Paco and the magic bracelet

For such a simple device, this thing is miraculous. We had to queue to get it fitted. Well, queue in the loose sense of milling around with everyone else. Queuing is mainly a British phenomenon and elsewhere it's done differently, sometimes by the simple use of elbows. Not in Spain, though. The Spanish queue is an invisible thread that winds itself through the throng and is generally respected. Each participant knows who arrived before and after them.

So we all waited patiently to check in and, once verified as worthy, to have our magic bracelet fitted. Paco, who has Down's syndrome and is everybody's favourite, gave a little shiver of excitement as the fitter wrapped the bracelet around his wrist. Made of bright green plastic with rows of holes, it took only a moment to clip it fast and trim off the excess with a pair of scissors.

You can put it to work immediately. Head for the bar, demand a restorative glass of beer and kaboom! - there it is on the counter. Take it away and nobody will charge you anything, now or later. Paco marched off with a glass of fizzy orange and a look of wonder in his eyes - you don't have to pay for it? This is not life as we know it!

We were on a weekend indulgence with our village association, staying in a smart hotel in Tenerife on an all-included deal, the todo incluido. You pay in advance and once the pain of that has faded, all is magic. In the restaurant that evening the waiter, mesmerised by our bright green bracelets, plonked a bottle of red wine on the table then awarded us the freedom of the self-service counters.

Most people start by overdoing the magic then feeling ill the next day, which slows them down and is what the hoteliers depend on to avoid ruination. Our neighbour Eusebio started by overdoing it then continued to overdo it for the next two days.

He and his wife Carmela were sitting at a table next to ours, his plate cleverly piled in multi-coloured layers assembled from everything on the buffet counter. I raised my wine glass: 'Salud!' He grinned and returned the salutation.

As a second bottle of wine arrived on his table, shortly afterwards, we raised our glasses again. 'You know,' Eusebio said, perhaps a little defensively, 'we need this kind of break now and again. Carmela and I work hard all day, every day. What's the point if you don't ever have any enjoyment? Eh? What's the point? Tell me!'

This drew prolonged applause from a nearby table, where two young women were tucking into plates similar to Eusebio's. We all drank a toast to enjoyment. Later the two friends told us they worked on a banana farm in the north of the island and this was a little holiday, an escape from work, an escapadita.

People do work hard in these islands. Eusebio, for example, has a full-time job with the local council but he and Carmela also maintain a little farm, a finca, where they raise goats and grow much of their own food. They're not alone in this, the family finca has formed the heart of Canary Islands life for centuries. More about that in another story, perhaps.

But to get back to the magic bracelet - like all sorcery it has its darker side. When you venture into the town during the day your cheerful, brightly coloured little bracelet marks you like the electronic tag of a paroled prisoner. Seated at a café table with your coffee or beer in hand, you are instantly recognisable as a todo-incluido.

So you have to decide. If it bothers you, hide it beneath a rolled-down shirtsleeve. I decided that it didn't bother me at all, I was happy to roll up my sleeves and wear my magic bracelet with pride. It's a badge of those who have worked hard and believe they've earned a little enjoyment. (Pause for applause.)

It also goes down well with the proprietors of bars and cafés for whom the todo incluido concept threatens disaster. Anyone who ventures outside the hotel to eat, drink or otherwise spend money is to be cherished.

Returning to the hotel for an enchanted pre-dinner aperitif by the pool, we found that Paco had been appointed Wizard of the Drinks and was running a shuttle service over the bridge across the bathing pool, carrying wine, beer, orange juice or vodka-limón. 'Only one at a time,' his brother cautioned him. 'And if you spill any of it you're a dead man.' Paco is well used to being teased, loves it and is a dab hand at the withering retort.

So we drank and we ate and we chuckled, then like tired but happy children we piled into the magic bus to take us home. Two days is enough but it's a fun way to do nothing together.

Here's to good health and enjoyment without guilt. Salud!

Get rolling!

Many years ago, during my first faltering attempts at Hispanic communication, I asked a young waiter in a café-bar for two glasses of rosé wine, which in Spanish is vino rosado. Two glasses, dos copas, so there you go: Dos copas de vino rosado. Easy, see?

The waiter, who was probably called Juan, frowned and leaned closer. I had already learned to dread this Spanish frown. It is not one of annoyance, it simply means I'm concentrating really, really hard to try and catch some faint inkling of what you're on about.

Try again: vino rosado? with hopeful doggy expression. No joy. Juan smiles apologetically and tries a wild guess: 'You want two beers?'

I was rescued by Victoria, the landlady of the apartment where we were staying at that time, who fortuitously passed by at the height of the impasse. She said exactly what I'd said but this time Juan nodded gratefully and toddled off to get the wine.

A bit miffed, I demanded to know in what particular respect my pronunciation had been deficient. Well, difficult to know where to start with that one, but it seemed the crucial failure was the 'r' of rosado.

I hadn't yet learned to trill. In Spanish, when an 'r' comes at the beginning of a word it requires work. You must start it up, roll it along on your tongue then release it like a motorised butterfly: rrrrrosado!

Likewise, a double 'rr' in the middle of a word: Un tarrrrro de mermelada! will get you a jar of marmalade. Maybe.

Learning Spanish is no more difficult than learning any other language. It's just that the sounds you're supposed to make demand courage and, especially, a tongue that's unafraid of adventure. It has to be prepared for new and strange experiences.

Our landlady Victoria was very good at nurturing tongue-tied foreigners. With great patience and tact she taught our two tongues the basic tricks. That word rosado for example: it wasn't just the 'r' I was getting wrong. 'You're saying the 'd' so it sounds like 't' to me,' Victoria explained. Really? But surely a 'd' is just a 'd', whether Spanish or English...?

No it isn't. Victoria had uncovered for us a crucially important, breakthrough piece of information. 'You must put your tongue,' she explained, 'behind your teeth like this.' Tip of tongue against back of upper incisors. Your 'd' then comes out like 'th' in bother. Thus, the capital city of Spain is not what you thought at all, it's Mathrith.

The dictionaries make light of this. Some even claim that 'd' at the beginning of a word is the same as in English, which is outrageously false. Just listen to a Spaniard!

Even better, watch their mouth closely as they speak. I offer here the simplest and most useful piece of pronunciation advice you may ever read: When speaking Spanish, the tip of your tongue should play a dominant role, clearly visible from the outside, waggling around like a trapped ferret.

Victoria, bless her little waggling tongue, also gave us this useful rhyme for practising the motorised 'r' (erre, pronounced ay-ray, means the letter 'r'):

Erre con erre cigarro

Erre con erre barril

Rápido corren los carros

Los carros del ferrocarril

It's almost meaningless but not quite: R with R cigar / R with R barrel / Rapidly run the cars / the cars of the railway.

Intriguingly, the fourth line is sometimes written as Cargados de azúcar al ferrocarril - 'loaded with sugar on the railway' - which conjures a wonderful image of steam trains puffing through waving fields of sugar cane under a blazing sun, long ago in Cuba. Or Mexico, perhaps, or ...?

I'm sure this little poem has an interesting history.

Salsa and the widows

Eusebio elbowed me in the ribs. 'Those women need help.'

'What?'

'Those women. They need help. Look at them.'

I looked at them. He was right, they needed help. 'You do it,' I suggested, but Eusebio pleaded exhaustion. Too much wine, too much food. Yeah, me too. But still. Chivalry and all that.

It was party day in the village. A day to eat, drink and enjoy being a little cluster of people living in close proximity who are mostly happy with that. The summer sun was friendly but fierce and our sports ground was clothed with canvas gazebos sheltering tables, food, drink and most of the villagers.

Over in one corner young Crístofer, who knows about these things, had set up a laptop computer feeding chirpy salsa music into two black loudspeakers perched like vultures on tall poles. He was still sulking over being made to keep the volume below denture-rattling level - 'Hey, chico, some of us want to talk, turn the effing thing down!' - but was otherwise doing a good job of keeping things lively.

There is no moment, at these events, when we all sit down at the tables to start eating, nor any identifiable end - the meal starts when anything edible arrives, and people sit and eat or stand and talk as they wish. A relaxed and fluid feast that lasts all day.

Crístofer's salsa music pervaded the air like an aerosol drug that went straight to the feet, causing involuntary tapping and twitching. Men headed for the beer cooler wiggle-walking in time with the music. People abandoned their plates of chick pea stew or barbecued pork in order to dance, impelled by their hyperactive feet.

Rubén, a twenty-something guy who has hyperactive everything, danced wildly with the kids, some of whom would get sick before much longer.

So we were all having a great time, everything was hunkydory and ticketyboo, until - inevitably - around mid-afternoon someone produced a football. Someone always does. It was probably Rubén but I can't swear to that. And football, as everyone knows, is the world's worst bully, it will claim any amount of space for itself and ruthlessly exclude all non-players.

The lads all joined the game and, even more distressingly, so did some of the lasses. And that was the end of the dancing. Crístofer left his disco station to take up position as centre-half for the Red team.

Thus it was for a few minutes. The football took over. But – here was his big mistake - Crístofer had left the music playing. Under the shade of the gazebos, at the tables, fingers still drummed along with the beat, feet still tapped and twitched. And on the margins of the football game five widows lingered wistfully, swaying their hips. Five women who had lost their husbands some years ago but had not retreated permanently into black mourning, had decided that life was still to be lived. They wanted to keep on dancing.

Eusebio, a man who also believes that life is for the living, recognised that things had slipped out of kilter. 'Go on,' he urged me. 'I'll go if you do,' I offered. Okay. We approached the five widows together, offered ourselves as partners and led them gallantly onto the football field.

Five ladies and two blokes dancing salsa on a football field can mess up the game pretty thoroughly. Nobody minded. They must have known in their hearts that we were right and they were wrong.

The goalie at our end started dancing. The Blue team’s star striker caught the ball in his hands and shoved it beneath his tee shirt, shimmying. The ref retrieved the ball, whistled and sent him off. He didn’t go.

Committed footballers tried to continue the game but they were lost. Down at the far end, the defenders turned their goalmouth sideways, probably the best defence anyone has ever invented.

Meanwhile Bernarda, one of our salsa widows, grabbed a plastic bottle full of fizzy orange and sashayed across the field with it balanced on her head. The game dissolved into chaos and anarchy. This was my kind of football.