Javier is one of the regular swimmers, retired but spritely, who plunges in every morning for his half-hour of backstroke even when the sea temperature falls to gasping point, which in La Gomera is about 18º Celsius. In Scandinavia they don't gasp until it's down to 2º, but all suffering is relative.
Holidays are an excuse to celebrate, we agree, but what's a GP?
'A GP?' answers Javier, surprised. 'Well, you know, a gin pink.' He likes trying out his English.
A pink gin, we suggest. Okay, a pink gin, he accepts. PG. Gin with tonic water and a dash of Angostura. 'The Angostura,' asserts Javier, 'is very important. Very warming after a swim. Do you know it?'
We do, yes. Angostura bitters. 'The name,' he continues - no Gomeran is going to be deterred from telling a good story - 'comes from Venezuela, a town on the Orinoco where the river becomes very narrow, which is angosto in Spanish, and the place where it happens is the angostura, you see? So they named the town Angostura.''So that's where Angostura bitters come from?'
'Exactly! Angostura is where they first made it. And do you know who introduced me to the gin pink? Sorry, pink gin?'
'Max?' we guess, not all that cleverly.
'Señor Max. Correcto!' We part smiling, to warm up over our respective beverages.
Max had discovered La Gomera many years before we did and he came here regularly every winter, staying in an apartment block run by Javier. Inevitably in this small town we used to encounter Max in the street but by mutual agreement we all wore invisibility cloaks. For our part, we wanted to know Gomerans, not elderly and aristocratic Englishmen, while Max had already cultivated his circle of well-to-do locals whom he invited to cocktails at the Nautical Club or to dinner at one of the smarter restaurants.
However, foreigners anywhere will always end up talking to each other no matter how resolutely they resist. Our relationship with Max gradually evolved over several years to a polite 'good morning' as we passed in the street then a brief pause for a few words of small talk.
Eventually we found ourselves joining him for a drink in the Club or a local bar and even spending an hour or two with him over dinner. This was truly astonishing because we should have loathed each other. From our perspective he was an appalling man, racist, elitist, narrow, bigoted, choose your favourite President Trump descriptor and it would fit Max. But for some reason we got on fine. You had to understand the background he was coming from - a moneyed family of the kind whose sons would be placed into banking, the army or the church, in that order, while the girls were offloaded into good marriages. Max ended up as the Colonel of an Indian regiment.
You couldn't blame him for any of that, and his heart was in the right place. He had a twinkle in his eye and for that I can forgive a lot. We took to teasing each other. 'Reading El País, that Communist rag?' he would roar on a Sunday. El País is a mildly socialist Spanish newspaper with a similar stance to the Guardian in Britain. We shared an interest in books but in those days he was way ahead of us in being able to read a Spanish novel for pleasure rather than for homework. 'Only problem is,' he complained, 'whenever I learn a new word from a novel, I try it out on my Spanish friends and they've never damn-well heard of it!'
This might have had something to do with his accent. His Spanish was impressively fluent but delivered with a wonderfully upper-class English twang. A few words, even in Spanish, were enough to place him among the Surrey mock-Tudor mansions and Sunday afternoon bridge.
He was also very large and very loud. Spotting us in a restaurant one evening he strode in and immediately filled the room. He stood beside our table to bellow a lengthy story about a visitor who'd just broken a leg by falling off a rock - 'silly blighter, geology's completely unsuitable for climbing' - before sweeping out again with a cheery farewell. In the silence that followed his exit, an English diner at the next table whispered 'Is he real?'
Max's favourite tipple was Spanish brandy, which his doctor had warned him not to drink too freely because it thinned the blood and he was already taking an anticoagulant. He solved this dilemma by taking less of the anticoagulant. A day or two before one of his regular check-ups he would reduce his brandy intake and take the proper dose of anticoagulant so everything would look okay in his blood analysis. I'm fairly sure this was both misguided and dangerous, but it worked for Max. He survived his full term. One winter he informed us that he was expecting to die at the age of 86, because that's when everyone in his family died. A couple of years later he died, at the age of 86. We received a letter from his family to tell us he'd gone.
We still miss him. So does Javier, who got on with him just as well as we did. But Max lives on in fond memory and his splendid legacy of the gin pink.
Notes for the serious student
Diligent research reveals that Javier's pre-lunch drink is not a pink gin but a pink gin-and-tonic. The authentic PG comprises only gin and a dash of Angostura bitters which further increases the alcohol as well as the flavour. Traditionally it should be made with Plymouth gin, which is hard to come by these days and impossible in La Gomera, but if you're not too fussy there's a wide choice of other brands.
The town of Angostura in Venezuela is now called Ciudad Bolívar, which is the fault of a Venezuelan aristocrat called Simón Bolívar who played a leading role in throwing the Spaniards out of South America. Even more disappointingly it hasn't produced Angostura bitters since 1875, when the company relocated to Trinidad.
The product itself is reputed to contain some 40 ingredients, none of which includes anything from the angostura tree, not even the bark. So now it's just a brand name based on ancient history, but so are Marmite, Hoover and the House of Windsor.
