do that. This one didn't.

After finishing my filo pastry parcel I wiped out the remaining sauce from the dish with a piece of bread roll, which had marginally more flavour than the mushroom sauce. Here was a demonstration, perhaps, that I can no longer consider myself young. It's said that as the years march on we tend to prefer stronger flavours.

Anyway, prising open a little packet of filo pastry had been fun, like opening a mystery present. For the main dish we ordered a dish of stuffed peppers - those tasty, tangy little red peppers called pimiento de piquillo, in this case filled with spinach and prawns and baked with a gratin of cheese. I was fairly sure this was going to be a commercial frozen product, because they always are. Which busy cook would want to waste time stuffing delicate little peppers when you can buy something perfectly serviceable from the local frozen food shop? But no, I was wrong, these peppers were clearly home-stuffed with home-made stuffing.

'Está bueno?' The waiter again, hovering.

'It's good,' I told him. 'But I can't taste the prawns.' Ah, no, the waiter explained, this was intentional. The chef puts the prawns, spinach and other ingredients into a bowl and mashes them together. He demonstrated a fierce pummelling with one fist mashing the other. 'The flavours mix together.'

Okay.

In our later assessment over coffee we decided that we were simple folk with a preference for simple foods. Our favourite supper at home is fried eggs on a plate of julienne potatoes, with plain, ordinary, unstuffed red peppers and lightly cooked peas. The go-to restaurant meal (apart from pizza) is a lovely white fish called cherne, grilled to perfection but fancied up with nothing more than the typical Canary dressing called mojo. With chips and a little salad.

Peasants.

But by this measure, so is one of the UK's most celebrated celebrity chefs, Rick Stein, who launched an extensive portfolio of successful restaurants and has starred in numerous cookery series in travelogue style on BBC television. We have some of his DVDs and I love watching him trying to be enthusiastic about an artistic arrangement of tiny morsels at the centre of an otherwise empty plate. He can't do it. But see him tackling a simple dish of plain, hearty food and you see a happy man.

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

The restaurant menu referred to the light and crispy brandada packet as a bric, spelt without a k but pronounced almost like the English word, an interesting example of language transfer designed to confuse the foreigner.

Cherne is a very popular fish in the Canaries but its English name, Atlantic wreckfish, doesn't add much to its appeal. It's chunky but with a mild flavour and very few bones when filleted, often none at all.

The mojo sauce served with cherne (and almost anything else, if you want) comes in two flavours, as I've mentioned in previous stories. Both are based on olive oil and garlic, along with coriander for the green one or red pepper and chilli for the spicier red. The green mojo verde is recommended for the fish and the red mojo picante for the accompanying chips or boiled potatoes, but really it's up to you.

Where the Jumblies live

Far and few, far and few

Are the lands where the Jumblies live…

Edward Lear

'One day,' I remarked to the taxi driver, 'they'll solve this problem.' I try to engage taxi drivers, they're often chatty and enlightening, unless they're weary of foreigners trying to engage them. Some just grunt.

This one was somewhere in mid-range. He laughed scornfully and thumped his steering wheel. 'Nunca!' Never.

'They're talking about it this very week,' I insisted. 'The island council, the town council, the presidents of the other islands…'

'They're always talking about it. They've been talking about it for twenty years. Nothing ever happens.'

Sadly, this was undeniable. We were sitting in a long queue of cars, nudging slowly forwards as holidaymakers strolled past us on the pavements, licking ice creams. This is the normal experience for Gomerans disembarking from a ferry at Los Cristianos in Tenerife. Two lanes of traffic leaving the port converge with other roads at a small roundabout, where we all get shoehorned into a narrow street lined with parked cars, bars, restaurants, sex shops, bike hire centres and emergency treatment clinics for overwrought taxi drivers.

Actually the taxistas handle it better than I do, because they have no choice if they want to continue being a taxi driver. Various solutions have been suggested over the years, most of them showcased yet again in a current spate of high-level angst. The most radical idea is to ditch Los Cristianos altogether, cede it to the sunseekers and their all-day English breakfasts, trips around the bay and cocktails at sunset while we serious travellers sail into a brand new ferry port further along the coast.

There isn't one yet, of course, but there is a proposed location near a small coastal development called Fonsalía, supported by detailed plans of a multi-purpose ferry, leisure and fishing port. Looks nice in the artist's impression. Big, though. Ambitious.

So what did our taxi driver think about that?

In a word: 'Loco!' Crazy. It would add more than 20 kilometres to a trip to the airport or the capital, Santa Cruz, which is already an hour's drive away. And building a new port would take many, many years.

'But,' added the driver darkly, 'you can understand why some people would like the idea.' He did that Spanish gesture of rubbing finger and thumb together: banknotes! Well, yes, a major building project would offer many desirable deals and contracts, as critics with a suspicious nature have pointed out. I don't know and frankly 'Yo no me meto' as they say here, I'm not getting into that. More concerning is that it would open another busy sea route through an important marine protected area along the western coast of Tenerife.

All of which illustrates one of the penalties we Gomerans pay for our doble insularidad, double insularity. The first insularity is common to all the Canary Islands. We are ultraperiférico, ultrapheripheral - a delightful word which is also a technical term within the European community for regions that are an integral part of a particular nation but located far from the rest of it.

The double insularity is that to reach Gomera you not only have to cross two thousand kilometres of ocean from the rest of Europe to land in Tenerife, you then face another crossing by ocean or air before arriving knackered at your destination. It has cost you extra time and money, two factors that are also tiresome if you're a crate of Seville oranges or a new car.

It's not all bad. For one thing, some of the extra costs are subsidised (see Notes, below). And our doble insularidad means that visitors who come to La Gomera haven't just booked a last-minute holiday in any old place as long as it's sunny, they've made a positive choice to visit this very special island.

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

Far and few are the Spanish Jumblies, found only in two island clusters, but the Mediterranean Balearic Islands are far closer to home than the Canaries.

The Spanish state subsidises personal and business travel between the islands through the medium of the Canary Islands' autonomous government, registered residents paying just a quarter of the normal ferry fare. Also welcome are the lower rates of VAT applied in the Canaries, except that this creates complications for traders. Sometimes it's enough to put them off altogether:

'This item cannot be sent to the address you have specified. Please choose a different address.'

How daft can you get? I'd rather they just said honestly, 'Nah, sorry mate, not worth the hassle.'

Yes please

 Having lived for so long among Spanish people, most of whom are dark rather than fair, with hair ranging from deep copper to jet black, to me the British now look drained of colour. They stand out as being different. I'm one of them, of course, along with Janine, which is why we could never be taken for genuine Gomerans.

But there's another striking difference about the Brits. Here's an example. Picture four visitors - two middle-aged wives and husbands - sitting at a table outside a cafe and ordering drinks from a waitress. (In English, naturally - almost none speak any Spanish, which is not their fault.)

Wife 1: 'I'd like a white wine, please.'

Wife 2: 'Me too, I'll have a wine as well, please.'

Husband 1: 'A beer, please. Lager.'

Waitress: 'Grande?' Big? She mimes a phantom beer mug with her hands above and below it.

Husband 1: 'Yes please! Big!' He mimes a beer mug the size of a bucket. The waitress smiles at this little joke she sees many times a day when there's a cruise ship in the port.

Husband 2: 'Same for me, please. Beer. Big!'

Now let's imagine this group transmuted into an equivalent set of Gomerans. The interaction would be briefer (in Spanish of course, but translated here into English):

Wife 1: 'For me, a white wine.' 

Wife 2: 'Yes, the same.'

Husband 1: 'A glass of beer.'

Husband 2: 'Me too.'

Generally, Gomerans don't go for a big mug of beer, more likely a glass from the keg or a bottle. But the point is, they are unlikely to add any 'pleases' in this situation.

It can sound rude to British ears, but as I see it, they're right. 'Please' being short for 'If it pleases you' - why should a waitress not be pleased that someone's asking for something she's employed to sell them? This is a simple exchange of information: you want to know what I want to drink, so I'll tell you.

Even more likely to sound rude to a visiting Brit, and possibly cause offence, is what happens when it's time to pay the bill.

Wife 1 waves a hand towards the waitress, who comes over. 'We'd like the bill, please.'

The waitress nods, goes into the cafe, emerges with the printed bill on a little dish and plonks it on the table.

Wife 1: 'Thank you!'

The waitress nods, goes away, returns a little later to retrieve the dish which now contains a banknote. She takes it away and returns with the change.

Wife 1: 'Thank you!'

It's entirely possible that the waitress, if she's busy, won't bother with this 'thank you' stuff at all, although they are usually aware that foreigners seem to need it.

In a non-touristy bar or cafe you'll rarely hear any please or thank you exchanged. Ordering, obtaining and paying for food or drink are simple transactions, to everyone's benefit. Nobody's doing a favour.

Even after all these years, I still can't watch a cup of coffee arriving at my table without saying gracias or some substitute like perfecto. But I'm quite proud that I can now buy things without crawling. For example, a simple purchase conducted in the panadería, the baker's:

'Have you got wholemeal bread with seeds?'

'Yes.'

'Good, give me two.'

The assistant puts two loaves in a bag then says 'One fifty,' the cost in euros, takes the money without saying a word and puts it in the till. Next customer…

And the strange thing is, this dialogue sounds absolutely fine and normal in its original Spanish but translated into English it looks unpleasantly blunt. Definitely worth a blast of invective on Tripadvisor, although in this case the customer was just as rude as the shopkeeper.

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

So, is this to say that the Spanish just don't use please or thank you unless pushed or shamed into it?!!

No, no, not at all. The words exist and are much used, but only when merited, not just as a kind of verbal tic when they're not really needed.

There's also a common fudge where someone almost, but not quite, feels they should add please to a request - they shorten por favor to a brief porfa thrown out casually.

End of lesson. And thank you for reading it.

Sign here

An enthusiastic knocking on the front door rouses him from a Friday afternoon siesta. He staggers to the door, still half asleep, heart already sinking. He knows who this is.

Opening the door, he is greeted by a young and smiling postwoman. A knock at the door on a Friday afternoon is nearly always a postal delivery, which can be good news of course - a parcel, the new toy he ordered a couple of weeks ago! - but is much more likely to be a carta certificada. A registered letter. These are always bad news.

The postie points to his name on the registered letter, which is correct although the address is a version long superseded, dating back to when the village was smaller and nobody really needed an address because everyone knew where everyone lived. She hands him the letter, keys his Spanish identification number into her mobile device as he dictates it, then gets him to sign the tiny screen.

There is a special stylus for doing this but he has never met a post person who hasn't already lost theirs, so he signs with a fingertip, producing an unidentifiable squiggle. That's okay because the Spanish always sign with an unidentifiable squiggle anyway.

The carta certificada turns out to be entirely typical of its species. Somewhere among several pages of dense legalese he discovers an accusation that he owes San Sebastián's Ayuntamiento, the town council, the sum of 60.79 euros. The claim seems to be that around three years ago he missed a payment for the basura, the domestic rubbish collection service.

His wife tries to get hold of the documents as he stomps around the room waving them in the air and complaining loudly. What nonsense! All their council-supplied services are paid automatically from the bank account, and always have been. Adding fuel to his indignation is that the sum includes - 'Look at this!' he rants - a 10% fine for late payment.

That night, during a wakeful session at four in the morning, he mulls over the demand again and slowly, reluctantly, realises that perhaps it might be justified. The alleged missing payment was around the date when they moved their bank account from a global superbank to a much smaller local one. Changing your bank is made easy by law, the new bank simply takes over your routine payments in and out. But between closing the old account and activating the new one there could have been a short hiatus where, if the Ayuntamiento solicited a payment just at that moment, it might have fallen through the gap.

Later that morning he checks his records. This is the kind of occasion, he justifies to his wife, defensively, when it's useful that he keeps records of everything on the computer. Unfortunately his records leave no doubt.

'Three years ago!' he storms, still trying to be angry. 'Why didn't they notice it at the time?'

Secretly though, one part of his brain, the more rational set of neurons, is quite impressed. Someone or something has been rummaging through the council's accounts for the past four years (the fiscal watershed) in search of remnants of lost income. He noticed that the postwoman was holding not just his registered letter but several others in the same kind of envelope.

The rest of his neurons switch into despair mode. This kind of problem inevitably generates no end of grief and wasted time no matter how you try to deal with it. A friend, trying to achieve a simple transaction involved in the sale of his house, was driven close to madness by the bureaucratic convolutions. A sympathetic official in the council offices, fluent in English, commented simply 'Welcome to Spain'.

Anyway, there is no escaping the need to sort this out. Manos a la obra they decide, let's get on with the job. That same morning they begin their odyssey at the source, the Ayuntamiento building on the town's main square, where the helpful young woman at the reception desk explains that, no, they can't pay there, they have to go to the Agencia Tributaria elsewhere in town. The tax office.

Fine, they know where to find that - you can't live in Spain for long without knowing where to find the tax office. In the Agencia Tributaria he shows the letter to the security guard, who also acts as a friendly guide for bureaucratically bewildered visitors. As he launches into an explanation of the problem the security man holds up a hand: stop! This is not the place they need to be. There is a different Agencia Tributaria office that deals with unpaid basura fees. He describes where it is, just around the corner. This is a mercifully compact town.

They find the office without difficulty, a small doorway next to a cafe. At the service desk, protected by a glass screen from covid-19 and irate citizens, a cheerful lady listens politely, scans the sheaf of documents and nods understandingly, clearly recognising them. They've come to the right place.

'We accept that we owe the money,' he explains, 'no problem there, but the postal address on the envelope is out of date by several decades and the address on all the documents is even more wrong. We don't live up on the hill above San Sebastián, we live in a village nearby. This is the address of some other person entirely.'

He has visions of paying someone else's basura debt instead of theirs, thereby unleashing a future stream of increasingly threatening demands from which there will be no escape because he is now two different people. 'We're two different people,' he emphasises, but the assistant seems unfazed. There is a form for this situation. There's a form for everything. She pushes a Change of Address form across the counter.

'But we haven't changed our address. We've lived in the same house for ever, and this address isn't it! The bank is going to be confused if…'

He pauses then gives up, realising that he's wasting his breath. There is only one form for putting an address to rights, the assistant tells him, and this is it. 'Sign here.'

He signs. She makes a photocopy, stamps it, signs it with an unidentifiable Spanish squiggle and passes it across the counter along with another form to take to the bank.

In their bank, two of the attendants are already occupied but the ridiculously young branch manager waves them over to his desk. There is absolutely no problem about making the payment, he assures them, no problem about the address being incorrect, no problem about anything.

All over in moments. Our hero wishes the manager a happy Carnaval because that's coming up the following week and the manager laughs as he ushers them to the door.

Over a restorative coffee they retrace the stages of their journey. There is a kind of glow around them now, an aura of success achieved in the face of difficulties. Reviewed objectively it has been almost - is this possible? - almost enjoyable. Nobody got angry or dismissive - stupid foreigners! - or imposed impossible hoops and hurdles. On the contrary, everyone was smilingly helpful and understanding. But then, they've been living with Spanish burocracia all their lives, unless they're from Cuba or Venezuela where it's even worse.

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

Thinking about this incident called to mind that doom-laden quotation, The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. There are various versions and they all make me shiver.

However, full marks to our Ayuntamiento for discovering this discrepancy in their finances, even if it took a while to get there.

Not too many marks for the impenetrable documentation that accompanied the demand, but that's normal throughout Spain's administrative functions. It used to be the same in Britain before the highly successful Plain English Campaign transformed things, but I'm not aware of anything similar here, a Campaña por el Español Sencillo.

Dense legalistic language is of a piece with the bureaucratic processes involved in anything official. I'm not playing the whingeing foreigner here, Spanish people themselves are entirely aware of how bad it is. There's a hilarious video on YouTube called Funcionario Público, Civil Servant:

https://youtu.be/NmXCmmjJQ_c (or just search for the title)

But credit where it's due: Spain, along with most of Europe, has a remarkably simple system for identifying its citizens. You have a number, and that's it. For Spanish citizens it's referred to as the DNI (Documento Nacional de Identidad) or, specifically for financial stuff, the NIF (Número de Identidad Fiscal), but the number is the same. There's only one version of you.

Foreign residents get a similar number, the NIE (Número de Identificación Extranjero). This is extraordinarily useful. You can apply for a card bearing your NIE along with your photo and signature and it serves to confirm your identity for just about anything you need to do in everyday life, from buying a new pair of shoes with a credit card to catching a ferry, where the card serves as a ticket.

There is nothing of the police state about this card, you are not obliged to carry it, but everyone keeps it in their purse or wallet anyway because it's so handy.

Cats and dogs

They caught her in the very act. One foot on the pavement, the other still swinging over the lowest part of the fence as she was making her escape.

Unfortunately they weren't our local police, who perhaps might have been more understanding, but two from a team of Spanish national police who had been stationed here to help enforce the rules. We were all grateful for this - except for Helga, the fence climber - because the covid-19 pandemic was something new and frightening in our lives.

The long weeks of home confinement were over by that time but severe restrictions remained, especially in relation to social gatherings, so San Sebastián's central park was out of bounds, its gates closed and locked. We met Helga shortly after the police released her that morning. She was understandably shaky, not having been nabbed by the police before, and angry because they had issued her with an on-the-spot fine for contravening the pandemic regulations. Three hundred euros was devastating for someone who doesn't have much spare cash. And if she didn't pay up within two weeks it would double.

So why did she do it? Why climb into the forbidden park over the fence? She had tried to explain to the police officers but her limited Spanish didn't prove sufficiently persuasive. 'La ley es la ley, señora', the law is the law. Well yes, but… what she was doing was to return a feral cat to its usual home in the park. Helga is a volunteer supporter of a group called ProAnimal Gomera that, among other activities, captures stray cats and takes them to a helpful vet to be neutered. It's a gentler approach to population control than culling and, from the cats' point of view, not ideal but probably the solution they'd prefer if given a choice.

Cats have always been a problem if you choose to look at it that way. It's really more of a problem for the cats than for us because they live their own lives quietly (except at night) in the park or on the rocks by the sea, but the benefactors who supply them with food tend to come and go unreliably. One elderly couple used to feed them daily with nothing but the best, visiting the supermarket to buy premium fish which they dispensed on silver platters with a choice of sauces, fresh bread and finger bowls.

They also fed the pigeons, scattering corn for the squabbling hordes that gathered twice a day at the appointed times (how do pigeons do that?). That all came to a sad end when the couple passed away. Other kind souls now fill the gap to some extent but much less dependably, sometimes being away, sometimes overlapping with each other so the cats get fed several meals simultaneously. The pigeons do better because there are always plenty of tidbits blowing around the cafe tables.

And what about the dogs? Are there no feral dogs as well? Yes there are, but far fewer and very seldom in town. There is an official dog-catcher service but in practice, any stray dog foolish enough to turn up in San Sebastián is likely to get caught by a local lady who used to worry about cats but now specialises in dogs. She takes them home and walks them daily in groups of five or six at a time, whether they want to or not. This also serves to discourage local dog owners from allowing their pooch to roam around on its own (which is illegal) because it risks finding itself collared, roped and trotting among the herd twice a day.

You couldn't do that with cats, could you? They'd tear each other to pieces along with their captor. It's probably significant - standing back for a moment to view life philosophically - that although there are now many more dogs than cats in La Gomera, they are nearly all owned and living in a cosy home with the rest of the family. It's the cats who choose to run wild, free and aloof. Which you either find admirable or not, a known way of dividing the human species into two distinct camps.

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

As always, the arrow of time flies onwards and things change. The ProAnimal Gomera group, although they operate throughout the island, now have a permanent base on the outskirts of San Sebastián where stray animals can be cared for and, if they're lucky, assigned to a new home.

This has made our local dog-snatcher lady increasingly redundant and she is currently reduced to a single ageing mongrel with arthritis. They seem happy together and he has the benefit of not being in competition with any of the other riff-raff.

There are also a decreasing number of cats wandering around because as the older ones pass into their peaceful eternity they now leave no kittens to carry on the struggle.

Sorry, I shouldn't have mentioned kittens, that invites the involuntary 'Aaah, what a shame…'

Contact details for ProAnimal Gomera

Post

ProAnimal Gomera, Calle de Las Tomateras, s/n

Antigua Escuela Taller

San Sebastián de La Gomera, 38800

Web

https://www.proanimalgomera.com

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/proanimalgomera

Email

proanimalgomera@gmail.com

Phone

+34 621 273 777

The French yacht

This story dates back to earlier times in La Gomera. It was brought to mind by… Well, let's tell the story first.

------------------------------

During a brief pause, I turned to the beefy young local in swim shorts behind me. 'Why exactly are we pulling this?'

He shrugged, grinning. Pulling on a long rope that stretches from the beach into the sea is fun. There was resistance but nothing obvious out there to cause it.

'Vale, vamos!' – Right, let's go! A young man with blonde curly hair and an accent definitely not Spanish conveyed a reassuring sense of purpose. He was standing to one side rather than pulling on the rope, a sure sign of leadership. We began to heave again, about a dozen of us working more-or-less in unison.

Higher up the beach behind us a sailing yacht sat forlornly propped on piles of old rubber tyres, leaning sideways as though recalling southerly wind in better days. Something like 10 metres in length, it was the kind of craft in which intrepid pensioners sail single-handed around the globe or weekenders take the kids for a spin off the Isle of Wight.

It belonged, I already knew, to two young French lads, one of whom was the curly-haired overseer of the rope team. His name was Michel. His friend Jean-Paul was smaller, darker and more typically Gallic, with a narrow nose and a wry grin. We first encountered them a few days earlier walking around their stranded yacht like two toddlers wondering what was wrong with Mum.

'Qué pasó?', what happened, we asked them with Gomeran directness.

Michel responded in English. They had sailed into San Sebastián harbour the previous evening and moored to a buoy in the harbour. After rowing ashore in their dinghy to buy provisions and have supper, they returned to their boat and eventually went to bed.

'It was very windy last night, you know?' Michel said. Yes, we'd heard it. Winds can get very gusty in the complex weather systems that drift here from across the Atlantic. Michel had woken in the early morning sensing unexpected movement, poked his head outside and found they were being blown towards the beach, towing the mooring buoy behind them. It had come loose from the sea bed.

'We only had a couple of minutes to do anything. I tried to start the engine but the battery was flat.'

'It's buggered,' contributed Jean-Paul helpfully.

They had borrowed the yacht from Michel's father, who should have been here on the beach to see what happens when you let two young men sail unsupervised from Sète and head off into adventure. Jean-Paul was on a rest break from his day job as a waiter and night job as the drummer in a rock band. I'm not sure what Michel's job was, but I suspect it was more of an occupation than a job. They were on a let's-see-what-happens holiday, they told us. On their way to the Canaries they had called into a port somewhere on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Hmm.

The boat was damaged by its unintended encounter with the beach but not too seriously. Its traditional timber hull had sprung a plank but they had now managed to bang it back into place and squeeze in enough filler to keep out the sea, they hoped, while they sailed around the south coast of La Gomera to the port of Santiago, where there was a boatyard with a crane and experts to effect a more reliable repair.

First, however, they had to get the thing back into the sea. Which is why we were all pulling on this rope. Within a few minutes the objective was revealed: our rope was attached to a thicker and tougher one which we now hauled onto the sand. A hawser, the kind of rope they use for mooring ferries to wharfside bollards.

At the far end of this hawser, out in the bay, was an ugly but utilitarian vessel that transported people and equipment to a settlement of dubious repute (in those days) just around the coast.

The two French lads, with their support team of rope pullers and an increasing number of others, attached the hawser to a cat's cradle of ropes wrapped around the hull of their boat and, in due course, the sturdy vessel in the bay tugged it down the beach and into the waves. It floated, bobbing apparently happily, while the boys rowed out to it in their dinghy and climbed aboard.

We met them again a couple of days later, arriving back on the beach in the dinghy. The yacht was moored out in the bay, still healthily upright.

'How did it go? Boat repaired?'

'No,' Michel said. 'They didn't really want to know about it.'

'Didn't want to lift your boat out of the water?'

'Well, no…' Michel said, oddly reticent. 'I think they didn't like us very much.'

'Questions, questions…' amplified Jean-Paul.

'And they wanted the money first, before they'd do anything.'

'Huge amount,' said Jean-Paul. 'Ridiculous. We haven't got that much! Not in cash. We'd have had to…'

He paused. His friend Michel had placed a foot heavily on his toes.

They left the following day, heading back to France with fingers crossed that the deviant plank wouldn't ping out of place again. We know they made it because they arrived back in San Sebastián two years later in the same craft and - incredible this, but true - once again managed to get it shipwrecked on the same beach, in much the same way.

Whatever it was that brought them here, it wasn't just a holiday and, even more surely, they weren't very good at it.

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

Visiting yachts no longer moor in the open bay, San Sebastián now has a sheltered marina with its own crane and facilities. The photo above is from the era of this story.

The coastal settlement of dubious repute I mentioned has transformed itself into a highly respectable (and expensive) retreat for clients seeking tranquility, healthy food, restorative massages and optional trips to town on a sleek motor launch.

Two recent events brought this memory back to the surface. One was the arrival of a large number of visitors, mostly young and fit, who had committed to setting off from La Gomera to row across the Atlantic to Antigua. Like Columbus, but without the sails, they faced a journey of around 3,000 miles. Since 2003 this has been an annual fixture in which somewhere around 30 boats take part with crews from one to five rowers. They're not just ordinary rowing boats, of course, but chunky little vessels with small cabins and helpful electronics. So far they've proved unsinkable, which is comforting for the mums and dads fearfully following their mad offspring.

The other event, reported in the local newsletters, was the interception by the marine Guardia Civil of a motor vessel heading past the Canary Islands. A smart, modern semi-rigid craft, it had a cabin in which the police found two men and 2,500 kilos of cocaine. It was packaged in 86 bundles which the guys hadn't even bothered to try and conceal, probably intending to transfer them at sea to smaller boats for delivery to European ports. There is a well known 'Atlantic Route' for the transport of drugs from the Americas and the Caribbean. However, as far as I'm aware La Gomera plays no active role in that, and our two young seafarers were certainly not part of any large-scale organisation.

The holiday bridge

Next door a skilled team is transforming the house - one of the oldest in the village - into something that will undoubtedly be wonderful, but at the moment is a centre of banging, drilling, dust and pop music. No complaints, we're very glad someone will be moving in soon, an empty house is a sad one.

One of the workers is more chatty than the others, more willing to engage, although he always has an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips which doesn't help my understanding of his Gomeran Spanish.

'You're working today?' I asked him. 'But it's Saturday, and the romería!'

He chuckled, wobbling the cigarette, and said something I very nearly got.

'Only until midday?'

'Mas o menos,' he agreed - more or less. A little more, his hands indicated. Then he'd be off, he said, smacking his palms together like clashing symbols, a gesture meaning 'that's it, done, finished'.

He did it with great verve, with notable glee, the significance of which I didn't appreciate at the time. It was normal practice for the guys to stop a little early on Saturday then take Sunday off but this particular Saturday was a very special one with a huge, enormously important street procession, the romería in honour of the Virgen de Guadalupe, the island's patron. The town would fill with singers, drummers, strummers and dancers not only from San Sebastián but from all over the island and from several of the other islands too.

'And you'll have Monday off as well,' I suggested. 'For the bajada.'

He nodded, grinning cheerfully. 'Sí, sí, la bajada.'

The bajada is an even bigger event than the romería and rarer than the Olympics, taking place only every fifth year. It means literally 'the descent' but refers to the landing of the Virgen de Guadalupe on the main beach of San Sebastián, having been transported here by fishing boat from her home in a small chapel just along the coast. The Virgen is a representation of the Virgin Mary, a small effigy carved in wood but with a local importance way beyond her size. Her arrival on the town beach unleashes floods of emotion for true Gomerans as well as lots of money for the local cafes.

The day of the bajada is always a Monday and, of course, a holiday. In practice one day is not enough - the celebrations extend to breakfast time the next morning with an all-night dance - so on these special five-yearly occasions Tuesday is also a holiday. It's not quite official but it happens, with schools closing along with most of the shops - kind of unofficially official.

Even more unofficial was something else that happened this particular year. As the dates worked out, the following Thursday was an annual national holiday, the Día de La Hispanidad. Which meant that - but wait, first we've got to invoke a brilliant feature of the Spanish way of life and leisure called el puente, the bridge. If, for example, a holiday falls on a Tuesday, it's unofficially accepted that going back to work after the weekend for just a day, before another day off, is hardly worth the bother so Monday is labelled un puente and becomes a de facto holiday as well, creating a long weekend. These can also be triggered at the end of the week by a holiday on Thursday, turning Friday into a puente.

Following this principle, if everyone was going to be off work on Monday and Tuesday because of the bajada, it was hardly worth starting again for just a day before the national holiday on Thursday, so Wednesday became an unofficial holiday as well. Friday was already labelled a puente, so the end result was that everyone took the whole week off.

The workers next door, others on municipal roadworks and various worksites nearby, even the schools and colleges joined in this agreeable subterfuge, although the latter pretended it was because of an unusually prolonged heatwave.

And thus, the explanation for our next-door workman's hearty sign-off on the previous Saturday. He knew. I can't fault this as an attitude. It's not that people get nothing done: Gomeran workers start early and go at it hard all day, but if there's an opportunity for a break and enjoyment they grab it with both hands. When it comes to establishing a healthy work-life balance, I think they're well ahead of the game.

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

Multiple puentes such as this recent one are a recognised Spanish phenomenon called the acueducto (aqueduct) or macropuente. They are frowned upon by economists and right-wing politicians but not so much by everyone else.

It seems that the French also follow the admirable tradition of holiday bridges, les ponts. I can't see it taking hold in Britain, and anyway there's little opportunity as most of the bank holidays are on Monday or Friday - no doubt deliberately. A spoilsport former Spanish president, Mariano Rajoy, in 2012 tried to do that to Spain, proposing that all national holidays should be on Monday or Friday. Fortunately he failed because many of them are religious celebrations and the Catholic church wasn't going to have those messed about with.

The Virgen de Guadalupe five-year festivities are called the Fiestas Lustrales which is another way of saying five-yearly. The Lustrales featured in two earlier stories: A moment of madness, 18 April 2018 and The little dark one, 10 January 2019.