The clandestine emigrants

On Friday 25 November 2016 one of the world's best-known heroes or villains, depending on your standpoint, finally succumbed to the enemy that nobody ever defeats. Fidel Castro was cremated the following day and the island of Cuba entered a nine-day period of mourning. Followed by, we can be sure, a much more prolonged feeling of strangeness, a sensation that the world has changed.

So what has this got to do with La Gomera?

Let's address that question with irritating obliqueness by following Doris and Bill as they make their way down the gangway from their cruise ship, one sunny morning in the port of San Sebastián. They are refugees from a grim Lancashire winter, taking a week's sunshine cruise around the Canary Islands, and this is their day in La Gomera.

Ripe for adventure, or at least for something vaguely interesting, Bill and Doris stroll hand in hand past the neat rows of yachts in the marina. As they approach the town they pass a flower bed where a small metal sculpture lurks apologetically beneath a giant cactus.

Doris pauses to look at it. 'It's a yacht,' Bill tells her and tries to walk on but Doris, who was once a teacher and likes to know about things, has caught a whiff of history. 'It's bigger than a yacht, Bill. It's an old sailing ship.'

Bill grunts and bends down to look at the bronze plaque beneath the ship. 'Telly-macko,' he reads. Shrugging, he takes Doris's hand again and pulls her onwards.

Well, they did better than most - at least they noticed it. But they've just dismissed an extraordinary and highly emblematic event in Gomeran history. This humble sculpture commemorates the sailing of the Telémaco (Tell-AY-mako) in August 1950, the last sailing ship to depart from La Gomera carrying clandestine emigrants across the Atlantic to South America.

Why clandestine? Because in 1950 General Franco, the Generalissimo, was still very much in control of everything that happened in Spain and strongly discouraged emigration, even from islands such as the Canaries which he had allowed to descend into deep poverty and hardship.

The Telémaco passengers had a terrible time on their voyage, but some of them eventually managed to settle in Venezuela. Many other such fly-by-night escapees from the Canary Islands fetched up on the island of Cuba, and many of them stayed there. So there's our first clue to the Castro conundrum.

Meanwhile, Doris and Bill have just happened upon another highly significant monument as they stroll along the seafront. This time it's a large lump of rusted metal perched precariously on a marble-clad plinth. Bill is a little more intrigued here, walks around the monument, peers through the central hole as though it were a telescope or Henry Moore sculpture.

He stands back to squint at it for a moment then announces: 'Propeller!' Correct, got it in one. 'It's the shaft of a ship's propeller. Must've been quite a big boat.'

There is a bronze plaque on the plinth but the embossed text is difficult to read and anyway it's in Spanish, so most visitors never find out what this thing is. Sadly, it's all that is left of the proud Cantabria, a transatlantic steamship whose captain took the bold decision, on the fifth of March 1862, to beach his ship in the harbour of San Sebastián after it suffered mechanical problems and a dangerous leak.

The Cantabria was bound for Cuba with a battalion of Spanish troops. At that time Cuba was still a Spanish colony but showing increasing signs of not wanting not to be, and Spain was reacting with a brutal campaign of suppression.

In short - what these two humble monuments illustrate is the closely interwoven histories of the Americas and the Canary Islands. There are large numbers of Latin Americans today with Canary Island blood in their veins, and in recent years many have returned to the Canaries, ironically, in search of work and a better way of life. It's by no means a flood, nothing to merit a Donald Trump We're gonna build a wall! - but here in La Gomera I know of families from Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Cuba.

Especially Cubans. There are quite a few of those. They fit here perfectly, their culture is much the same, hardworking but friendly and cheerful. I asked a few of them in San Sebastián how they felt about the demise of Fidel Castro, their revolutionary Comandante and head of state for the last half century and more.

Most were neutral - 'He was an old man, death comes to all of us, it won't change anything very much' - but Yani, a waitress in one of our favourite cafés, confessed to feeling triste, sad. Maybe she was sad about Fidel, or maybe the news of his passing reminded her of family, friends and her earlier life in Cuba.

Yani is settled here now, with her own family, but like all our Cubans she goes home now and again for a holiday. Mostly they come back complaining about the heat. There's really nowhere better to live than La Gomera, even if you're Cuban.

Notes for the serious student
The Telémaco was heading for Venezuela, a voyage of nearly 6,000 kilometres. A small cargo schooner, it set sail on the ninth of August 1950 with 170 men and one woman crammed like sardines on the deck and below. They left at night, without permits, without papers, and with nothing but hope to greet them when they arrived. Skippered by a local fisherman who had never before ventured out of sight of land, because the professional pilot who was booked to do the job took one look at the ship and fled.

Not long into the voyage they suffered two great storms, followed by continuing heavy seas that washed overboard most of their provisions, including the water barrels. They were saved from almost certain death from starvation and dehydration by a Spanish oil tanker whose captain gave them water and rice. Four terrible weeks after setting off, they arrived at the island of Martinique where the inhabitants took them in for a few days, revived them with food and kindness and gave them provisions for the rest of their journey.

Six days' more sailing took them to the port of La Guaira in Venezuela, where the authorities immediately sifted out the fourteen voyagers they considered responsible for this adventure, imprisoned them in Caracas for 45 days then sent them back to Tenerife.

Some of the other would-be emigrants chanced their luck by slipping away illegally into the hinterland, where they generally had a hard time, while the rest were eventually given immigration papers and found work of one kind or another in Venezuela.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of this story is that ten days into their voyage, while they were fighting the waves, Franco lifted his ban on emigration. If they'd waited a couple more weeks they could have done it all so much more easily.

The interrogation

Transcript of a merciless interrogation of the author, your humble blogger, after he participated in a harmless event of community bonding.

Cold and Humourless Interrogator: So, already you're on the defensive. 'A harmless event...'

Defensive Blogger: You can't start an interrogation by quoting from the introduction to its transcript. It's illogical.

CHI: (snapping) Don't quibble!

DB: Sorry.

CHI: Did you or did you not take part in a coach trip around the tranquil island of La Gomera with a rowdy party of villagers?

DB: They weren't rowdy, they were perfectly well behaved, just out for a good day's...

CHI: Answer the question! Did you take part?

DB: Yes I did. But they weren't.

CHI: One might wonder why villagers born on the island, who certainly know the place like they know their own kitchen, would wish to spend an entire day being driven around it.

DB: It's a beautiful island! The landscapes change by the year, by the day, by the hour! They change with the weather, the sun and clouds, the state of mind of the beholder! This is an island full of history yet unspoiled by the concrete footprints of commerce. An island where humankind lives largely at peace with the natural world. An island of dreams and magic, where anything...

CHI: Oh for goodness' sake.

DB: What? Well okay, enough said. But it is.

CHI: Let us proceed. The coach stopped on the main road outside the village for you all to climb aboard. Some of your fellow villagers were seen loading two very heavy containers into the luggage bay, with the help of the remarkably indulgent coach driver.

     (Silence)

CHI: Well?

DB: Well what? That wasn't a question.

CHI: Were or were not two heavy containers taken on board?

DB: Yes. I didn't know what they were. Mind you, it didn't take much guessing.

CHI: (ominously) We'll return to those later. First let's address that business in the tunnel. There are several tunnels on the north road, the GM1 towards Hermigua, are there not?

DB: Yes. What's that got to do with...

CHI: And during your trajectory through the longest of those tunnels, in darkness, someone was heard making crude and offensive sucking noises as though lasciviously kissing. Was that you?

DB: No! I think that was just Rubén clowning around. We've got several clowns.

CHI: So you're denying that anything happened.

DB: No I'm not, he made crude and offensive sucking noises.

CHI: (sighs as though in pain) Very well, let's move on. Your first halt was in the town of Agulo, where the coach pulled into a car park at the entrance to the town. Why was that?

DB: Call of nature, some of us are no longer young. There's a café.

CHI: Which you entered. And ordered what?

DB: Coffee. Café con leche, coffee with milk.

CHI: Nothing else? No little extra glass with...

DB: Nothing!

CHI: (disbelievingly) Very well. There was, however, an incident in the queue for the gentlemen's toilet.

DB: Was there?

CHI: You elbowed your way in front of Paco, a small and vulnerable individual who surely deserves consideration and protection.

DB: He thought it was very funny, it cracked him up. I let him go first really. After we'd had a fist fight.

CHI: You surely didn't...!

DB: Oh come on, can't you recognise a joke?

CHI: No.

     (Silence)

CHI: From Agulo you drove to the famous and very popular tourist attraction, the Mirador de Abrante, is that correct?

DB: Yes.

CHI: You drove directly to the Mirador?

DB: Yeah. Well, almost. We stopped first at...

CHI: (triumphantly) Ahah! Precisely. You stopped first outside the Centro de Visitantes at Juego de Bolas.

DB: The Visitor's Centre, yes. It's good, examples of all the native trees and plants, stuff about geology and history, a typical cottage with a gofio mill and things. Loads.

CHI: But none of you went in there. Not one of you.

DB: Well no, we've all been round it lots of times.

CHI: Instead you extracted from the luggage bay of the coach, and then opened, the two mysterious containers. Containing - remind me?

DB: Well, one of them was a thermal coolbox with orange juice and Coca Cola. And bottles of water.

CHI: And?

DB: Okay, a few bottles of wine.

CHI: So at - what, about 11:30 in the morning, these bottles of wine were already being opened? Corks popping while you, personally, thrust forward a plastic beaker to be half-filled with red Rioja?

DB: You're making it sound evil.

CHI: The British Medical Association would be unanimously horrified.

DB: They should come and live in La Gomera, get a life.

CHI: (ignoring this provocation) And the other container?

DB: (defiantly) Cake!

     (Pause while CHI shakes head in sorrow)

DB: (still defiant) Really nice cake, sponge, cooked by one of the local ladies. With orange peel and things.

CHI: (sighing) Let's move on. Your next stop was the Mirador de Abrante, an architectural miracle, a long glass cage projecting seven metres into the air from the very top of a high cliff.

DB: Terrifying.

CHI: Where one of your party was seen at the furthest extreme of the glass cage, balanced on one leg with his arms outstretched and flapping. Was that...

DB: No, it was not me. It was Felipe being a seagull or something. Most people do something daft in there - seeing Agulo hundreds of metres beneath your feet does your head in.

CHI: And of course, there's a café-bar attached to the Mirador...

DB: Yes, safely on terra firma. And no I didn't! Well, only a small one, to recover.

      (The Interrogator, smiling grimly, adds another entry to the notepad on his knee)

CHI: Lunch was taken in the equally famous restaurant Casa Conchita in Arure, noted particularly for its excellent potaje de berros?

DB: Watercress soup. Very traditional.

CHI: And of course there is little doubt that you...

DB: (holding up his hands) Yes, yes and yes. Too much soup, too much tuna with salsa and potatoes, too much red wine served from a magic carafe that kept refilling itself. Actually there was a very funny bit where two of the old blokes pretended to have the shakes while refilling each others' glass. One shaking the carafe, the other shaking the glass, wine dancing around like rum in a cocktail shaker, and they didn't spill a drop. Not a drop. Can you believe that?

CHI: No.

      (A long silence, then the Defensive Blogger rises to his feet)

DB: You are a miserable, bald-headed pile of dry bones and you've got a bogey up your nose. I've had more than enough of you and I'm not going to tell you what happened at Verduñe, so there.

CHI: I already know what happened at Verduñe. And I shall know what happens at your next communal debauchery, the Christmas dinner-dance on the village square.

DB: Yes, and I know - you see, I'm not so stupid! - I know exactly who you are. You're wasting your time, I stopped listening to you decades ago.

Who's that at the door?

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore; while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. 'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door. Only this, and nothing more.'

So begins Edgar Allen Poe's chilling poem, The raven. Late-night tappings on the door are disquieting.

Even more disquieting is a thunderous, flat-handed thumping, resounding in the cool night air like a thunderclap.

For a moment we both remain at the supper table, stunned. As I finally get to my feet I run a mental survey of the possibilities. Jehovah's Witnesses? No, they tippety-tap with squidgy fingertips. Luzma, our near neighbour, with a bag of surplus bananas or mangoes from the farm? No, she does a down-to-earth knuckle rap.

The last time we heard anyone hammer on the door like this it was two officers of the Guardia Civil, Spain's national police force, wanting directions to someone else's house. The Guardia are generally affable people these days, but they haven't shaken off the Franco-era habit of trying to break down your door. Could this be them again, the Guardia? But so late in the evening? Shouldn't they all be in a bar somewhere by now, watching football?

A touch nervously, I open the door. Dark outside. Nobody there. I poke my head out to look around.

A dozen black shapes leap into the light spilling from the door, screaming and waving their arms. They have white faces, black-rimmed eyes and lips the colour of fresh blood. Most are elfin small but a few larger and fiercer ones lurk at the back beneath tall, pointy hats.

Through the death-mask paint I detect familiar faces, the local kids. Now they're all waving little paper shopping bags at me, the kind you get when you buy expensive perfume or a new iPhone, but the bags have been painted in sinister purples and blacks and each bears the scrawled legend Trick or Treat. Written in English.

That was the first time it happened, a good few years ago. Now it's every year, on the thirty-first of October, Halloween. At this stage of the performance - bags waving under my nose, demanding a present - I always suffer a brief but painful internal battle.

Mr Grumpy: This is terrible, this has to be resisted! This has nothing to do with Gomeran folk culture! Nothing to do with the Canary Islands, nothing to do with Spain, nothing to do with Europe!

Mr Nice: Oh come on, they're just kids.

Mr Grumpy (warming up for a rant): If it's anything at all it's American, but I doubt it has much to do with USA folk culture either. It's twenty-first century aggression. Trick or treat, see! Give me a present or I'll make you suffer!

Mr Nice: But look at all the trouble they've gone to, dressing up. And the excitement in their faces. They're enjoying themselves.

The bags are waving closer to my nose and the kids are yelling 'Treek o trait, treek o trait!' at this dim Englishman. Get on with it, give us the treat!

Mr Grumpy (metaphorically waving stick): Extortion with menaces. Robbery!

Mr Nice: You churlish old fossil. You've done it too. Don't you remember the fifth of November, Guy Fawkes night? When you went round knocking on doors and wheeling an old pushchair with a stuffed potato sack sitting in it - 'Penny for the Guy, missus'?

Mr Grumpy: That was entirely different, Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament and deserved to be honoured. This lot are just demanding something for nothing.

One way to avoid this annual ambivalence is to go out for the evening and leave the house in darkness. A very cowardly solution, though, and it doesn't work anyway because they'll wrap several metres of toilet roll around our bikes as a mark of disdain, a symbol of shame: these people are mean!

So we've taken to arming ourselves in advance with handfuls of caramelos, boiled sweets, which - no, no, we don't hurl them at the kids, goodness gracious! - which we drop into their bags, a couple of sweeties each, while pretending to be scared out of our wits and in fear of our lives. It sort of works, some of the ghouls giggle, although I'm sure they'd much rather we dropped a couple of euros into their bags instead.

Intimidation! Threats! Mugging!

Oh, shut up.

Notes for the serious student
Spain has traditionally celebrated Halloween but tricks, treats and boiled sweets are a relatively new arrival.

The last day of October is technically Día de las Brujas, Witches' Day, although nobody seems to call it that nowadays. The first day of November is Día de Todos los Santos, All Saints' Day, which is of course a national holiday. You can't travel far through the Spanish calendar without coming across a national holiday.

The tree that lost its head

You could feel the impact through the soles of your feet. A huge, dull wump! from the general direction of the village square, as though a playful daddy elephant had jumped off the chapel roof.

People tumbled out of their houses to see what had happened. It didn't take long to track it down. One of the two stately palm trees in the plaza, the square, had lost its head. The trunk remained as proud and stately as ever, but its leafy crown lay upside down on the ground, with just a stub of trunk pointing forlornly towards the sky.

The crown of a mature Canary palm is very, very heavy and you really wouldn't want to be walking underneath when it fell. Fortunately, this one was considerate enough to do it early in the morning, when there was little risk of anyone getting hurt.

However, heads falling off palm trees are not a normal feature of the Gomeran way of life. Palms wave gently in the wind all over the island and remain reliably whole and complete, except for the occasional time-expired leaf falling to the ground, which is part of the natural order of things and has never killed anyone. But an entire head falling off - no, this is something entirely different. This is Mother Nature with a problem.

We gathered around the fallen head in a strangely subdued throng. It was like looking at a slaughtered giant, struck down by a devastating blow. Paco, our Down's syndrome neighbour who is always first on the scene, scampered around the plaza warning everyone that the head might fall off the other palm tree too. With a bit of luck, his expression was saying. We edged away, looking up at the second palm.

'It's diseased,' confirmed Saturnina, shaking her head sadly. 'They're both diseased. Nothing you can do about it.' Saturnina sees doom everywhere but unfortunately she's often right. 'This could spread,' she prophesied. 'It's carried by insects. Who's going to stop them? We could lose every palm tree on La Gomera.'

Oh but surely... no, that couldn't be allowed! That was unthinkable. Losing the island's Canary palms would be catastrophic, they're an essential feature of the landscape. They are protected by law - you can't just fell a palm, you need special permission and a very good reason. Such as a terminal disease, of course.

Eusebio was poking around the fallen head with a pocket knife. (The older men here still carry pocket knives - you never know when you might need to peel an orange or whittle a toothpick.) He pointed to a palm frond that had snapped off, exposing its base: 'See the holes? Tunnels made by the gusanos, the maggots.' Like woodworm, then, but even more deadly. Killing a palm tree is an impressive feat for a maggot not much bigger than a grain of Basmati rice. Eventually the maggots turn into beetles which fly off to the next palm tree, the next victim.

So a diseased palm has to be disposed of correctly if Saturnina's doomsday scenario is to be avoided. Someone had already telephoned the Ayuntamiento, the town council, to tell them that one of our palm trees had lost its head. Not long afterwards a couple of men arrived in a pickup truck, equipped with heavy boots, work gloves and a serious chainsaw.

The square had mostly emptied by then, people having drifted away to start their working day, thereby missing the splendid finale of this drama.

Clearing away the fallen head took a while because the two workmen first had to cut off every frond. Then came the felling of the headless tree, which went commendably smoothly. Cut a wedge from one side - carefully judged to set the direction of fall - then cut across from the opposite side, push the trunk and over it goes!

Perhaps they were slightly too pleased with the success of this first operation, perhaps slightly too keen to get the second one done and the mess cleared away. So they just did a repeat run of the first felling. Cut a wedge from one side - carefully judged etc - cut across from the other side, give it a push and over it goes! Over it went, just like the first one. However, the key difference was that this palm still had its head, so it was considerably taller. And strung across the plaza was an electric cable feeding the street lamp in the corner.

Flanders and Swan wrote a song about this kind of thing: '...then he nailed right through a cable, and out went all the lights! Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do...' It's funny in a guilty kind of way, as long as you're not involved and don't have to pay for it. I watched one of the council guys on his mobile phone, gesticulating as people illogically do on their mobile phones, miming the falling of a tree, the snagging of a cable, the crumpling of a lamp post, the dangling of a now-defunct floodlight...

But there's a happy ending. Nobody was hurt except for a touch of wounded pride, and we got a brand new floodlight for the plaza with a high-efficiency bulb and a modern design that reduces light spillage into the night sky. You can still see the Milky Way on a clear night.

And the island still has its beautiful Canary palms populating the hills and the valleys, despite Saturnina's doleful prophecy. Doom came only to the evil maggots, as is right and proper in a happy ending.

Notes for the serious student
There are many potential threats to a palm tree but one of the worst is a beetle smaller than a coffee bean. Officially called diocalandra frumenti but commonly known as the picudo negro, black weevil, it was spotted not long ago climbing around in some of the palm trees in the main town, San Sebastián.

It's easy enough to detect this creature at the beetle stage of its life cycle, but by then it might already have done a lot of damage. The beetles lay tiny eggs among the leaves, the eggs hatch into little maggots and the maggots tunnel their way through the leaf stems, feeding on the plant tissue. In two months or so they're big and fat enough to turn into pupas, from which they emerge a couple of weeks later as new beetles.

Meanwhile the palm leaves are now full of tunnels which disrupt the natural flow of nutrients, and also leave them open to opportunistic infections by other intruders such as fungi.

It's not a pretty story. If the tree is too damaged it has to be felled and burned, but generally it can be saved by spraying to kill the beetles and larvae. The important thing then is to treat all the trees in the vicinity too, to catch any beetles that have already moved house.

Trouble of this kind is always someone else's fault. In this case the beetles were transported by unknown agencies from somewhere in Polynesia, where they habitually dined on coconut palms. We love to receive foreign visitors here in the Canaries, but only on condition they don't eat our palm trees.

Columbus and the countess

Our taxi driver rolled his eyes. 'Discursos!' Speeches. We were discussing the forthcoming acto institucional due to take place that evening in the park, 'institutional act' being a fancy way of describing a couple of hours of speeches. There would be speeches by - at the very least - the president of the Canary Island parliament, the president of the Gomeran Cabildo (the island council), the mayor of San Sebastián and, as invited guest speaker, the rector of the university in Tenerife. 'Aagh!' cried our taxi driver, throwing both hands into the air, 'Save me from speeches by university professors!'

He was only joking, of course, Spanish people love a good speech. And if, halfway through the third monologue, you feel the magic beginning to fade, you can always sidle away in the growing darkness to one of the bars around the park.

The person responsible for this gathering of dignitaries was Almirante Cristóbal Colón, known in Britain as Admiral Christopher Columbus. La Gomera was his final stop before setting out across the Atlantic into the unknown, on the sixth of September 1492. One of the island's soubriquets is La Isla Colombina, the Island of Columbus, and he is commemorated in San Sebastián by a slightly strange bronze bust, unveiled by the King of Spain in 2006.

We need a little history here, before we get to the gossip. The Admiral's plan was to reach the East Indies - those rich, spicy islands a few weeks' sailing beyond India - by heading in the wrong direction, westwards, to circle the globe and reach the Indies from the other side. In this way he would avoid the irritating obstacle of Africa.

Five weeks into the voyage his little fleet of three ships sighted land ahead. The Indies, already! But no, they soon realised - this was too soon. They found themselves sailing through a broad scattering of completely unknown islands with beautiful white beaches and waving palm trees.

Columbus called the first island he set foot on San Salvador, the Saviour, and today's experts have a lot of fun arguing about which island it was. But it doesn't really matter - he had discovered, entirely by accident, the outlying islands of the Americas, the New World. These islands later became known as the West Indies, perhaps as consolation for Columbus who had failed to reach the East Indies.

He wasn't the first European, of course, to find the Americas. A Norwegian, Leif Erikson, landed on the northern tip of Canada nearly 500 years before Columbus set sail. But being fair, Columbus had no reason to suspect that land up there in the far north of the Atlantic would still get in his way thousands of miles further south.

And also being fair, what Columbus discovered was not the cold north of the North American land mass but the warm, lush Caribbean and, just a little further on, the vast southern half of the American continent. A big find, and he didn't even know about all the gold and silver at that stage.

However, here's the interesting bit. Columbus called into La Gomera ostensibly to stock his ships with food, water and wine and to rest his crew before their big adventure. But he also - if the rumours are to be believed - had a torrid affair with a Spanish countess living on the island.

And not just any old countess, but Beatriz de Bobadilla, widow of the Spanish aristocrat appointed to rule here on behalf of the Crown, a job Beatriz had now inherited.

Rumours perhaps, tittle-tattle, but the evidence for this liaison seems pretty solid to me. Just look at the facts. On his first voyage in 1492, Columbus puts into the port of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, a much bigger island than La Gomera. On leaving Gran Canaria he sails no more than a day before making another stopover here in La Gomera. Why does he need to do that? Has he already heard about the beautiful widow?

And he lingers here not just for a day or two but for a month! (It has been suggested that one of his ships required repairs which, as well as being a very boring explanation, also sounds unlikely. Fresh leaks in the hull, after a day's sailing in calm waters?)

The following year, 1493, he sails directly from Cádiz in Spain to La Gomera. Directly! No messing about in Gran Canaria first, or even Tenerife or La Palma, all much larger islands with greater resources. I mean, if this isn't already as clear as daylight...

When he eventually manages to tear himself away from the countess he retraces his earlier route westwards across the Atlantic and discovers the islands we now call Antigua and Puerto Rico.

He then has to wait a few years - difficulties with funding, perhaps - until his third voyage in 1498, when he again puts into La Gomera as his first stop. But maybe things hadn't gone quite so well with the countess the last time, because by now she has already married someone else.

So Columbus sails on, and this time discovers the island of Trinidad and the coast of Venezuela, his first contact with the South American mainland, which must have made him feel a bit better about everything. On his fourth voyage, in 1502, he calls into Gran Canaria for supplies then sails straight past La Gomera without pausing. Nose in the air - see if I care!

We shall never know who uttered what kind of wounding words on that fateful second visit, whose passion began to cool, who persistently snored or stole all the bedclothes. Whatever, it seems to have marked the end of their brief affair.

None of the earnest discursos on the sixth of September covered this particular aspect. They never do. A big mistake in my opinion, I guarantee it would keep everyone firmly in their seats.

The illustration of Columbus on his flagship, the Santa María, is from a painting by Emanuel Leutze (1855)

Fernando

'You've heard about Fernando?' Blasina asked, just in case we hadn't. Blasina is the most dedicated of the morning bathers at the beach (see the story After the deluge, 9 December 2015).

Fernando. Picture a plump man in swimming trunks, staggering towards the sea with terrifying uncertainty, waving a walking stick around as a balancing aid like a high-wire acrobat. We watched in dry-mouthed fascination as he wobbled sideways, backwards and occasionally forwards in fits and starts, approaching the water mostly by luck and grim determination.

'Shall I go and help?' But no, even as I spoke I realised this guy knew what he was doing and would resent interference.

He didn't fall over until, reaching the breakers, he advanced a few more paces then allowed himself to topple forwards like a felled tree. He hit the waves face-first in a spectacular whoosh of white water then set off towards Tenerife in a purposeful arms-only crawl, legs trailing like tentacles.

'You're not eating your sandwich.' Picnic on the beach. I took a bite. It was like trying to eat while watching an imminent disaster laid on as cabaret. Ten minutes later the swimmer arrived back in the ripples at the water's edge and we had to watch as he raised himself on arms and legs, wobbling like a newborn calf, before crawling forward to retrieve his walking stick and somehow hauling himself upright.

There was something terrible and wonderful about this performance, humbling in its bravery, inspiring in its success. It was like watching the Dawn of Mankind, the first triumphant steps on two limbs instead of four.

That was the first time we noticed Fernando, many years ago. We soon got used to seeing him, worried less about him, because he was always around. He had suffered some kind of cerebral catastrophe many years ago which had ruined his coordination, and although he could just about walk with the help of crutches he normally propelled himself through the streets on a silla de ruedas, a wheelchair. Later he bought a fancy motorised one with joystick control, chromium spring suspension and flashing indicators, in which he hummed around town at alarming speed to do his shopping.

But he still climbed out of it regularly to take some exercise. A favourite routine was to make his way to and fro on the bridge across the riverbed, clinging to the railings hand over hand.

He used to earn a few euros by selling lottery tickets for the ONCE charity, until he reached retirement age a few years ago. Then he spent his days working through his fitness programme or sitting with friends to argue about football. We got to know him better after the town council installed bright yellow exercise machines on the beach promenade, where we became fellow regulars.

Last Wednesday we greeted him there as usual as he sat twiddling his legs on the static cycle. Then for the next couple of days we didn't see him. People like Fernando are very noticeable when they're not there, they leave an empty space like the clock missing from the sideboard.

He had gone for a swim in the afternoon, Blasina told us, and suffered a heart attack. Other swimmers dragged him from the water, an ambulance rushed him to the local hospital then a helicopter flew him to an intensive-care unit in Tenerife, but they couldn't save him.

We hadn't heard this, we didn't know. As always, such a sudden extinction is hard to accept. 'He looked fine the last time we saw him,' I objected. 'He always looked after himself, kept himself fit.'

'True,' agreed Blasina, 'but really he was lucky to have had so many years. He could have gone long ago, when he first had the brain thing, the attack.'

Well, yes. That's the philosophical viewpoint, I suppose. And the rest of us will carry on until our time comes. But the fact remains, there is now just an empty space where Fernando ought to be.

Four bitches

One of my excuses - and there are many - for spending so much time at café tables is that it's an ideal setting for practising Spanish. Seated under a sun umbrella and wafted by a gentle sea breeze, we take out the e-reader and set to work.

The methodology is this: reading a Spanish novel, I translate a sentence aloud into English which J then attempts to translate back into Spanish. After a page or two, we swap roles. It's entertaining for us and even more entertaining for any locals within earshot.

Now and again we might stumble over an unfamiliar word or phrase that the dictionary doesn't know about either, in which case we are surrounded by expert Spanish speakers to turn to for help.

The other day, for example, I came across the phrase un vestidito de cuatro perras. Translated literally this means 'a little dress of four female dogs', which doesn't make a lot of sense.

Nothing helpful in the dictionary. So I try going online, to a famous multilingual translation website, which comes up with 'a dress four bitches' which makes even less sense.

We call for help to Susana, the café waitress, who has no trouble sorting things out for us. This phrase simply means 'a cheap dress', she explains (in Spanish). Cuatro perras is a very small sum of money.

We've captured her interest now, though. 'I think,' she says, 'a perra was a couple of céntimos. A two-céntimo coin.' (A céntimo was a hundredth of a peseta.) Wanting to be sure about this she grabs a passing Gomeran, a senior citizen with a flat cap and a stick who might remember such things: 'Una perra. Was that a two-céntimo coin, when we still used the peseta?'

He rubs his chin. 'I think it was five,' he says. 'A five-céntimo coin. We're talking about a long time ago, though. They stopped making them, the perra was almost nothing, wouldn't buy you the foam on top of that beer glass.'

Another pensioner seated at a nearby table looks up from his newspaper. 'Ten céntimos. The perra was ten céntimos.'

For any self-respecting Spaniard, being contradicted is the surest way to transform a half-formed opinion into rock-solid certainty. 'No, no, you're wrong, it was five,' insists the man with the flat cap.

He turns for support to the beer delivery man who has just arrived and probably has no idea how much a perra was but provides cautious backing: 'Could have been five. Either that or ten.'

The discussion spreads to the other tables, two more passers-by, the postman and the deputy mayor on his way back to the office. Impassioned argument is an essential part of the Spanish way of life and everyone is entitled to wade in.

On this occasion the resolution is particularly harmonious because it turns out that both combatants are right. Everybody's right! There were two different varieties of perra! A little one, the perra chica, which was the five-céntimo coin and the perra gorda, literally the 'fat bitch', which was ten céntimos.

Offering thanks all round, we return to our e-reader.

'Then, of course,' muses the ten-céntimo man with the newspaper, 'there was the duro. You remember the duro?' He nods at the guy in the flat cap, who is hanging about in the hope of more excitement.

'Five pesetas,' he responds. Disappointingly, nobody challenges this, it's correct, there was only one duro and it was the five-peseta coin. Even I know this, an ignorant foreigner, because shopkeepers and waiters used to tease visitors by demanding veinte duros, twenty duros, instead of a hundred pesetas, which was the price of a beer, coffee or bottle of water in those days.

No more duros now, of course. We have only the euro. I love the euro, especially the fact that the coins circulating here are not only Spanish but also Irish, German, French, Dutch and others of more mysterious origin, bearing portraits of distant royals or presidents. But as far as I know, nobody has invented colourful nicknames for the euro menagerie.

Unless you count the diminutive eurito, a little euro, which is a perfectly normal euro but softened by the -ito ending. It's a way of charging you a euro while indicating that a euro is nothing very much at all. But there we're into a whole new topic, which I think I'd better leave for another time.

Try not to look scared

The shop was empty - no other customers, nobody behind the counter. There is something unsettling about an empty shop, especially one with a security eyeball watching you from a corner of the ceiling.

I wandered around for a minute or two, examining the lamps and switches and reels of cable on the shelves, vaguely searching for the kind of wall socket I'd come to buy. But in an electrical retailer's you always have to ask - the thing you want will lurk somewhere within a dark forest of shelving through a doorway at the back.

With British restraint I waited another minute or two then leaned across the counter and called towards the storeroom: 'Hola! Hay alguien?' Anyone there?

I leapt backwards as two paws thumped onto the counter top, closely followed by a black snout, white teeth and a make-my-day glare. A very large Alsatian was standing on its hind legs behind the counter, tall enough to look me in the eye. It twitched its ears expectantly, waiting for me to make the first move.

Never turn away, is the first rule. Maintain eye contact and try not to look scared. Then you can slowly back away. Or if really desperate, grasp the hem of your shirt and pull it up over your head like a sail to make yourself look bigger, but I'm not sure if that's only for rhinoceroses.

For long moments, the dog and I contemplated each other warily across the counter.

The whole dog situation on this island has slowly changed over the years. When we first set foot here dogs were almost exclusively employed as guardians, like this one. (I'll get back to the story in just a moment.) Many of them would spend their entire days and nights chained to a shed made from scraps of timber, guarding a few goats that lived inside.

One mongrel we got to know in our very first year lived in a rusty oil drum, which it perched on during the day as a lookout post. (It had also discovered that by sticking its snout through a gap in the goat shed's timbers it could reach an udder and get a free drink of milk. A bright dog that deserved a better career than guarding goats.)

The other principal occupation for a Gomeran dog was, and still is, to go hunting with its master. This is a special, elite breed of dog capable of bounding across steep hillsides to flush out rabbits and partridges. There are strict controls on hunting: gun licences, quotas and restrictions, you can't go around blasting anything that moves. And the season is specified down to particular days and hours, so even these privileged dogs only get to enjoy life in brief bursts, but I suppose a few days' holiday a year is better than nothing at all.

Nobody in our early years here would have considered keeping a dog as a pet. Young Debora, daughter of a neighbour, dared to broach the idea of a puppy to her father and was told that if she wanted a dog it would live outside the house like any other animal and she'd have to find the money to feed it. She didn't get one. Well, not just then, anyway.

Gradually, however - and I'm not sure why this happened, perhaps it's a sign of increasing affluence - dogs began to creep into Gomeran life in new guises. Firstly came the big, tough breeds, the Alsatians and Dobermanns and mastiffs, which young men with tattooed arms would equip with spiked collars and weapons-grade steel chains to parade as fashion accessories.

Then the other kind of dog began to appear, the mascota or pet, the spoiled, fluffy creatures you can decorate with ribbons and sit on your lap to feed with cucumber sandwiches. These days most families get a canine mascota sooner or later, they're more popular than cats.





I could have done with a passing cat in the electrical retailer's shop, to divert the Alsatian's attention. Remembering survival guide advice to appear confident, I bid the slavering beast a cordial 'Buenos días,' good morning. It put its head on one side, apparently making some kind of judgement. Then it disappeared behind the counter.

While I was looking anxiously towards the storeroom door to see if the proprietor had noticed what was going on, I heard the dog's paws thump onto the counter again. Just in front of the paws there now lay a plastic carrot. Well chewed and lacking most of its upper leaves, but recognisably a carrot.

The Alsatian eased backwards a little and lowered its head towards its paws, the universal doggy gesture that means play!

I hesitated for a moment because this could be a trick, couldn't it? Victim moves forward, grasps the carrot and bingo! - another set of fingers to chalk up on the side of the kennel. But in those big brown eyes there now seemed to be a pleading, an anticipation. There was plenty of empty space behind the counter. I picked up the plastic carrot and threw it into a far corner. The dog jumped into the air, spinning round as it went, and skidded across the shiny floor tiles to retrieve it.

Carrot back on counter, brown eyes gazing at it expectantly, willing it to fly again. I picked it up and threw it towards the opposite corner.

This went on for several minutes until the owner finally arrived. 'Disculpe! Sorry. I had to pop out for a moment to...' He paused. 'Oh, he's got you doing that, has he? You'll be here all day.'

I purchased my electrical socket, wished dog and owner a good day and headed for the street. As I left I heard the cheerful plimp of a plastic carrot bouncing on a tiled floor.

The Three Dons

Don Carlos, Don Fernando and Don Salvador. They often played dominoes together, seated around a table in the shade of a palm tree. Or chatted over a glass of wine in a bar, snacking on jamón serrano, the famous Spanish cured ham which comes in expensive and distressingly thin slices.

Don and doña are terms of respect in Spanish, courtesy titles, much superior to the plain old señor and señora which simply mean Mr and Mrs. You can ascend to the title don or doña in various ways. The simplest is to open an account with an electricity company, because their monthly bills will address you thus. But this is just commercial toadying and not to be taken seriously.

More convincing is another common method, which is to become very old - or even more reliably, to die, when the obituaries in the local newspaper will award you the title posthumously.

Far more appealing as an approach, although much less easy to achieve, is to have lots of money. Our Three Dons all had lots of money.

We got to know Don Carlos on the beach. While we swam he walked briskly up and down the tideline in the sunshine, a dignified figure in bathing shorts and a big, prosperous belly. From initially nodding cheerfully to each other we progressed to pausing for a word or two, and gradually we learned a little more about him. Born on the island, he still owned property here but had married into business interests and a different way of life on the Península, the Spanish mainland. 'I come back here to relax,' he told us. 'Un pequeño paraíso.' A little Paradise. No argument there.

Don Carlos had a heart problem and had been told to take gentle exercise. The problem was something to do with swollen blood vessels - let's not be too gory - and although it was operable, the cardiologist had warned him there was a one-in-three chance of failure. 'One in three chances that they'll kill me!' he roared, outraged. Two in three that they wouldn't, then, but Don Carlos was clearly not a gambler and had decided just to cross his fingers and keep walking.

Maybe his friend Don Salvador played some role in this decision. He was a pharmacist, addressed as don perhaps from respect for his expertise, or his age, or more probably because like Don Carlos he had inherited property. By the time we met him he had retired, but he still lent a hand now and again in the pharmacy.

I went there one day with a sore back to ask if he knew anyone who could massage it better. 'There's a curandero,' replied Don Salvador, shrugging eloquently. A curandero is someone who claims to heal without being conventionally qualified.

Don Salvador could have tried to sell me pain-relief pills, but it turned out he also suffered from back pain and as a fellow sufferer, he showed me his cost-free solution. 'Look,' he said, coming around to the front of the counter. 'The best way to treat a sore back is this.'

Bending his legs, he leaned backwards against the edge of the counter, positioning it between two of the knobbles of his spine. Then he leaned back a little further and wriggled, like a brown bear rubbing its back on a pine trunk. 'Like this, you see?' Rising a little to position the counter edge between the next two knobbles, he wriggled again. Whether it was doing any good I've no idea but he was clearly enjoying it.

A while ago the town council installed some bright yellow exercise machines near the beach, one of which has a big rubber roller that achieves much the same effect. Any brown bear would love it.






And then there was Don Fernando. Who had a secret.

We got to know him a little better than the others through chatting in the bar of the Club Náutico, the Nautical Club, a pleasant venue half buried in a cave and not as grand as it sounds. 'We call you people the golondrinas,' he told us. The swallows, who arrive in winter and depart in spring, until some of us forget to fly off again.

A man of wit and wisdom, and also of great patience, Don Fernando listened to our baby Spanish with elegant politeness rather than hysterical laughter and occasionally helped us climb over a pronunciation hurdle. I can still hear and see him demonstrating Archipiélago Canario, the Canarian Archipelago, leaning forward for emphasis: 'Arr-chee-pee-AY-lago!'

Like his two friends, Don Fernando owned land and property, including a large farm in one of the island's many valleys where he, or rather his handful of loyal workers, grew bananas on a commercial scale. And avocados, oranges, grapes, apricots... anything will grow in this rich, volcanic soil, you just have to throw down a pip, spray a little water and stand back.

He invited us to call into the farm one day, which of course we did. 'Have a banana!' A banana picked yellow from the growing bunch is a revelation, rare and wonderful. For export the bunches are cut down while still green, because if you try to transport bananas already yellow they arrive looking like discarded work gloves from an oil rig.

At this stage Don Fernando didn't know us well enough to confess his secret. That came later, over a glass of wine or two in a restaurant. Eccentricity being not only permitted but expected of a don, he drank his wine from an ordinary glass tumbler as used for water: 'Much better than any wine glass, look at all that air above it for the bouquet!'

As our conversation progressed from the humdrum to deeper probings and the broader-sweep stuff about work, life and the Universe, he suddenly became pensive. 'Luck plays a big part in life.'

'Well yes, but you have to…'

'Do you know,' continued Don Fernando, lowering his voice, 'how I came to own my farm, all that land?' We had assumed it was inherited, but he shook his head. 'I have my wife to thank for that.'

'Ah, so the land was hers and…'

'No. I won the lottery. A big prize, mucho, muchísimo.' He mimed a huge bag of money, golden doubloons. 'I'd have spent the lot, wasted it,' he admitted with endearing honesty. 'Fortunately my wife had more sense and insisted I buy land. I couldn't see the point, but she was right. Look at it now.'

He topped up our glasses from the bottle. 'Sensible woman. Here's to my wife.' We clinked glasses.

'And also to health - salud! And happiness - felicidad!' And while we're at it, let's add luck as well - suerte! When you think about it, all you really need is luck.


--------------------------------------
A postscript for the pernickety
In English we capitalise the titles Don and Doña, whereas in Spanish they do not. Nor do they capitalise our Sir and Dame, which looks a bit odd, as in 'sir Francis Drake' or 'dame Maggie Smith'.

Whatever happened to Sebastian?

Foreign visitors, seeing things with fresh eyes and holiday-sharpened curiosity, are inclined to ask difficult questions. There is plenty of material here for difficult questions, just in the capital San Sebastián itself. For example:

What's that big tower thing in the park?
The first serious footprint of the Spanish Conquistadores - a military fort built around 1450 as a refuge against attacks by the island's native population, the guanches. (This turned out to be a sensible precaution.)

Who is Cristóbal Colón, and why is there so much fuss about him here?
The adventurer we know as Christopher Columbus, for whom La Gomera was the last port of call before sailing on to discover the Americas. Mind you, he discovered them many thousands of years later than the people already living there. And local tittle-tattle claims that while staying in La Gomera he launched a torrid affair with a certain Beatriz de Bobadilla, who at that time ruled the island in a style much like Margaret Thatcher's.

We now have trained tour guides able to cope with all this stuff, but it's the off-the-cuff questions for the rest of us that cause problems. A foreign visitor who really stirred things up many years ago was my mother, who had spread her winter wings to join us for a couple of weeks. On a visit to view the effigy of San Sebastián (Saint Sebastian) in his little chapel, she spotted the one thing that's really strange about him and that nobody here ever mentions. (Actually there are two strangenesses, but I'll come to the second one later.)

We couldn't answer her question ourselves so later that day, while chatting to our neighbour Isabel in the evening sunshine, we asked her what she knew about Saint Sebastian.

'He's the santo patrón, the patron saint of the town.' Well yes, but what we really wanted to know - what my mother wanted to know - was why he'd got little arrows stuck all over him.

Isabel was a genuine dyed-in-the-wool Gomeran, born in the village and lived here all her life, but this was something she'd never thought about. Couldn't explain it. No idea.

She called up reinforcements in the shape of her husband Víctor who was sitting in the shade cutting seed potatoes into single-eyed pieces. He too could shed no light on Saint Sebastian's arrows, and didn't seem too bothered about it. But the fact is that no Spaniard, and still less a Canarian, finds it easy to admit they don't know something then just let it go. At the very least they will have an opinion, inventing one on the spot if necessary.

'Has to be something to do with South America,' Víctor decided. 'The Indians. He was a missionary in South America and got killed by natives with bows and arrows. Obviously. No?'

He looked at us for approval of this scenario. A very likely one: many Catholic missionaries came to grief one way or another in the Americas. Many others made vast fortunes one way or another in the Americas, but that's a different issue.

'Venezuela,' Víctor added, fleshing out the theory.

'They don't have Indians in Venezuela,' objected his wife. Many Gomerans still have relatives in Caracas, descendants of those who fled there during the long, terrible years of the Franco regime, and none of them have ever ended up pierced with arrows.

Víctor waved a seed potato dismissively. 'Well, wherever. Colombia. Peru. Ask the priest.'

In those days there was a weekly service in our village's chapel, an evening Mass, and my mother had already decided she would like to take part. She couldn't speak a word of Spanish but was very good at smiling, which is really all you need in order to make friends. Neither had she been to a Catholic Mass before, but the local ladies took charge of her and presumably (I wasn't there) prompted her to stand, sit or kneel as necessary. Judging by the photo I took of them all afterwards, she had a great time.

The priest was able to speak to her in English, which must have greatly impressed his little flock, but it was a big mistake because this evident rapport emboldened Isabel to ask the question: 'This lady wants to know why Saint Sebastian has got arrows stuck all over him.'

I suspect that the priest wasn't altogether sure of his ground about this. He reportedly fielded the question to the other ladies and was duly shocked when it turned out that none of them had the faintest idea. They tried a few guesses, the consensus favouring Víctor's South American theory. Sebastian had achieved his martyrdom as a missionary in the dark, dangerous rainforests of the Americas.

No. This would not do, the priest scolded. This would not do at all! Saint Sebastian was the patron saint of the island's capital yet nobody in this village knew what had happened to him? He promised to give them a sermon about it the following week. (Which - I'm being unkind! - would give him chance to refresh his memory about the details. I recall this ploy from my early incarnation as a teacher.)

By the time he gave his sermon my Mum had already flown back to the British winter, and when we asked our neighbours about it they had forgotten much of what the priest had told them. But in brief, it had nothing to do with South America. It was all the fault of the Romans and was actually a little less romantic than the arrows suggest. For those with a thirst for knowledge I have appended a summary below.

But equally interesting is the other strangeness about Saint Sebastian. We got this from a volunteer guide in a church in Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the north of Spain, which houses effigies not only of Sebastian but of many others of his saintly companions.

Here it is: San Sebastián is the only Catholic saint to be depicted near-naked, apart from Jesus Christ himself. He wears a modest loincloth, a bit of drapery, but nothing else. Some versions have him handsome and virile in Michelangelo style, while in others he appears more vulnerable and approachable. Our local version is - well, almost cuddly, and the arrows don't seem to hurt at all. Perfectly suited to the island he lives on, and what can be wrong with that?


The legend of Saint Sebastian
A slightly mysterious figure, Saint Sebastian. Nobody seems to know much about his early years except that he may have been born in southern France but was educated in Milan. He joined the Roman army in 283 AD (I've no idea how we know this so precisely) and did so well at soldiering that he was promoted to the Praetorian Guard of Emperor Diocletian.

Unfortunately, Sebastian was also a clandestine evangelist who converted many of his comrades and local dignitaries to Christianity. Emperor Diocletian was notoriously intolerant of Christians and when he found out, he sentenced Sebastian to an exemplary punishment: he was roped to a stake and used for target practice by the archers.

Astonishingly, although riddled with arrows he survived and was rescued by a fellow Christian, a woman called Irene, who nursed him back to health. So far so good, but at this point the story turns even uglier. Once recovered, Sebastian boldly but foolishly confronted Diocletian in public, haranguing him for his persecution of Christians. The emperor had him clubbed to death, this time successfully, and his body was thrown into the Roman sewers.

Another Christian woman, Lucina, recovered the corpse and he ended up decently buried in the catacombs beneath Rome, from where, some time later, the remains were distributed as relics to various Catholic sites around Europe.

Sebastian is now the patron saint of soldiers, athletes and - bizarrely - archers. He is also credited with protective powers against the plague, which derives from ancient beliefs that this disease was hurled down as arrows from the sky by angry gods. Sometimes these things get a bit muddled.

How they stopped the hooting

 A well-heeled gentleman called Don Antonio González Martín launched the invasion way back in the early 1920s, proudly importing the very first. It was unloaded from a ship at the quay near Vallehermoso, in the north of the island, dangling inelegantly for a while from the pescante, the dockside crane, before settling its wheels gently and irrevocably on the ground. Probably to excited cheering and throwing of caps into the air.

Don Antonio couldn't do very much with his new car because there were no roads to drive it along. The only highways were the narrow, stone-paved donkey paths called caminos reales which wriggled their way along the hills and valleys. He reportedly made a few pesetas by giving people paid joyrides around the town in the first car they'd ever seen. (In a nice irony, tourists can now get a paid ride around San Sebastián, the island's capital, in a horse-drawn carriage.)

Less than a hundred years later, the four-wheeled invaders had multiplied to the point where they were causing serious headaches for the Traffic and Road Signage team of San Sebastián's Ayuntamiento, the Town Council.

I imagine Señor Enrique, let's call him, talking one day to his young assistant: 'You hear that, José?' Nodding towards the window.

'Hear what, Enrique?'

'The hooting.' Somewhere in the distance a car horn is blaring, pausing, blaring again with increasing desperation. 'That, José, is the sound of failure.'

'It's just someone who can't move their car because some other blighter's blocked them in.'

'Exactamente!' shouts Enrique. 'Exactly! People park wherever they want. If there's no space they park anyway. They just stop the car, get out and leave it. Blocking those already parked, blocking the traffic. It's chaos. It's anarchy.' Enrique waves a finger menacingly towards his assistant. 'This fine and ancient town has become nothing more than a huge, messy car park. It cannot go on, José. Think of something.'

Within a week, José has the solution. They will paint lines along every road in the town to guide correct parking behaviour - white for 'Yes you can, sometimes', yellow for 'No you can't, except perhaps on Sundays', and zig-zags for 'Don't even think of it'.

'José.' A couple of weeks later.

'Enrique?'

'Nobody is paying the slightest attention to your paint, José. They still park anywhere they like. The yellow no-parking lines are already beginning to wear off from being scrubbed by tyres.'

Gomerans are a proud and independent people, not noted for docile obedience. José sighs and reluctantly has to admit, there is only one answer. 'We'll have to enforce it.'

'Do what?'

'Fine them. If they park on a yellow line you stick a multa, a parking ticket, under their windscreen wiper.' José once spent two weeks in Madrid on a student exchange scheme.

But this seems to Enrique a somewhat dismal idea - and in any case, where will they find a Gomeran prepared to stick a parking ticket on a car they know perfectly well belongs to Uncle Manolo, their neighbour Juana or their third cousin Alberto from up the valley?

I'm not sure how the next step happened, the escalation, but I don't believe anyone here would have proposed it seriously. A traffic management adviser from Gran Canaria, perhaps, or Barcelona.

People laughed in disbelief when they saw the newly-installed parking meters. Little boys found them great to swing around, whooping. Dogs loved them. People hung their jackets on them conveniently while they locked up their car for the day.

The Ayuntamiento responded robustly by employing uniformed strangers from Tenerife to apply penalty tickets.

'José.'

'Enrique?'

'Do you know what we found in the Council letterbox this morning?'

'Umm...'

'A large pile of parking tickets. All torn in half.'

The parking meters rusted and died.

José, being a resourceful young man, set about analysing traffic flow to see what could be done statistically, logistically or geographically to ease the bottlenecks and discourage antisocial parking. He came up with a clever rerouting strategy involving the extensive application of one-way streets, No Entry signs and white arrows painted on the road at approaches to junctions.

I remember discussing the results of this with Lorenzo, who lives near the centre of town. The main problem was that nobody knew how to get anywhere. 'You need a lookout standing on the car bonnet,' Lorenzo complained, shielding his eyes like a sailor peering through the storm. 'Junction coming up, left turn at fifty metres! Straight ahead for a bit... sharp right here... whoops, it's no entry, back up, back up!'

It took only a couple of months before the signs were removed and the white arrows painted out. Then followed a long, injured pause while nothing happened.

Or nothing seemed to be happening. In reality, José was incubating a final, draconian solution to the town's traffic problems.

'Say again, José?'

'Remove the cars, Enrique. Keep them out altogether.'

'You surely can't be suggesting...'

'Install traffic barriers. Pedestrians only. Replace the asphalt with paving stones, ornamental trees, benches for the elderly. Return the streets to the people.' Flushed and excited, José feels he is on the verge of making history.

Others feel the Council has lost its sanity. Public consultations are characterised by impassioned soliloquys about urban dictatorship, misuse of public funds and the foolish idealism of woolly-hat environmentalists.

In every bar and café along the proposed pedestrianisation routes are heard howls of rage and protest, mostly from the proprietors. 'People park outside here to pop in for a quick coffee and a sandwich. This lot are trying to put me out business!'

This is the nub of the problem, of course: people habitually park outside everywhere just to pop in. To snatch a quick coffee or beer, to buy their newspaper or groceries, to check their lottery winnings... This is precisely what José is trying to combat.

He is helped by the known principle that outrageously bold and expensive schemes are always much easier to fund than pussy-footed tinkering. Europe steps in and gives José all the money he needs. The big yellow diggers arrive and the town's main shopping street becomes a nightmare of mud, trenches and wobbly little bridges.

When the diggers finally move out again, and teams of extraordinarily patient artisans finish the job by laying little blocks to cover every square centimetre, the street is unrecognisable.

It looks wider and brighter. It's strangely quiet. A lingering scent of fresh cement has replaced the acrid stench of car exhausts.

Over the following weeks and months, slowly, timidly, café tables begin to spread into the street from their doorways. People take to strolling to browse the shop windows. In the evenings they stroll to do nothing much at all.

Something magical has happened. The place has begun to look like Paris.

Meanwhile the cars get parked tidily in new parking spaces on the outskirts. Nobody has to hoot any more, and people perhaps feel a little fitter from having to walk a few metres.

Not long afterwards, the other main street gets pedestrianised as well.

Urban Design magazine devotes an entire issue to the extraordinary success of this visionary scheme, José lands a top job in the Traffic Planning department of Torremolinos and Enrique is voted Spanish Civil Administration Man of the Year.


There's a touch of poetic licence in all this, I admit (with grovelling apologies to the Ayuntamiento de San Sebastián). But it's wonderful when a bold, controversial and ridiculously expensive scheme turns out to be a really good idea.

The thing on the beach

Down at the end of the beach Blasina was poking something with a long stick. Gingerly, as though it might spring up and bite.

We placed the beach towels in our usual spot and prepared for the morning swim. By the time we were organised Blasina had been joined by a couple more people, one of whom had taken charge of the poking stick. Nobody seemed prepared to get too close to whatever it was.

Naturally, I wandered over to see what was going on. As a general rule this is poor survival strategy - if there's something that needs poking with a stick it's best to walk away rather than towards. However, wildlife on this benign little island is mostly of the cuddly or edible kind. There are a few biting flies but nothing you need to fend off with a chair.

From a distance, the thing on the beach looked like a mound of wet, brown liver. Close up, it still looked like a mound of wet, brown liver. Blasina nodded in greeting as I joined the group, now grown to half a dozen onlookers. One of the Council workers weeding the roadside flower beds had arrived with a rake and sickle in hand, but Blasina warded him off. 'Está vivo,' she told him, it's alive.

Another of the regular swimmers, a lady with more courage than caution, took up a large flat pebble and began investigating the pile of liver more closely. She tried to prise it open. It unfolded a little but retracted as soon as the pebble left it alone.

There followed one of those uncomfortable interludes in which everyone waits for someone else to do something. Living creatures do get washed up on the island's beaches occasionally, but it's not a regular occurrence and people usually call the Guardia Civil to come and sort things out. They would contact one of the organisations that specialise in relaunching stranded dolphins or offering comfort to confused baby gulls.

On this occasion, however, nobody seemed inclined to call the Guardia Civil and inform them there was a pile of wet brown liver on the beach.

Distressingly often, what gets washed up if it's lucky, or more probably sinks without fuss to the bottom of the ocean, is a creature that has mistaken a plastic bag for a jellyfish and eaten it. Turtles do that. So do some of the fish. They eat the plastic and it clogs up their innards, slowly killing them.

And despite the best efforts of the Council's cleanup squads it's not uncommon to see an escaped supermarket bag flying out to sea on a gusting northerly wind, a lethal kite waiting to kill a turtle. Which is why I have developed a mild obsession for trying to catch them. 'Look mummy, there's that man who chases plastic bags and crisp packets!'

But I'm not the only one. (John Lennon, Imagine). There are other beach regulars who will try to retrieve any floating plastic bags or bottles they come across, to deposit them safely in a waste bin.

In sharp contrast, I once watched someone's beach umbrella flying seawards on those same northerly winds. It briefly touched down just in front of a lady, a foreign visitor, who was doing her anti-cholesterol march along the shoreline. She avoided the umbrella and marched on, leaving it to tumble into the sea and set off towards Tenerife floating handle-up like a coracle. The owner plunged in and managed to catch it, but the point of this story is, how could anyone...

What? Oh right, the thing on the beach. Another Council worker, older, wiser and probably a weekend fisherman, bent over the glistening lump, unfolded it carefully with a gloved hand, stood up and pronounced: 'It's a choco.' A cuttlefish.

I can recognise a choco when I see it on my dinner plate but it doesn't look anything like that. Perhaps because this one was much bigger than anything a restaurant would serve up, and its tentacles were hidden somewhere underneath, and it had covered itself in brown ink.

In fact it could have been just about any kind of squid because nearly all of them will squirt ink when feeling anxious, in shades ranging from deep black or bluish to the dull brown of this one.

How had it got itself into such a predicament? Chasing something smaller, that cleverly led it into the shallows? Fleeing from something bigger out there in the bay? Or was it, perhaps, unwisely tempted by a plastic-bag jellyfish floating among the breakers?

The Council guys moved in with spades and an empty fertilizer bag. With great care, they manoeuvred the thing onto the bag then transported it back to its home environment, wading knee-deep to gently release it. I didn't see it swim away but neither did it wash up on the beach again, so let's hope it lived happily ever after.