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.