What's that on your nose?

Part 1: The bubble

Arturo was the first.

Seating ourselves at a shaded table outside his café-bar, we waited quietly, knowing what would come next.

Arturo came out to take our order. 'The usual?' He paused, staring at my nose with the hesitant half-smile of a man torn between politeness, curiosity and suspicion that he's about to get his leg pulled. 'What's that?' Pointing at my nose.

'It's a spot,' I told Arturo. Beyond that I could tell him nothing.

It had begun as such a tiny thing, appearing out of nowhere, out of nothing, like the cosmic Big Bang. A tiny pimple on the upper bridge of my nose, placed with geometric exactitude midway between the eyes. Nothing much happened for a week or two while the newborn pimple sat there deciding what to do, then one day it began to expand enthusiastically.

In the story of the Big Bang this phase is known as 'inflation', a fudge that nobody understands but purports to explain why we now have a Universe to live in. After the inflation of my pimple what I had was a pink circle spreading across my nose and beginning to swell like one of those slow, malevolent bubbles in a volcanic mud pool.

Arturo peered more closely at my bubble. 'There's a kind of scab on top.' Yes.

'And it looks like there's blood inside.' Yes indeed.

He retreated, trying not to look repulsed. 'You ought to see a doctor with that.'

I had already made an appointment for the next morning. Meanwhile I covered the bubble with a sticking plaster which reduced the repulsion but not the comments, since it clearly hid something big and nasty.

My doctor at the local health centre, well practised in avoiding alarm for his patients, flinched only briefly when I showed him the excrescence but sent me straight to the dermatologist at the local hospital with a big label Urgent around my neck and instructions to beat down the door if nobody answered. (I'm exaggerating a little.)


Part 2: The treatment


There are some doctors who inspire instant relief - at last I'm in good hands! - and others who inspire dread that they're hiding something from you. My dermatologist belongs to the first group, an extremely competent lady in whom I have the utmost faith. She examined the growth on my nose with her high-tech illuminated magnifying glass, through which it must have looked magnificently horrid.

She straightened up and nodded. 'It's not malignant.'

'It's not malignant?'

'It's not malignant.' She must be well accustomed to having to say that twice. 'But it does need dealing with.'

Yes, good, great. An ointment, a pill, an antibiotic? 'We'll do it now,' she decides. 'Agreed?' Right, fine.

The best thing to do, she explains, is to burn it out.

Burn it out? I picture a little blowlamp hovering between my eyes. But I have complete faith in this lady. If she wants to burn it out, let her burn.

'Over to the couch there, and lie down.'

'Right.' Complete confidence. J is watching from the guest chair and looking as perplexed and nervous as I'm trying not to look.

'You don't have a pacemaker, do you?' asks the dermatologist. Why would that matter? But I don't. Could probably do with one just at this moment. She switches on one of those mysterious electronic machines they have in hospitals then administers a quick jab of anaesthetic at the top of my nose.

A minute or two later she's waving in front of me a little rod trailing a curly cable back to the machine. The rod turns out to be an electronic red-hot poker. She taps the bridge of my nose with it, tentatively at first, perhaps to see how I react, then with more determination. Tap, hold, withdraw... tap again, hold...

This doesn't hurt, it really doesn't, but the billowing smoke and barbecue smell are alarming. And the cotton swabs, handed to her in quantities by her assistant to mop up whatever’s flowing from my nose bubble. How deep does this thing go?


Part 3: The aftermath


It's best to leave the cauterized wound open to the air, it seems, to heal more quickly. Within moments this revamped adornment to my nose catches the eye of Bernardo, a fellow villager. He is seated in the waiting area, accompanying his mum (nobody ever visits a doctor alone). 'Hey, that was a good shot! Right between the eyes. You must have really annoyed her.'

Such remarks will be repeated throughout the next week. Shop assistants, bartenders, friends, taxi drivers (especially taxi drivers). My barbecued nose spot has become a blood-black hollow, perfectly circular, clearly the entry wound of a high-velocity bullet. I've seldom produced such hilarity with so little effort.


Part 4: Epilogue


Eventually the black scab fell off and now there's just a little scar. But the question remains - what provoked this evil eruption?

Well, it was certainly the sun, and it's suspicious that the spot nestled precisely below the bridge of my old plastic sunglasses. Could the curved lower surface of the bridge have acted as a concave mirror, treacherously focusing the ultraviolet into a hotspot?

Who knows. I'm not going to experiment. Maybe it was just the usual cause of most such problems these days, la edad, age. And the remaining scar, a little white patch, could come in useful one day, as Arturo pointed out. 'When it's time to put you down they'll have something to aim at.'

But meanwhile: 'Another little glass of wine?' Oh okay, Arturo, go on then.

Gofio

One morning many years ago, on our way out of the village, we paused beside a cloud of blue smoke billowing from the patch of land on the street corner. At the centre of the cloud was Dolores, perched on a rusty kitchen stool before an upturned dustbin lid. The lid was balanced on two brick columns and beneath it was an unruly fire of logs, twigs and leaves.

Peering through the smoke, all I could see in the dustbin lid was what looked like dark sand from a Gomeran beach. Now, why would anyone...?

From the stone shed behind Dolores a cockerel greeted our arrival with a subdued cock-a-gloogle-gloo while its harem of hens clucked excitedly around it. A clutch of turkeys gobble-gobbled next door and at the far end, two goats looked on from their tin outhouse in goatly disdain, chewing. A compact little tribe of fellow travellers on a leisurely passage to the dinner table.

We bid Dolores good morning and asked politely why she was heating sand in a dustbin lid. She beckoned us into the enclosure to look more closely. Ahah! Right. Mixed in with the sand were grains of maize, also known as corn. The sand was there to surround the maize with an even heat so it didn't scorch. Clever!

'You're roasting the maize,' I ventured, 'to make gofio?'

Dolores nodded - got it on one. Not too difficult because if you live in La Gomera you know about gofio. Gofio is what for centuries has enabled little Gomerans to grow big and strong, Gomeran women to bear fifteen children without blinking and Gomeran goatherds to leap across hillsides using long poles. Gofio thickens your breakfast milk and your lunchtime soup, gofio dumplings sustain you in the fields, honey-sweetened gofio balls are a treat for the kids and toothless grandpa.

Once the maize grains were well roasted, Dolores would sift them from the hot sand and take them up the hill to the gofio mill, where for a small fee they would be finely ground into flour. Very finely ground. On my first introduction to gofio I made the near-fatal mistake of sniffing it. I've since wondered if a lungful of gofio could spontaneously explode, as powder aerosols sometimes do, but the effect is in any case similar. Don't ever sniff gofio.

At a New Year's day family gathering to which we'd been invited, a particularly enthusiastic advocate demonstrated how to make gofio dumplings in the authentic manner. The first requirement is a rabbit. There are many rabbits in the Gomeran hills and Luis had obtained one, or rather its skin which is the key component for this purpose.

You sew the skin up again (nicely cleaned of course) to make a long bag, open at one end. If you ignore the dangly legs it now looks fairly innocuously like a Scottish sporran.

Into this bag you pour your gofio, being careful not to sniff, along with water or perhaps goat's milk for a richer dumpling. Close the end of the bag and tie it tightly with string then - here's the skilful bit - start rolling it like a big heavy sausage across your knees, backwards and forwards, applying pressure with the palms of your hands as in deep massage. You will be subjected to rude jokes while you're doing this, as Luis was, but ignore them and keep massaging.

After the proper length of treatment you can untie the rabbit bag and peel it away from what is now a large roll of slightly squidgy gofio dumpling. Slice it into bite-sized discs as required.

Nobody does this in real life any more, of course. They just mash up the mixture with a wooden spoon or, more probably, bung it into an electric dough mixer, but the end result is much the same and just as healthy.

Gofio forms part of a beautifully integrated system of self-sufficiency. You grow the maize on your family finca or smallholding. Being tall, the maize plants shelter other crops such as beans and potatoes from the strong winds which are a known feature of Gomeran weather.

Having consumed the maize cobs, either sliced up in soup or turned into gofio, you donate the rest of the plant to the goats or the pig. In return the goats give you milk and, in due course, meat, and the pig gives you ham, bacon and blood sausages as well as a friendly honk every morning when you go to feed it, except for the last time.

The goat milk - a litre or more every day - you can drink fresh from the udder or turn into cheese, to eat with your slices of gofio dumpling. Gomeran goat cheese is wonderful, tasty but mild, not at all goaty like the French stuff.

Meanwhile, back at the smallholding, your potatoes are coming along nicely in fertile volcanic soil enriched by nitrogen from the beans growing between them and by manure from your goats and pig. The beans will later form the basis of a nourishing soup called rancho canario into which you sprinkle your gofio...

It's not as satisfyingly circular as that nowadays with our frozen foods, takeaway pizzas and spit-roasted chicken, and there are fewer goats and pigs around than before, but you will be hard pressed to find a family without its own finca and somebody still making good use of it.

Dolores doesn't grow maize herself now because her joints have let her down, but her sons do. And gofio, although now produced mainly by companies rather than individuals, you will find on the shelves of every supermarket. Buy it, eat it and grow strong!