Wheels

Ah, what it is to be young!

Agony and uncertainty, a lot of the time. For example, the other day we watched a young boy trying to impress a member of the opposite sex. He was a local lad while she was a visiting foreigner, a German, seated outside a café with the rest of the family. He began by pausing briefly near her table on his motorbike. She ignored him, so he then tried zooming past at speed. At his first pass she looked up with a flicker of interest, so he skidded around and zoomed back the other way. At the third pass she smiled and tentatively waved a hand. He was doing well!

After a few minutes of this, with things progressing nicely, the girl’s family decided enough was enough and grandad took her off for a walk around the plaza. She was around three years old, her suitor something similar, and his motorbike was one of those plastic things you sit astride while crouching low in the proper motormaniac way. He had to propel it with his feet but could do a convincing turn of speed and authentic skid-turns on his wide plastic tyres.

But now he had to watch as his potential conquest disappeared, although she did look back a little wistfully as she went. He was left there with nothing to do, feeling a bit silly. He dismounted from his motorbike, flipped it upside down and banged the underneath of it with his fist.

‘Problems with the engine?’ I suggested.

‘No.’ He banged it again just to be sure, flipped it the right way up and zoomed off somewhere else, confidence renewed.

If only it were always that easy. Soon he’ll have a real bike and more complex relationships to deal with. Perhaps his next step in that direction will be a patinete, the old-fashioned foot-propelled scooter that has staged a revival in recent years. Most of the local kids have one, sometimes the modern three-wheeled variant where you perch on a V-shaped frame and waggle your legs from side to side to keep it moving. A skilled rider can go almost as fast as the three-year old on his motorbike. Terrific exercise for kids, but I doubt if I could manage more than a couple of waggles before putting my back out.

Not so good healthwise are the two-wheeled, self-balancing hoverboards you stand on to be effortlessly transported by electric traction. These landed on San Sebastián’s main plaza a couple of years ago as catastrophically as a Dalek invasion, the first big wave being on the sixth of January after the annual visit by the Three Kings who do the job of Father Christmas here. Fortunately the invaders seem to have succumbed to some fatal disease - always a risk for aliens (see The war of the worlds by HG Wells) - because there are very few of them still around.

Or perhaps it’s not so fortunate because they seem to be reincarnated as electric scooters. This is potentially an even more serious threat because they appeal to adults at least as much as children. On my cycle route home I’m now regularly overtaken by an e-scooter whooshing silently by, its rider poised as upright and elegant as an emperor on a chariot.

They’re surprisingly capable, these things. One of the cruise ships that calls into San Sebastián offers its passengers guided tours into the hills on electric bicycles, but another has recently started doing the same thing with electric scooters. They set off from the port in a long line, all wearing helmets but otherwise a motley collection of riders from teenagers to old men with beards. Hands grasping their narrow handlebars, they glide silently through the streets in military convoy and out into the hills like some weird beings from an old surrealist movie or an early Doctor Who.

An admission: I’d quite like an e-scooter.

I don’t need it and couldn’t justify it but they do look like fun. Although not, I would think, something to go for if you’re trying to impress the girls because any skid-turn or other masterly flourish is likely to send rider and scooter spinning in opposite directions. Perhaps I won’t bother.

NOTES

for the serious student

We’ve seen an increasing variety of e-transport in San Sebastián in recent years including adult versions of the two-wheeled hoverboard and even the futuristic single-wheeled e-wheel. It’s just a wheel.

But it’s the electric scooters that have really blossomed - and with them, the number of complaints from pedestrians. The Ayuntamiento, the town council, recently issued a reminder about correct behaviour. You mustn’t go faster than 10 kilometres an hour (about 6mph) on a pavement and you must keep at least 1 metre away from pedestrians or the facades of buildings. You must not perform any manoeuvre that might put pedestrians at risk (such as, I suppose, attempting skid-turns, jump-turns or wheelies). If in doubt, the correct way to get around with an e-scooter is to carry it. Umm… doesn’t that rather… well, okay. Pedestrian safety comes first.

These excellent guidelines are likely to prove only temporary because in mainland Spain there have been a lot of accidents involving e-scooters - some 300 in 2018 - and new regulations will soon come into force throughout the country, including here. You will no longer be able to ride your e-scooter at all on a public pavement. All such ‘personal mobility’ devices will be considered vehicles, just like cars and motorbikes. On roads the maximum speed will be 25 kilometres an hour and you could be fined if caught riding while using a mobile phone.

This all sounds very sensible and reasonable. Rather more so than the British approach which currently bans you from riding your e-scooter on public roads as well as pavements, limiting you to pootling around on your private airfield or country estate.

The impossible romance

Young, lovely and a little daft and dreamy like so many girls of her age, she gazed wistfully at the big island just across the water. The high peak that soared skywards through the clouds, strangely white at the top and especially in winter, turned to flaming gold when lit by the setting sun. There were stories of it spitting fire and smoke in the past and, although she had never seen that, she had seen faint lights lower down, small fires burning nearer the coast, so she knew there were people living there.

Were they like her own folk, the guanches, or different altogether? Perhaps more handsome. Especially the young men. She fantasised that among them was a prince who would somehow find his way across the water, take her into his arms and sweep her into a glorious future. Who would save her from the imminent marriage her father - the local chieftain - had arranged, to the son of a tribal chieftain from another canton. A prince if you like but small, ugly and terribly boring.

Meanwhile, over on the Island of the White Peak, the youngest son of the mencey or ruler of the Adeje canton watched the dazzling sunset outlining the low, dark shape of the Mysterious Island and felt that it was trying to tell him something. He was stifled by his life at home, keen for adventure and, like so many boys of his age, stupid enough to do almost anything. He fantasised about swimming across to that intriguing island... but a shred of sanity warned him he’d never make it.

Everything changed during the autumn Beñesmen celebrations, the most important fiestas of the year, celebrating the annual harvest. Music, dancing, games, wine and copious quantities of food. It was the roasting of the goats that gave him the idea. Rescuing a discarded bladder from one of the slaughtered animals, he cleaned it, tied it at one end, inflated it then tied a knot at the open end to contain the air.

He’d learned this trick as a kid! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Preparing two more bladders to be quite sure, he crept away unnoticed from the evening’s celebrations, tied the bladders around his chest, waded into the sea and set off with purposeful strokes towards the island.

The next morning the young princess spotted a figure sprawled on the beach as though washed up by the sea. She ran down to investigate, turned the body over and saw that it was a young man, and still alive. Pulling off three limp bladders and some seaweed dangling from his chest she patted his cheeks gently to try and revive him.

His eyes opened, and they were beautiful eyes. He smiled a little, and it was a beautiful smile. They fell instantly in love with each other.

At first the girl’s family were impressed by the young newcomer’s feat in crossing the water and treated him with respect, gave him food and shelter to restore his strength. He spoke their language, although a bit strangely, and everything was fine for a few days until the princess announced that she was cancelling her previously arranged engagement and would be marrying this new man instead. Seeing their darkening expressions she argued tearfully ‘He’s a prince! And I love him!’

An urgent council of elders from the two families involved rapidly agreed that breaking her engagement and marrying a foreigner was way out of line, that the young man had clearly abused the hospitality of his hosts and that he would have to go, one way or another. Find him at once, bring him here and we’ll pass sentence!

Nobody knew where he was that morning but there were suspicions. He and the princess had gone into hiding. She was well in tune with local customs and had quickly realised they were both in deep trouble.

‘What’s that whistling? What are they saying?’ whispered the prince. His young lover, arms wrapped around him as they lay among the shrubs outside the village, interpreted for him the silbo, the whistling language: they were searching for the foreigner from the Island of the White Peak.

They ran further inland, towards the high ground. ‘They’ll kill you,’ she warned him. ‘And if they do, I’ll kill myself too.’ This is love, in its purest and most desperate form. Why does everybody have to die? Couldn’t they all just sit down and discuss things…? But no, the young couple kept running and the pursuers kept pursuing, and finally the two lovers reached the very top of the highest mountain with nowhere else to go while the whistling came closer, the instructions to go this way, go that…

‘We’ll die together,’ said the princess, being fatally young and consumed by her fantasy. ‘If I can’t be with you in life, I’ll be with you in death.’

The prince, being also terribly young, broke a thin stick from a cedar tree, took a sharp stone and scraped a point at each end of the stick, then explained to his lover what they must do. As the sounds of pursuit came closer - ‘There they are!’ - they wedged the sharpened stick between them, heart to heart, wrapped their arms around each other and drew themselves into a final embrace.

Her name was Gara. His name was Jonay. The peak where they died together is now the Pico de Garajonay and all around it is the wonderful Parque de Garajonay, an unspoiled wilderness of ancient laurel forest and a living testament to the power of undying love.

NOTES

for the serious student

There are many versions of this legend, some very different although they all end in tragedy. This one seems to be the favourite and we first heard it from a local enthusiast for everything guanche - so much so that as a young man he invented a guanche name for himself and announced to friends, family and colleagues that he would respond only to this new name. Thirty years later he’s still known only by his guanche name.

As for the legend - well, as with most legends, it’s a charming if sad story but not to be taken too seriously. In the original guanche language garajonay simply meant a high rocky outcrop or hill, and as this is the highest hill on La Gomera it would be a logical name for it.

But let’s not spoil things. The legend lives on in the form of real people. There are girls and women called Gara in every one of the Canary Islands and in many parts of mainland Spain, something over 1,000 in all. Jonay is even more popular with over 2,000 boys and men named after the legendary hero. They’re both lovely names and clearly linked to the island they came from. I dedicate this account to all the world’s Garas and Jonays.

We'll find you wherever you are

On the beach, getting changed for the morning swim. This is one of the benefits of retirement and a small recompense for having grown old enough to retire. Swimming is excellent exercise and exercise seems to be the nearest thing anybody has yet found to an Elixir of Life.

I’m on the point of skipping youthfully towards the waves when my mobile phone rings, somewhere deep inside a pile of clothing in a plastic bag.

I manage to dig it out before it stops ringing. ‘Hola?’ This is not the proper way to answer a phone call in Spanish, you’re supposed to say ‘Diga!’ which means ‘Talk!’ but I can’t bring myself to do that, it sounds like some evil mobster in a third-rate American thriller.

At the other end of the line, the caller responds equally politely: ‘Hola! Peter?’

‘Sí…?’ I reply, slightly suspiciously. If it’s a political survey, or Movistar trying to sell me a new monthly plan for all-day TV football, or anyone from a call centre in India, I’m not available.

It isn’t though, it’s the local postman. ‘Dónde estás?’ where are you, he wants to know. On the beach, I tell him. About to swim. Wait just a momentito, he instructs, he has a parcel for me. A couple of minutes later he buzzes up the beach road on his bright yellow motor scooter, grinning cheerfully beneath his bright yellow crash helmet as he dismounts.

Reaching into the big yellow box at the back of the scooter, he extracts a small parcel and leans over the wall to hand it to me. It’s a DVD from Amazon. ‘Momentito!’ A moment more. The sun is warming my back, the cool waves whisper invitingly on the shoreline.

The postman produces a little electronic gadget with a screen where I must sign to confirm receipt, preferably without dropping it into the sand. This is La Gomera demonstrating that it’s right up there with today’s cutting-edge technology. You’re supposed to sign using a special plastic stylus but I’ve never met a postperson who hasn’t already lost their stylus so I have to sign with the tip of my finger, creating a chimpanzee squiggle much like everyone else’s.

But there you are, parcel delivered and certified, sender and receiver both happy, job done. This is far more convenient for everyone than the traditional ‘Failure to Deliver’ note in our postbox which would mean a trip to the Correos, Post Office, to pick up the parcel. I wonder if the postman should perhaps ask for proof of identity before handing over mail away from the destination address, but given that we wave to each other most days when passing on the road into town, why would he need to do that?

A new assistant in the Post Office once asked to see my passport when I turned up to collect a parcel after we’d been away for a few days. The other assistant looked slightly embarrassed and so did a local postman who happened to be behind the counter. I hadn’t got my passport with me, of course. ‘They both know me,’ I pointed out, indicating the other two.

‘Maybe, but I don’t,’ the new guy told me severely. He had recently arrived here from mainland Spain. We reached a compromise in which he grudgingly accepted my driving licence as proof of identity. The next time we met he greeted me as an old friend and made a joke about this incident. It takes time to understand how things are on this little island.

For a while we had an armed guard stationed in the Post Office, presumably as specified in new instructions from Spanish headquarters, but she soon got so bored with standing around trying to look fierce that she took to helping out behind the counter. She has now moved on to do something more useful.

If there’s any significance to be gleaned from all this, perhaps it’s that sometimes small communities work better than large ones. As long as you’re not fifteen years old and keen for adventure and all-night parties, when everything you get up to will be public knowledge by the next day. For me this is only good. At the moment. Ask me again when I’m further along the road towards second childhood.

NOTES

for the serious student

The Post Office - the building itself - is strictly the Oficina de Correos but everyone calls it the Correos. In June 2019 the (state-owned) company Correos introduced a new imagen de marca, logo, much like the old one but simplified, more modern, more adaptable and more digital in flavour. More in tune therefore with los tiempos nuevos, the new times, the new era.

Presumably the word correos derives from correr, to run, which gives a fine sense of urgency and speed. It wasn’t always like that. One of the neighbours in our early years here, a pensioner, told us that his father used to be a postman and delivered letters by donkey. He and his donkey had to trek huge distances on rough mountain footpaths because there weren’t any roads. There wasn’t very much post either, of course.

Goats, sheep and a puzzle

In the coach, just in front of a notice specifying (in English) NO EAT / NO DRINK, Jorge was handing out mini plastic beakers of his home-made cocktail. Sniffing it cautiously, I guessed ‘Gomerón?’ This is a popular and probably ancient Gomeran liquor, a simple blending of the delicious and unquestionably healthy miel de palma - palm syrup, a Gomeran speciality - with the slightly more suspect parra, the local version of vodka or grappa. Parra is entirely safe in small quantities, I’m sure, but is best treated with respect like any other strong spirit. What my mini beaker contained was, Jorge agreed, pretty much gomerón but with added secret ingredients.

It was nice, and it got us all off to a lively start on this, the final outing of the Asociación de Vecinos, our Neighbours’ Association. All good things come to an end (why? why do they always do that, dammit?) and for more than ten years our association had been sustained by just three active executives. They’d all had enough of the organising, the phone calls, the accounting and the paperwork (we were subsidised by the town council), and nobody else was prepared to take over. Ho-humm. So we had a farewell tour of the island, to see what had changed since the last time anyone toured around it, but mainly to be together in a bus for one more time.

This story is not really about the coach trip, however, it’s about goats. And sheep. Jorge not only makes an excellent hooch for private consumption, he also produces goat cheese for sale in shops and supermarkets. During one of several convivial breaks on the coach trip I asked him how his cabras, goats, were getting on - his farm is some distance from the village - because the last time we talked he’d been a bit stressed, with over 200 goats dependant upon on him for their survival and vice-versa. He’d reduced them, he told me, now had just 50, which was much more manageable. The more goats, the more staff you need. More profit perhaps, but also more problems. At our time of life we can do without problems.

He and his wife still had to be up at seven in the morning to do the milking. They don’t actually do it by hand these days, seated on little wooden stools as in fairy tales, but someone still has to plug all those wobbling udders into a milking machine.

Perhaps in time a new breed of self-plugging goat will evolve. They’re astonishing creatures. A farmer across the valley sometimes releases his small flock to run wild on the hillsides, and these little creatures prance around on near-vertical slopes as though held by natural magnetism like souvenirs on a fridge door. They all tinkle prettily because sometimes they decide to abscond from home and the tinkling bells give more hope of recapturing them. Some earlier escapees from around the island have gone wild, which is a little troubling for the council because if left alone they’d eat the landscape down to bare rock.

On a different occasion altogether I asked another villager, Feli, why he kept sheep instead of goats. He has five of them, which potter around in the fields and the river bed finding things to eat while he sits casually watching with his dog at his feet. He keeps ovejas, he told me, because cabras are a pain. For a start, they’ll eat anything at all, and just try and stop them once they’ve started on a neighbour’s courgettes or strawberries. Furthermore, at the drop of a hat or a goatly whim they’ll be off into the distance. Unreliable, goats. Difficult. Sheep are tranquil, they give you no bother. Yet ewes give you milk just like goats, and quite a lot of it - upwards of a couple of litres a day at full flow - from which you can make cheese. Ewe’s milk produces a softer and creamier cheese than goat’s, and some Canary farmers produce a blended cheese using both.

Gomeran goat cheese was on the menu for lunch, of course, on our final outing as an Asociación de Vecinos, when we took over most of a restaurant somewhere in the middle of the island. Then we travelled on, up, down and around, until the sun sank wearily in the sky and we all tumbled out to go home.

‘We shouldn’t just finish like this,’ I suggested to Jorge. ‘We could carry on organising things by ourselves, nothing to do with a formal association and the council and all the bureacracy.’

‘We could,’ he agreed. ‘Just us. El equipo, the team.’ That’s it, the team! Just us, all of us. Maybe we will, maybe something new and more casual will coalesce naturally like cheese in a milk vat. We’ll see.

NOTES

for the serious student

Maybe you know this already, but I didn’t. How to tell a sheep from a goat. They both come in many formats, with or without horns, with or without woolly coats, and they often look remarkably similar. Seeing Feli’s sheep for the first time I wasn’t sure which they were. He provided me with a simple way to tell. Two ways.

Number one: sheep are grazers and eat with their heads down, nibbling grass or small plants on the ground, while goats are browsers and will eat leaves, twigs and almost anything else, often with their heads up, often perched in unlikely places.

Number two: both sheep and goats have tails unless they’ve been docked, but a sheep’s tail hangs down while a goat’s points upwards.

And there you are. There are other clues involving intricacies of the mouth and so on, but two’s enough for me.

An ongoing puzzle, though, is why Gomeran goat cheese doesn’t taste in the least bit ‘goaty’. My first experience of goat cheese was the French variety which is tangy and calls to mind tomcats. The Gomeran product is absolutely not like that at all. In its fresh form it’s mild to the point of blandness, and when more mature its flavour is no stronger than that of, say, an English white cheese such as Wensleydale. In my view it’s at its very best when lightly smoked. It only develops a sharper, stronger flavour when smoked more heavily - and that’s the smoke, nothing to do with cats.

Living water

Spray from the beach showers painted dancing rainbows around us. I pointed out to a fellow swimmer, Iván, the recent scars on my leg. ‘Oof! Mal,’ bad, he commented sympathetically. ‘They hurt.’

They do indeed, they hurt like little red-hot needles when it first happens. They’re almost worth suffering, though, for the satisfying gasps of horror when you show them to people. My exhibit consisted of two finger-length rows of bright red spots and another cluster of them covering an area the size of a hen’s egg, like the aftermath of a picnic by a herd of fleas.

‘I got stung as well,’ Iván commented, and showed me the scars on his left arm. The worst thing about having any kind of wound is that someone’s always got a better one. The rows of spots on Iván’s arm were bigger, brighter, more numerous and a sinister shade of purple.

We’d both been stung a couple of days before, when the wind changed from the benign alisios which blow from the north to the more treacherous southerlies, which can bring all kinds of trouble such as rain in winter or mists of African dust in summer and, on the beaches, heavier swells and bigger waves that roll in from the south.

And with those waves come, just occasionally, jellyfish. This is a very rare event - in many years we get none at all - but when they do float in it’s wise to climb out of the water, dry off and stay away until they’ve gone.

I didn’t spot the one that got me until too late. It happened just after I’d walked waist-deep into the sea and launched into my warm-up overarm stroke, when I felt something wrap itself around my leg. This could mean an encounter with a plastic bag which is disconcerting, but plastic bags don’t sting.

James Bond would have calmly diagnosed the problem, thrown a mini-grenade and swum away powerfully, leaving behind him a muffled whoomp! and a fountain of jelly and tentacles. I didn’t do that. I panicked, yelled, beat the water with both hands, struggled to my feet again and lurched backwards towards the beach.

As I retreated I glimpsed my attacker just beneath the surface - a translucent blob about the size of a ring doughnut, dull yellow-brown in colour with darker spots somewhere inside. It was pulsating gently like a ballet-dancing parachute.

This was an aguaviva, literally ‘living water’. A delightful name for a thoroughly nasty animal. It trails thin tendrils as it glides through the water, each tendril covered in little stingers. The shock of being stung is worse than the pain itself, which is not much greater than the burn you get from brushing against a nettle and it doesn’t last for long.

Other types of jellyfish can do more damage. When I announced proudly in Arturo’s café that I’d been stung by an aguaviva someone capped my story by saying two Portuguese men o’ war had been seen floating around in the marina. They’d heard this from a friend who had heard it from a yacht owner. La fragata portuguesa! Two of them! If you get stung by a portuguesa, well now, that’s really something you’d know all about… Yeah, yeah, okay. I’d only been stung by an aguaviva. Must try harder next time.

Too late now though, the southerly winds had died down to be replaced by the northerly alisios and all the jellyfish had drifted away, leaving the water as calm and clear as usual. For a day or two I swam in short bursts, raising my head regularly like a performing seal looking for buns, but now we’re all back to normal. Still got the scars, though, they linger for a long time. I took a photograph of them at their vivid best but nobody’s very interested.

NOTES

for the serious student

In case you’re worried, jellyfish are not a big problem in La Gomera. In thirty years of swimming off the beach in San Sebastián this was my first personal encounter.

However, they’re out there in the broad ocean, as they are worldwide. The aguaviva is one of the most common types in these waters. Its English name is the mauve stinger, which is less poetic but perhaps more helpful, and they come in a choice of colours from mauve through pink to a muddy brown like the one that stung me.

The other two common varieties float on the surface of the water rather than hiding sneakily below. One is called the velella, which derives from vela, sail, because it has a little triangular sail like an offcut from a sheet of celluloid. In English it’s a by-the-wind-sailor, a beautiful name for a blob of jelly.

Then there’s the fragata portuguesa, the Portuguese man o’ war, a suitably bellicose name for a creature with a nastier sting. It has a taller, inflated sail which looks vaguely obscene, like something invented for a sci-fi film about invading aliens. Beneath this is a complex body the size of a dinner plate, broadly purple in its overall colour scheme, and supporting a trail of tentacles that can stretch ten metres or more. They’re not really proper jellyfish at all if we’re being pedantic, they’re a clever assembly of several different organisms that cooperate for mutual benefit. Theirs, not ours.

The banana inspector

The Club Náutico, Nautical Club, one Saturday lunchtime. A youngish couple are perched on high wooden stools at the bar. They have discovered that this is a good time and place to get into conversation with locals of all varieties (the bar and restaurant are open to everyone) and they are keen to improve their Spanish.

An older man wanders in and heads towards the bar. He is dressed casually but smartly with neatly-pressed trousers and an open-necked shirt. The young man on the stool turns towards the newcomer and smiles with recognition: ‘Good morning! We met last year. You’re the Inspector de Plátanos, the Inspector of Bananas!’

The newcomer nods affably, shakes hands with the young couple and signals the barman to bring him a glass of red wine. Then he turns back to them looking a little puzzled. ‘I’m not an inspector of bananas,’ he tells them. ‘I’m a plumber.’

He’s a plumber. Un fontanero. The young foreigner attempts to explain in his Stage One Spanish that the previous year he and his wife had conversed in this very place, at this very bar, with a man of remarkably similar appearance who came over from Tenerife regularly to inspect shipments of Gomeran bananas. In an official capacity. He was an Inspector of Bananas! Whose job was to…

…inspect bananas. Etcetera.

While this awkward scene is resolving itself, let’s turn away for a moment to fill in the background. At that time, many years ago, bananas were the island’s most important export crop. On the quayside in San Sebastián stood a long, open-sided shelter beneath which cardboard boxes full of bananas would be stacked to await collection by the banana boat.

There is a touch of magic here. There were two banana boats, both of which were painted a bright
banana yellow. I don’t know whose idea that was but what a wonderful, unnecessary piece of commercial artistry! From the cliffs above the town you could watch one of these banana-coloured boats sliding into the harbour, confident in its identity and its role, confident in its importance for the island.

The ships were nicknamed los delfines amarillos, the yellow dolphins, because they were called the Delfín del Atlántico and the Delfín del Mediterráneo. On each trip they would sail around the Canary Islands picking up bananas then carry them northwards past Morocco, through the Straits of Gibraltar and along the Mediterranean coast of Spain to unload at Alicante, Valencia and Barcelona.

As well as the Inspector of Bananas (I’ll get back to him in a moment) we also got to know Manuel who had spent two decades as a chef on one of the banana boats. ‘Brilliant,’ he told us. ‘I saved all my wages because at sea there’s nothing to spend your money on.’ He took a very early retirement and invested his savings in an apartment block which has given him a comfortable income ever since, without having to work at all. However, if you ever want some novel ideas for cooking with bananas, just ask Manuel.

But to return to the Club Náutico: it was me of course, the embarrassed young man, and I never again accused anyone of being an inspector of bananas, but the friendly plumber turned out to be surprisingly knowledgeable about bananas. In fact all Gomerans know about bananas. They all eat them and they all have someone in the family who grows them.

Bananas are still one of the island’s major exports, some from small family farms but mostly from large plantations in the valleys. The bunches are cut while green and wrapped in blankets like big babies to be taken to a central warehouse in La Gomera. From there they are loaded into refrigerated containers, hauled by lorry to the port in San Sebastián and onto a ferry for transport to Tenerife and then onwards to mainland Spain and the rest of Europe in anonymous container ships. It’s a less charming system than the old one but perhaps more efficient.

The plumber - let’s call him José - was unusually knowledgeable about plumbing as well as bananas. He was one of a very small number who were fully qualified to do just about anything involving pipes, even gas pipes, and a year or two later he supervised the installation of our bottled-gas water heater and cooker.

A few days after completing the work he returned with an Inspector of Gas Installations, who came over regularly from Tenerife like the Inspector of Bananas. We watched as José performed the required pressure and leakage tests under the stern gaze of the Inspector. All went well and the Inspector issued a permit for us to buy our bottled gas, then went on to his other appointments around the island, chauffeured by José who would also do all the testing.

It’s a rule of life on this little island that everyone you meet can surprise you in one way or another. Perhaps it’s a rule of life everywhere, but here there’s more time to explore it.

NOTES

for the serious student

Bananas themselves are surprising. Did you know, for example, that those huge trees live for just a single season? They grow from a tiny green shoot to a three-metre tree in a year or so, produce a big bunch of bananas then die. All over. Banana production is handed over to the next generation, which is already beginning to sprout from around the base of the old tree. As with mushrooms, there’s more going on under the soil than appears at the surface, a big root system capable of sustaining a long series of generations.

And banana trees are not even trees really, they’re herbaceous plants. The trunk is just a tightly wrapped roll of leaves, like a cigar. At the top of this pseudo-trunk the leaves break free to spread themselves luxuriously under the blue sky while from their centre sprouts a flexible stalk which will bear the fruit. It starts with a very large and strangely sinister purple flower dangling at the tip. This the male. Higher up the same stalk female flowers then sprout in huge numbers, arranging themselves in a series of rings, and beneath each flower a banana gradually forms.

The end result is a big bunch of anything up to three or four hundred tightly-nested bananas weighing something like 50 kilos, which is more than most men would want to try and lift unaided. The Canary Island variety are a little kinder to their handlers, generally being smaller and lighter than their more showy West Indian cousins. Smaller and sweeter too, which is one reason they’re so popular.

Apparently you can also eat the big purple flowers as a delicacy. You deal with them in much the same way as artichokes, peeling off the tough outer petals to reveal the tender green petals beneath and the soft heart at the centre. Eat them raw in salads, stir-fried or boiled in a stew. I haven’t tried them and I’ve never yet seen a restaurant in La Gomera offering them on the menu. A big opportunity for one of our more adventurous chefs.

The piglet game

‘Falta! Falta!’

The guy next to me was yelling excitedly towards the arena, waving his fist. Falta means ‘foul’ as when a footballer kicks another’s ankle, or ‘fault’ as when a tennis player hits the ball after it’s bounced twice (they rarely kick each other’s ankles).

In this case the falta was because one competitor had pushed another out of the way while both were trying to grab a piglet.

I’m not sure that I should write about this, for fear of upsetting delicate sensibilities, or of misrepresenting this kindly island, but the fact is it used to be an annual event. Our village fiesta in the summer was an all-weekend affair in those days, with Saturday devoted mainly to feasting, music and all-night dancing while Sunday was for family fun. The kids bounced in bouncy castles and splashed in bouncy play pools while the adults stood around sipping beer. There were adult games too, such as the wheelbarrow race in which young men wheeled young women around the sports ground pursued by others trying to empty buckets of water over them.

The highlight of all this jollity came in the early afternoon, with la suelta del lechón. The release of the piglet, a game that attracted crowds of spectators from the town and the other villages around. The arena was a section of the riverbed (always dry in summer) smoothed out and spread with sand. A largish piglet, about the size of a spaniel, would be released into the arena and allowed to run free while two or three competitors tried to catch it.

The piglet was provided with shelters made from wooden pallets to hide behind, and its legs were thoroughly greased so that grabbing just one leg was unlikely to be enough. The winner was anyone who managed to lift it bodily from the ground and carry it around the arena. Winners of the various bouts would then compete in a final play-off. And this was a game worth playing, because the winner kept the piglet, donated by a local farmer.

This was country life, where animals were for people to use. Most families kept a pig. Every now and again a lorry would tour around the villages selling live piglets to be fattened up, much as other vendors came round selling fresh fish. (They still do.) Most families also kept chickens and often a couple of goats.

I have a vivid memory of a neighbour allowing two recently-born kids to scamper around the street, springing joyfully into the air like little toys on wind-up legs. ‘They’re happy to be alive,’ he commented, chuckling. He too was happy they were alive, because they’d fetch a good price a few weeks later from a local restaurant where fresh cabrito - young goat - was a prized delicacy. (It still is.)

One of the village’s pigs lived in a small enclosure we regularly cycled past, and it would always pop its head up, front trotters on the wall, to watch us with bright eyes and its ears pricked up expectantly. We greeted it with a friendly comment about the weather or the coming elections. Pigs are intelligent animals and worthy of respect.

We were, of course, deeply uncomfortable about watching la suelta del lechón, and we were not alone. Even in those days, when the onlookers ringed the arena three-deep and noisily cheered or reprimanded, it was obvious that many of them didn’t really like the spectacle. ‘Not a lot of fun for the piglet,’ a shopkeeper from the town commented, turning to lead his two youngsters back to the car. You could sense that this event would soon be history.

The last suelta took place quite a few years ago, with only a straggle of spectators and a handful of competitors. Many families still keep animals and chickens but they don’t play games with them. I’m not at all sorry that the piglet game has gone, but nobody quite knows what to put in its place. Like bullfighting, it is what it is, and there is no real substitute.

Bullfighting, by the way, has been banned throughout the Canary Islands since 1991, and I’m not sorry about that either.

How not to be a thief

Two lads were sort-of playing football. In a lazy, sporadic, hot-afternoon kind of way. They were on the village sports field, which is concrete but flat as a billiard table, smartly painted dark green and with white and yellow lines in all the right places.

One of the two players remained sitting on the ground with his back to a wall while the other stood a couple of metres away, kicking the ball gently towards his friend who then threw it back to him. The more energetic of the two was the lad sitting down, who would sometimes throw a bouncer, making the ball leap into the air just in front of his opponent’s foot.

The most interesting aspect of this uninspiring performance was that the ball they were using was a baby aguacate, an avocado.

Did you know that immature, freshly fallen avocados will bounce? I didn’t. It’s not something you’d want to test in normal circumstances. They do though, they bounce very well, almost as well as those brightly coloured little bouncy balls dispensed by machines in bars and cafes.

The avocado footballers were attending, like us, a village fiesta in honour of one of our saints (there are two). The religious celebration had taken place on the previous evening - a short mass in the chapel followed by a procession around the village - so today’s event was pure pleasure, with music from two of the island’s many traditional folk groups supported by a kiosk selling beer, wine and soft drinks and the prospect of a communal paella later in the afternoon.

However, this was the month of July and the sun was strong. The town council had provided a marquee with folding chairs for those who wished to listen to the music, but it was amplified as always to jumbo-jet volume so many of us simply cowered around the periphery in whatever shade we could find. Our two footballers continued playing but taking things nice and slowly.

Watching them, it occurred to me (not for the first time, not for the first time at all) how extraordinarily unbalanced is this world we live in. I’d recently read that New Zealanders had developed a huge appetite for avocados which local farmers were scarcely able to satisfy, leading to the entirely new crime of avocado theft. Organised gangs were creeping among the avocado trees at night to denude them of their fruit. Farmers faced seasonal ruin.

Here in La Gomera avocados grow so prolifically, on trees that grow so tall and broad, that the fruits can quite literally fall on your head. Many get squashed by passing vehicles.

So too do the oranges and the mangos in their seasons. But please be aware, reader, that a fallen fruit still belongs to somebody, no matter what the law may say about it. I know of a foreigner, a permanent resident on the island, who took to picking up fallen avocados and carrying them home in a plastic bag. He was seen the first time he did this, of course - there is always someone who will see anything you do - and he was at once labelled as a thief. In a society where honesty and trust are taken for granted and very rarely abused, such a label is with you for life. Anything you do thereafter, no matter how innocent, will be viewed with suspicion - what’s he up to?

You can pick up a fallen avocado if invited by the owner, naturally. And if you meet a neighbour walking back from their farm with a bucketful of avocados, oranges or mangos, you will be given an armful of them with no option for refusal.

You could also, I guess, play football with a fallen avocado without penalty, because football is second only to religion as a respected activity. Be careful, however, not to do what young Rubén did at our fiesta. When the two footballers lost control of their baby avocado, Rubén intercepted it, attempted a nifty return but trod on it instead. He walked away looking a bit crestfallen and trying to shake guacamole from his foot.

Notes for the serious student
Know your avocados! They are on sale all year round in the local shops and markets, but several varieties grow on the island itself and they appear at different times. First up are the ubiquitous pear-shaped kind with a slightly rough green skin, the sort you expect to get in your avocado-with-prawns starter anywhere in England.

They’re fine, but better still are the rounder kind that ripen later, with knobbly skin ranging in colour from dark green to black. The skin is tough and thick but the flesh is full of flavour. They’re my favourites.

Finally come the smooth-skinned variety, much like an overgrown pear in shape and colouring, and they can be huge. They’re perfectly edible but bland and watery.

Mangos too come in various guises. The first to ripen, typically around June or July, are the size of a plum, yellow in colour and with a darkish yellow flesh. They are delicious but extremely fibrous and will have you picking your teeth for hours. I suspect these are the closest to the wild fruit.

The later ones are called mangas rather than mangos in the Canary Islands, but they’re just various cultivars of mango. Ranging in size from hen’s egg to ostrich’s and in colour from green to red or purple, they are milder in flavour than the fibrous mangos but equally delicious if you catch them at the right moment.

A practical tip for dealing with mangos: to get at the flesh, take a sharp knife and slice the mango on either side of its flattish central stone, which you can find by looking for a slight hump in the roundness of the fruit. Then scoop the flesh from your slices with a teaspoon. You’ll get covered in mango whatever you do, but this is the least messy method.

The little dark one

A big day for the village. On one of her very rare trips around the island, she would pass through here as she returned to San Sebastián, and would pause to receive a civic reception by the villagers.

The reception was to be held in a car park beside the main road, extensively beautified with bamboo fencing, palm fronds and swathes of flowers. We arrived shortly before the appointed time but, as is habitual with the famous, she was a little late in arriving. The sun had already given up and was sinking behind the hills, turning the sky into a glorious son et lumière show. The soundtrack for the show came from a group of folk singers, strumming guitars and singing appropriately demure traditional songs.

Passing by the front-row seats we greeted our many neighbours who had probably been waiting there patiently for an hour or more - Gomerans are good at waiting patiently - and found a spot to lean against a wall.

Crowds had gathered not just from our village but from other villages around, and even from the town. This was an Event! A large police presence - well, two of them, Felipe and Fernando, but notably animated - attempted to keep the wandering villagers away from the main road, without much success.

The problem was that the car park itself was now fully occupied by a small stage garlanded with flowers, rows of seats for the elderly, the strumming folk group and a bar counter with beer fountain, leaving little room for the stream of cars still arriving, which therefore had to park along both sides of the main road.

Finally the two harrassed policemen introduced an impromptu one-way flow system which they controlled at each end with arm gestures and whistles. No-one in the meandering crowds got killed and although the line of vehicles queuing to get by on the main road grew steadily longer, many of them tooted their horns in cheerful support when they eventually passed through. Nobody would complain about a visit by La Morenita.

A sudden surge in mobile phone activity signalled that at last her cavalcade was approaching. She drew up in a kind of self-assembly Popemobile, a huge glass cabinet carried on the platform of a sparklingly clean pickup truck. Designated assistants from the village helped to extract La Morenita, perched on a golden plinth draped with red velvet and fresh flowers. They carried her with exquisite care to her place on the stage, where she was formally greeted with speeches from the attendant priest and a representative of the organising committee. A guitar duet played a classical piece for her, and some of the local children sang a song of praise, a verse each. They’ll remember this day, with pleasure I hope.

La Morenita, ‘the little dark one’, is an affectionate family name for the Virgen de Guadalupe, Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is the island’s patron saint. She normally resides safely at home in a little chapel by the sea, but today she is nearing the end of a journey that began nearly two months ago, when she was taken from her chapel, placed in a fishing boat and carried around the coast amid a large flotilla to land on the beach in San Sebastián. It happens only once every five years, the years of Las Lustrales, which is a fancy way of saying five years.

La Morenita is the guardian and protector of every town and every village on the island. She is hugely popular and revered. Hand-painted signs around our car park and on the main road shouted Gracias, Madre! Thank you, Mother! in huge letters.

Watching all this adoration, it was clear that there was something more than mere religion involved here. The Catholic religion is no longer the powerful force that it used to be in Spain, when attendance at Mass and events such as this was obligatory.

No, La Morenita represents something more. She represents the island, the people, the way of life. She is a rock-solid core to the island’s culture and a social glue that binds everyone together. I’m a little bit envious. Try as we might, we can never experience the sense of belonging that La Morenita provides to those who were born here.

Ah, well… We can still join in with the celebrations and enjoy the free paella and wine. After an excitement like this visit you need to calm down again slowly over some celebratory refreshments. Gomerans are good at celebratory refreshments.

Notes for the serious student
I touched on the subject of this five-year celebration in a previous story (A moment of madness, 18 April 2018) but left open the question of who exactly she is, this Virgen de Guadalupe.

Physically La Morenita is a very small statue. Really remarkably small, about the height of a wine bottle, but given stature by a tall crown and a splendidly elaborate plinth to stand on. Her holiness is emphasised by an aureole, a large gold circle like a ring of light behind her.

The Virgen de Guadalupe is venerated in many Catholic communities worldwide including Mexico, where she is also the patron saint. Her dark skin is undoubtedly due to her South American origins.

She seems to have arrived in La Gomera fairly early in the Spanish occupation, the imagen or statue having been carved in wood by an unknown sculptor sometime in the 16th century. She was awarded her own chapel on the coast in Puntallana, where it remains today, but she became the island’s patron only in the early nineteenth century when she took over from the Virgen del Buen Paso.

But then, does any of this really matter? In La Gomera, La Morenita is who she is, she’s always there, and once every five years we celebrate such certainty in a world of constant change.