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.