Scrapings and crashings

Early in the morning, in the dark hours before dawn when all sensible people are still asleep, we woke to the deep rumble of a big engine somewhere very close. And the clanking of heavy machinery, the scraping of metal against stone, the crash of rocks tumbling.

‘It’s a pala,’ said J, sitting up. A pala is a spade or a shovel but in this part of the world it’s also a mechanical digger, an excavator. Palas come in various sizes but they are always yellow and they are always Japanese.

Beep-beep-beep! - reversing to attack from a different angle. The cacophony of sounds made by a pala is unmistakeable. It’s not unusual to hear one working early in the morning but usually they’re down in the valley. The council sends them to clear the access road after rain has loosened rocks from the slopes. Occasionally a pala will spend a day or more levelling the dry river bed to form a temporary car park for a village fiesta, which is one of its more exciting tasks.

We also hear them working further away, across the valley or up the hill. Palas have multiple uses depending on what’s fixed to the end of their big yellow elbow, from cutting narrow trenches in roads to re-profiling the sand on the beaches or breaking up large rocks into smaller ones. As a friend once remarked, Gomera wouldn’t be Gomera without the palas.

Palas are also heavily involved in tearing down old buildings, but not usually this close to our house. In the clear air of early morning it sounded like an army demolition team clearing our neighbours’ homes out of the way in order to reach us – there they are, they won’t get away! Had we forgotten to pay this year’s Property Tax? Still in my pyjamas I peered out of the back door. I could see a monstrous yellow elbow rising and falling, a really big one. It was destroying Vicente’s old farm cottage, tugging rocks from the top of its walls. The roof was already gone.

We knew this was going to happen but it was still shocking to watch. This was part of my life being torn down. We often used to chat to Vicente in our early years when we came only for the winter months and he always greeted us on arrival with the same question: ‘When are you going home?’ What he really meant, I hope, was ‘How long are you staying?’ This is the kind of innocent misunderstanding that can cause people to post vitriolic reviews about their holiday hotel after a brief exchange with a cleaner.

Vicente was gone now and his widow had moved away to live with their daughter. The family had decided to clear the land and build a new house, perhaps two. I showed one of his sons a photograph I took years ago of Vicente sitting on a bucket surrounded by his chickens and turkeys and goats, laughing happily at the camera. His son smiled at the photo and told me he’d already got a copy, found among his dad’s possessions.

Watching the pala biting chunks out of the building that used to be the goatshed, then later razing the old house itself, I couldn’t help feeling sad. A treacherous little voice inside my head was playing the role of concerned foreigner poking his nose in where it didn’t belong – cultural vandalism! History being destroyed before our very eyes! Someone could have turned that into a charming old cottage! – but I didn’t listen. I’d got over all that many years ago when, talking to another neighbour, he told us with great pride that there were now only five old cottages left in the village. All those humble old hovels were disappearing one by one to be replaced by smart, modern buildings with proper kitchens and bathrooms. I’d decided he was right.

On the one hand it seemed such as shame, but the reality is that an old house like Vicente’s would be a nightmare - and very expensive - to try and update into anything approaching modern standards. Traditional cottages typically had no windows and only a single, low door which you left open if you wanted to let in a little light. Smoke from your fire exited through the gaps between the roof tiles. The walls were nearly a metre thick, put together stone by stone with nothing but gravity to hold them together. Try putting a window into a wall like that. A typical cottage comprised a single room with a flimsy divider to separate the sleeping space from the rest, in which heroic parents would raise five or ten children. You can understand why those children might want to do things differently.

The sound of a pala, in other words, is the sound of progress. This is not something to be regretted, it’s to be welcomed as not only inevitable but good!

Up to a certain point, of course. The rash of air conditioning fans spreading across walls here, as in the rest of the world, is not good at all, it’s bad, bad, bad. Climate change! There are so many better ways to…

Sorry?

Okay, you’re right. Stick with the message. Progress is good. Except…

Why the silence?

A fair question. There has been a gap of three months between the latest story (Scrapings and crashings) and the previous one on 3 September. Normally I’d been producing one every five or six weeks. What happened? Lazy slob…

Well, Covid-19 for a start. Although this island has faired better than many other places, we did have our lockdown and we still wear our masks everywhere. There’s much less happening than usual, much less life in the town and our village. It puts a damper on things.

The other excuse is that my paperback collection of stories from this blog (available on Amazon) has taken on a life of its own. It got me invited to join a local arts group which is planning an exhibition early next year, with a splendid catalogue for which I contributed a couple of stories.

Also it seems that Spanish people enjoy the book, which I’m delighted about, but of course they have to understand English so I’m now going to produce a Spanish version. I’m translating the stories myself (pause for disbelieving guffaws of laughter - no, wait, wait) with a Spanish native speaker on board to turn my nearly-Spanish text into the real thing.

All this has taken up a lot of my spare time and… well yes, it's a lame apology. Must try harder.

A few website links

Paperback Do they still whistle? on Amazon UK:

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B085HRZ4CF/

(on Amazon websites for other countries, just search for the book title)

Article about me (in Spanish) in local online newsletter:

www.gomeranoticias.com/2020/11/20/peter-drake-la-mirada-de-un-ingles-en-la-gomera/

Facebook page for the arts group El Viaje Interior:

www.facebook.com/El-viaje-interior-111119467291640/ 

Market evolution

 They are sitting on a wooden bench in the covered market in San Sebastián. A married couple of retirement age, visitors to the island, and almost certainly British because they’re neither well-tailored like the Germans, long and thin like the Dutch or noisy like the French. They are obviously married because neither is trying to impress the other in the hope of achieving a meaningful relationship - they’ve had one for a long time. And grandchildren.

We can tell they have grandchildren because Doris is elbowing Bill, with a soppy smile on her face, as she points to two toddlers tumbling around on a wooden car in the children’s play area. The larger of the two toddlers is preventing the smaller one from getting her hands on the steering wheel, which soon provokes rage, tears and a very loud tantrum. As their mother hurries over to sort things out, dangling shopping bags and looking harrassed, Doris turns to her husband: “Well, I think that’s our cue to get on with the shopping, Bill!”

Bill, who is a little heavier than he should be, pulls a face. “More shopping? I thought we’d…”

“Fruit, Bill, I told you. We need some fresh fruit. You can’t live on biscuits.”

“Not in this ruddy household,” Bill mutters sourly as he pushes himself to his feet. He follows his wife towards one of the market’s fruit-and-veg stalls. There are several, each set into its own niche around the periphery but spilling outwards with colourful, fresh produce arranged on multiple tiers of plastic crates. Visitors often pause to take photos.

They also take photos of their kids climbing around the wooden car, or of themselves seated on one of the wooden benches in the centre of the floor space. The benches follow much the same concept as those in an art gallery - a central location in which to look thoughtful and involved while surreptitiously easing off your shoes.

For Bill and Doris this place is just San Sebastián’s town market, but for anyone who knows what came before and fears the kind of progress that makes things worse, the market is uplifting. It’s new but it really works. And it has a lot to live up to because in its earliest beginnings, the market was a twice-weekly event held under the huge and beautiful Indian Laurel trees in the Plaza de la Constitución, where local farmers used to set out their produce on tables or simply on the ground. A tourist’s dream - so local, so authentic and so picturesque!

Tourists often tripped over a crate of apples or a box of lettuces, however, and for the farmers it was hard work to drag all that stuff out of the van at six in the morning every Wednesday and Saturday, set up the tables then haul it all away again afterwards. So the town council, in one of their occasional bursts of urban creativity, built an entirely new covered market for them.

Doris has already added apples, mandarins and bananas to her shopping basket and is now considering an attractive display of paraguayos, those exotic-sounding fruits that sellers with no poetry in their soul may call a flat peach. “Bill, would you fancy a few of those?” Bill looks up innocently from the display of locally-baked almond biscuits he has discovered in one corner. “Hmm?”

The council’s new covered market, the mercado municipal, was incorporated in an extensive complex that houses also a bus station, toilets, a restaurant, shops, an underground car park and an underground supermarket. Unfortunately, the architect’s enthusiasm to provide everything that anyone might need led originally to a tragic mistake. The open space allotted to the market was filled with permanent rows of concrete stalls. Each was in the form of a square with a tall, grey-tiled rear wall and marble-slab counters blocking the other three sides. They were cold, echoey and ugly, and together they looked like a communal workshop for something unpleasant.

Everyone realised it was all wrong but it took many years for the next wave of creativity to put things right. In came the big yellow bulldozers and out went the stalls! They cleared the entire space, tiled the floor and - a really nice touch - suspended little wooden crates upside down from the ceiling to add cosiness as well as context. A few wooden benches, a few plant pots and suddenly the market looked like a space intended for humans rather than Daleks.

There are now two cafes there as well, one at each end. Bill, having been forbidden to add a bag of almond biscuits to Doris’s basket of fruits, sits sulkily at one of the tables with a cup of coffee then, struck by a happy thought, waves to the waitress. “Have you got any doughnuts?” Fortunately she understands him straight away, both doughnuts and tired husbands being much the same whether they’re English or Spanish.

-------------- NOTES --------------

The Spanish word for doughnut is donut, basically the same word Americanised. Depressing for any lingering defendants of the British mother tongue but in this case (and many others) it seems to me the Americans are right.

Spell it doughnut and how is a Spaniard supposed to know how to pronounce it? Duffnut as in ‘tough’ or doffnut as in ‘cough’? Dornut as in ‘thought’ or doonut as in ‘through’? Or downut as in ‘bough’?

There’s also the ugly uh sound as in ‘thorough’ to choose from. Foreigners have only a small chance of hitting the correct dohnut as in ‘although’. This kind of thing is, of course, part of the richness and diversity of the English language.

The moon and the wine

The first full moon of March. Dogs howl on hilltops, hairy werewolves menace the villages, moonstruck lovers swoon helplessly into each others’ arms and an early divorce. And there is more, much more happening in the blue glow of this magical night…

From early the next morning, the air fills with a new sound, a soft snip-snipping: ‘Listen! What’s that?’ It’s all around, as though the entire local population has decided to trim its toenails.

A short walk around reveals what’s happening. It’s the vines that are being trimmed! There are vines outside many of the houses in our village, climbing over simple pergolas made of metal tubing, and everyone is clipping away last year’s twigs in preparation for the bright new growth of spring.

But why has everyone chosen today to prune their vines, all at the same time? In our first year here, intrigued, we asked a neighbour. Víctor looked surprised. ‘Well, it’s the menguante!’ Blank stares. ‘La luna menguante,’ he repeated. ‘You know - getting smaller. The moon.’

Ahah, got it! The waning moon. This is the right time to prune your vines, the only time. We tried to get Víctor to explain why and he took a good shot at it - sap in the vine rises and falls with the moon, obviously, and if you’re going to cut pieces off it, well… He shrugged. How can anyone really explain such mysteries of nature? It’s how things are, everyone knows!

It seemed to work, anyway. Soon afterwards we encountered the end results of this tradition. We were much younger, even more foolish than now and heavily into exploration on foot. On this particular day we were exploring a minor road from the island’s capital, San Sebastián, that guided us gently along the southern side of the long river valley. As we walked, rucksacks on our backs, the landscape gradually transformed itself from a suburban clutter of schools and warehouses into scenery increasingly more spectacular and beautiful.

Hiking along a road or track away from any coast will generally take you upwards, and nowhere more so than in La Gomera. As you gain altitude the weather may get sunnier and warmer or cooler and cloudier, even misty, depending on where you are. Dramatically different microclimates are a big feature of the island. Today we were walking into heat. After a couple of hours we were already faltering. With our water bottles nearly empty we seriously considered turning back.

And what a shame that would have been! Around the very next corner we found a cafe-bar. There is usually a cafe-bar around the next corner in Spain, less reliably in the interior of this island because it’s all National Park, but we hadn’t reached the park yet and there were two cafe-bars in a small settlement along the road.

We tumbled gratefully into the first. ‘Dos cervezas, por favor!’ Two beers, with the r properly emphasised, the v more like a b and the c and z both lisped, which is what they do in Madrid but not in La Gomera. Full marks for trying, though. Watching with friendly amusement was a local man of around our age standing at the bar. ‘Alemanes?’ he asked. Being taken for Germans is standard because they discovered the place long before the Brits. We corrected him. ‘Ah, ingleses…’ In those days it didn’t matter much anyway because all foreigners were from allí abajo, literally ‘down there’ but it means ‘over there’, with a hand-wave indicating great distance. I love the concept of a vast, vague otherness encompassing everywhere except this little rock, but it’s fast disappearing because Gomerans are now much more widely travelled.

Our new acquaintance, Agustín, was snacking on yam dressed with mojo verde - olive oil, garlic and coriander - and he called the barman to supply us with forks so we could share it. He was drinking wine though, he pointed out, not beer. Wine was much more traditional than beer in La Gomera. In fact he made his own wine, he told us - not vino tinto like this one, his wine was white, but very good.

Half an hour later we were standing inside his private bodega, a plain little hut made from grey cement blocks, but inside was a row of proper oak casks. He took three small glasses from a shelf, inspected them critically then took them outside to rinse them in the roadside gutter. Seeing our faces, he chuckled and explained that the water gurgling along the gutter was from a spring further up the hill. This was good water!

Agustín’s wine was excellent too, made from last year’s harvest, a dry but fruity white. He filled a bottle for us to take away. He also had orange trees, he told us, on his finca just up the road. Would we like to see…?

One of the more serious hazards of walking in La Gomera is that your rucksacks can grow heavier instead of lighter. We trudged homewards with several kilos of oranges as well as the wine. They were wonderful oranges though, and we’d made a new friend. Agustín is now retired like us but he still makes wine and grows oranges. And bananas, but best not to mention those, they’re even heavier than oranges.

-------------- NOTES --------------

As well as the home winemakers there are several commercial producers in La Gomera, all fairly small and mostly in the north of the island where the climate is less dry for their vines. The island council, the Cabildo, provides communal facilities for bottling and marketing, which I think is very enlightened of them.

The main grape variety for white wines is the Forastera, of which Gomera has its own unique cultivar probably introduced by the Conquistadores in the fifteenth century, so that’s one thing at least that we can thank them for.

For red wine the main variety is the Listán Negro which produces a characterful, robust red with just a hint of pepper in the flavour. It goes superbly well with the local goat cheese. Or anything, really.

Side effects of the virus

There is a certain spot in town where you can sip coffee while watching little whirlwinds play games with fallen leaves and paper serviettes. It’s a result of the prevailing northerly winds blowing air past a tall building and creating vortices.

Today an especially powerful vortex had captured two flimsy plastic gloves and was whisking them at speed past my nose then under my feet, time and again. I succeeded in catching them only when both got snagged by a low bush.

Plastic gloves are one of many unforeseen side effects of the new coronavirus, Covid-19.

Plastic gloves
Lightweight, transparent and single-use, these things are now issued at the entrance of every supermarket and you must wear them, along with your face mask. Some shops have already run out of plastic gloves and give you a plastic bag bearing a stencilled drawing of a hand. Whoever thought this was a good idea should try opening a plastic bag to put their tomatoes in while wearing a plastic bag on each hand.

Worse, these gloves and bags regularly escape into the wider world. Treacherous little devils, they jump from supermarket disposal bins, slip from people’s grasp as they take them off, fly from municipal litter bins or simply wait to be thrown to the pavement. They’re an entirely new form of environmental pollution.

Beards
How the virus has achieved this I can’t imagine, but the fact is that male chins of all ages are breaking into blossom. They range from timid two-day stubble to full-blown, rebellious foliage. At a rough estimate the number of beards and moustaches walking around town has at least doubled, perhaps quadrupled.

Closely related to this effect is its exact opposite in which the upper skull is shaved down to a blue-tinted, shiny dome with intriguing knobbles at the back. This is easier to explain: when you’re faced with trimming your own hair because all hairdressers are in lockdown, shaving it all off is the most reliable technique.

Queues
Spanish culture tends to view queuing as a freewheeling concept that relies on knowing who arrived just before you did. You ask the most likely person if they are el ultimo (gentleman) or la ultima (lady). That has become far more challenging now that everyone is required to distance themselves from everyone else by at least two metres. Queues can snake backwards along the street towards the shimmering horizon. In more constricted spaces such as the covered market they disintegrate into random placements intermingled with all the others who are just hanging about, waiting for their wife, waiting for a table at the café, passing an hour or two in the (distant) company of others.

And what does two metres of distancing look like in the real world? Nobody’s very sure. Children were briefly seen waving long-handled brooms to poke the person in front, a rough measure, but parents seem to have decided this has too much fun potential and I haven’t seen any brooms lately.

Humiliation
The law dictates that café tables must be disinfected between every set of clients. This is fine and reassuring until it’s your turn to leave, when you look behind and see the waiter spraying your table and chairs to eliminate your personal contamination. Now we know how dogs feel when their owner stoops with a plastic bag to clean their deposits from the pavement.

Microsoft Windows
Suddenly it’s not giving trouble any more! Nobody calls you at home from Microsoft Support to tell you they’ve detected a problem with your computer, even if you’re not using Microsoft at all but Apple! The virus has convinced all those dedicated support teams in India that their welfare is more important than yours. If your computer is on the point of cracking up yet again, you’ll just have to sort it out for yourself.

Flu and colds
There aren’t any. We’re all so clinically sanitised, distanced, untouched and untouching that the bugs have nowhere to go.

Smoked herring
There isn’t any. We personally depend on smoked herring - kippers - for our government-recommended weekly dose of oily fish, but try finding it on Amazon these days. The world stock of canned kippers is now stacked on the shelves of private kitchens, emergency rations for when the virus wins and people have to barricade themselves into their houses against the wild-eyed hordes outside.

And many more…
Once you start to think about it there are endless side effects of this novel situation. One of them is plain old boredom, which means people have been desperately looking for new ways to occupy the kids or themselves. Like, for example, writing lists of unforeseen side effects of the virus.

-------------- NOW AVAILABLE - THE PAPERBACK --------------

Amazon sells an attractive paperback book containing 50 stories from this blog, edited and with new illustrations. An ideal present for anyone who knows La Gomera, or would like to know it!

Search for Do they still whistle? on amazon.co.uk or amazon.es or any other Amazon website worldwide.

Enjoy your meal!

Gustavo, a young waiter in one of our local restaurants, swirled over with one hand balancing a pizza plate and the other behind his back in proper waiterly style. He tends to self-parody, a natural comic. The pizza made a smooth landing in the middle of our table and Gustavo bowed his head theatrically: ‘Buen provecho!’

‘Gracias, Gustavo.’ I picked up my knife and fork. A fresh pizza is strangely irresistible considering it’s just bread with a few bits of stuff on top.

Gustavo paused. ‘How do you say it correctly in English?’ he asked in Spanish. ‘Enjoy your meal?’

I hate this question because there’s no satisfactory answer. Historically nobody in Britain has ever been expected to enjoy their meal, the food being lumps of meat with instant gravy and two boiled vegetables, so the English language has never felt the need to get involved.

Yes, you can say Enjoy your meal we told Gustavo, it sounds fine, but we don’t usually say that in Britain. It sounds more the kind of thing an American might say, like the very irritating Have a nice day! I shall not have a nice day, young lady, because I’ve just been evicted from my flat for non-payment of rent, my wife’s run off with a Japanese weightlifter and my only remaining friend is an ancient poodle with age-related dementia.

A neighbour, by the way - this is a brief digression - who drives a taxi once asked us what was the word that English people used all the time about everything. Ny-ee, ny-ees? Something like that. On trips around the island, for example, he’ll stop at a scenic viewpoint and they’ll say it’s nyees. They have a coffee and it’s nyees, so is the doughnut. Nyees weather. Nyees people.

It’s nice, we told him. If there’s one English word you really need to learn as a taxi driver, it’s nice. Just don’t tell anyone to have a nice day if they look anything like me.

But to get back to Gustavo: in smart restaurants, I told him, the waiter is likely to say Bon appétit! which is not English at all, it’s French.

‘Bon appétit,’ Gustavo nodded doubtfully. You could tell he’d thought about this problem before. ‘Buen apetito, no? But why,’ he continued in Spanish, ‘would you wish them a good appetite when they’re already sitting in your restaurant? If they didn’t have a good appetite they wouldn’t be there.’

No, they wouldn’t.

‘And anyway, if you’re going to wish them a good appetite, why can’t you say it in English instead of French? That would be, what: good apetito? No...’

‘Good appetite. Don’t learn it, Gustavo, nobody ever says it.’ He went back to the kitchen shaking his head – how full of mysteries is this complicated world we live in.

This is just one of many important failures in the English language, in my view. Mind you, the Spanish Buen provecho! - Good benefit! - isn’t much better when you come to analyse it. Of course you’ll benefit, it will make all the difference between being hungry and not being hungry.

Or you can say Que aproveche! which means ‘May you take advantage, may you make good use of it’. By eating the pizza perhaps, as against putting it on your head to keep the sun off, tearing it up to feed to passing cats, spinning it across the restaurant like a frisbee to the small boy in the corner… It’s a daft thing to say, really.

What we need, all of us, Brits, Spanish, French and the rest of the world, is something meaningful along the lines of ‘We hope you enjoy this creation of our chef, made with skill, love and only the very best ingredients’.

Or let’s just dump the pizza on the table, smile cheerily and leave everyone to get on with it. Simplicity!

Perhaps simplicity is the key to everything. I’ve just read - this is another very brief digression - that in a particular region of Costa Rica (the Nicoya peninsula) there are vastly more centenarian old men than there should be. They just go on and on being alive, and a key factor seems to be that they have no challenging bucket lists, no unfulfilled dreams, they expect nothing more from life than to do tomorrow what they’ve been doing today. Simplicity!

But then, that sounds terribly boring, doesn’t it? Perhaps the Spanish have got it more-or-less right after all. Que aproveche! May you make good use of everything, even if it’s only a pizza.

-------------- Do they still whistle? --------------

THE BOOK

Now available as a high-quality paperback book: a collection of 50 earlier stories from this blog, edited and with new illustrations.

An ideal present for anyone who knows La Gomera, or who would like to know it!

Search for Do they still whistle? on www.amazon.co.uk or any other Amazon website.

Fear and dread

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread
[…]
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.


The scene: a pedestrian street in San Sebastián, where I’m standing outside the entrance to a small supermarket. An elderly lady hampered by two large shopping bags is trying to squeeze past a delivery trolley full of boxes, in order to get out. I wait patiently in the street while a small dog with its lead hooked around a bollard strains to get at my feet.

As this impasse was beginning to resolve itself a new element arrived in the form of an astronaut in a white all-in-one suit that covered not only his body but the whole of his head as well, leaving only a small aperture for his face. Most of that was covered by wrap-around goggles and a bulging white mask over his nose and mouth. He wore a yellow cylinder on his back and was waving a long wand from which he sprayed something that looked worth avoiding.

Pausing for a moment, he caught sight of me hovering nervously a metre or two away and greeted me cheerily: ‘Aha, hola amigo! Com’estas!’ How are you?

‘Fine, fine,’ I answered. ‘But who...’ All I could see was a pair of eyebrows.

He roared with laughter, causing his face mask to wobble. He pulled it down, revealing the smiling face of a regular associate from the distant days when we all used to sit around café tables in the sunshine. Sipping our coffee or wine or beer, welcoming each new arrival, exchanging occasional comments about the weather or the politicians. An amorphous group of people enjoying each others’ casual company.

I was pleased to see the astronaut, a reminder of how things used to be, but we couldn’t stop and chat this morning. He pulled up his mask, finished spraying around the supermarket door and the pavement outside then headed off to the next one, leaving a pleasant flowery scent of disinfectant.

He was one of a small team recruited by the town council to help protect us from The Virus. The island council, too, has recruited a team of sprayers, an entire army of them, each equipped with a smart astronaut outfit in bright sky blue.

The other weapon in this battle against the unseen enemy is, of course, social distancing, of which the most important element is personal isolation. The Spanish government led by Pedro Sánchez decided at a fairly early stage that isolation meant not leaving home. No wiffly-waffly guidelines, a clear and simple instruction to stay indoors. Tough but realistic. An infringement could cost you anything from 300 to 30,000 euros. (I’m not sure what you’d have to do to merit the big one but it would certainly ensure your place in local history.)

We’re allowed out for truly essential trips but under close monitoring. Cycling into town the other day I was stopped by a policeman stationed at a zebra crossing. I have the greatest respect for the police on this island and they’re a nice bunch of people, but this one was wearing a green surgical face mask that made him look sinister. ‘Adonde va?’ he demanded, where was I going?

To the post office to send a parcel, I told him, and then to the mercadillo, the market, to buy fruit and vegetables. I was prepared to expand on this - we’re both vegetarians, we need fresh fruit and vegetables, it’s what we eat. And - I could have continued if necessary - we believe the quality and choice you find in the market stalls is better than that of the supermarkets, and... but he waved me on my way, food is allowed, you can go out to buy food without penalty. Up to a point. I’ve seen one unfortunate guy having his name taken for carrying a single red pepper in a plastic carrier bag, a token purchase.

Which brings me to the most striking aspect of this alien situation in which we find ourselves. It was clear from my mental preparations for meeting a policeman that I felt guilty about being out at all. Why should I feel guilty about shopping for food? But I do. So does everyone else. In the market people shuffle around with their heads down, many wearing bulging white masks like the astronaut, some in pale green surgical masks like the policeman (where do they get those from?), others with scarves pulled across their face. In this most sociable of public spaces where traditionally everyone stops for a few words or a hearty gossip, we all sidle past each other as though trying not to be seen.

There’s a strong element of fear, of course. The next person you talk to might be emitting viruses, blown by a waft of air towards your nose. But it’s highly unlikely. The virus has scarcely touched this little island. We’ve had just seven confirmed cases, mostly involving visitors from elsewhere, all of whom were successfully quarantined and quickly recovered. Why are we all so anxious? It seems that fears, doubts and imaginings are even more contagious than covid-19.

---------------------- NOTES ----------------------

The quotation is from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

But did you know that this malignant coronavirus currently threatening the entire human species and many others is just 125 nanometres across? A nanometre is one-millionth of a millimetre. They’re invisible specks, ridiculously small - you could fit about 10,000 of them side by side on the head of a pin. They might be there already.

So, can a face mask really catch something so tiny? As usual in cases like this, my online investigations suggests that nobody really knows for sure, but anyway I wouldn’t want to rely on it.

If you’re wearing a mask and you cough or sneeze, your mask might catch any moisture flying from your mouth, tiny droplets on which the virus could hitch a lift if you’re already infected - so you’re doing other people a favour. This is good and laudable but doesn’t help you personally.

If on the other hand another infected individual sneezes and your face mask catches some droplets they’ve emitted, you then have a few million viruses on the front of your mask. When you next touch the mask you will get the viruses on your fingers, and if you subsequently touch your eyes, mouth or nostrils the job’s done, you’ve infected yourself.

The only really appealing thing about face masks is that you can make them out of old tee shirts, which would be one way to reduce the pile of old tee shirts in my cupboard.

Call in the police!

I first posted this story in August 2019 but quickly removed it for reasons I’ll explain later.

This problem has been ignored for too long. Nobody’s doing anything about it. And as it affects me directly, I’ve made the decision to do something myself. But what to do, that’s the question.

After a little thought the answer is obvious. We must go to the police! Explain the situation. That’s what the police are for, to sort out citizens’ problems. First we must decide which police, though. There are several varieties of police in Spain but here in La Gomera our choice comes down to two: the Guardia Civil or the Policía Local.

Maybe not the Guardia, a national force that regularly publicises its success in seizing million-euro consignments of crack cocaine or catching international criminals with false moustaches in Marbella. The Policía Local seems more the right level for our kind of complaint.

I have already prepared a one-page report on the problem, complete with photograph and explanatory text in faultless Spanish. Well, it looks faultless to me. This should save too much nervous babbling and hand-waving when face to face with a police officer.

Choosing our time carefully - not too early in the morning, but safely before desayuno (breakfast) at around 10:30 when everyone goes out for a coffee and sandwich, including most of the police - we head towards what passes for the local police station.

One of the clearest indications that this town is not a hotbed of petty crime is that there isn’t really a police station. The Policía Local have a small office in a multi-purpose building which they share with, among other organisations, the local land registry. It’s on the outskirts of town and not easy to find unless you know where to look. Their sign includes a rather nice modern logo that reminds me of Dr Who’s Tardis, an old-time police telephone box.

Passing through the modest entrance portal into a surprisingly long corridor, we walk past a branch to the right which leads to the land registry then straight on to a small doorway down at the far end. A small sign to the left of the door announces Policía Local: Atención al Ciudadano, Attention to the Citizen, which is encouraging. The door is open, revealing a small office with a large desk but nobody behind it. I knock politely on the door - always best to show respect - and from an inner office emerges a youngish police officer (they’re all youngish when you’re my age), at first cautiously then with a nice smile. ‘Sí?’

We have a small problem, we explain. Nothing serious, but it needs looking at. He ushers us into his inner office and indicates two chairs in front of his desk.

I begin by explaining that we cycle every day into town and often call into the covered market, where we park our bikes in the pedestrian street outside. ‘Vale,’ right, nods the policeman. Clear enough so far. There’s a bike rack, I tell him, where we leave our bikes, and in this bike rack is an abandoned bicycle. It’s got two flat tyres and it has been there for several months. This wouldn’t matter so much except that the bike is right in the middle of the rack where it really gets in the way.

I hand him my written account and point to the photo, then watch a little nervously as he peruses the report - is this too trivial, am I wasting police time? - but he nods thoughtfully. ‘It’s locked to the rack?’

‘It is. Cable and lock.’

‘It would be less of a nuisance if it were at one end,’ he comments. Yes, exactly!

A colleague wanders in to see what’s going on, nods cheerfully at us - we’ve known him for a long time - and takes a look at the photo. ‘This tree’s in the way as well,’ he points out. ‘It’s not a good place for a tree.’

‘It isn’t,’ agrees the first policemen. He straightens up, looking perkier. He’s beginning to see his way to a solution. It might be best, he observes thoughtfully, to get the Ayuntamiento, the town council, to move the rack to somewhere more sensible, away from the tree. And get rid of the bike at the same time.

Well, yes, but...

‘Leave it with me,’ he says. ‘Can I take a copy of this report?’

‘Keep it, keep it,’ I offer generously. ‘It’s for you.’

Nothing more we can do. Handshakes all round, thanks for your time etc, then the first policeman escorts us to the door. We leave feeling we’ve done our citizens’ duty but fairly sure the abandoned bike will still be there several months later. My report is going to be passed to the Ayuntamiento along with a recommendation that they move the entire bike rack to a different location. This will take time.

Two weeks later…
Parking my bike as usual in the rack, it took me a moment to realise that something had changed. Tree still there, rack still there - but the abandoned bike had gone. Six clear slots to choose from.

How wrong I was to doubt! Of course the police would take action! And commendably quickly too - I’m sure there were a few forms to fill in, stamp, copy and file before they could send someone along with bolt cutters to sever the cable. I would like to record here my sincere thanks to the Policía Local not only for removing the bike but also for demonstrating that in a free and open society, the citizen’s voice is heard.

Postscript
Why did I delete this story after its first posting? Because the bike reappeared, that’s why. Just a few days after it had gone. Complete with cable and lock, and in the same place in the middle of the bike rack. I assumed the owner had noticed its disappearance and demanded its return. Best to keep my head down for a while.
However, a week or so later it vanished again and this time it didn’t come back. My best guess is that at the first try someone had neglected to follow the proper administrative procedures for removing bicycles from bike racks, and was obliged by somebody else to put it back before doing so.

---------------------- NOTES ----------------------

The Policía Local wear blue uniforms and drive blue-and-white cars. They can look a bit intimidating because of the various armaments slung from their trouser belts but in all other respects they are very friendly and approachable. Mostly they concern themselves with local matters such as traffic control during fiestas or the daily chaos of the school run.

Also somewhat fearsome in appearance but generally just as friendly are the Guardia Civil, who wear green uniforms and drive military-green vehicles. They are concerned mostly with the heavier issues such as robbery, violence, drugs and traffic accidents so on this island it’s a fairly light workload, but they do cruise around in their vehicles to keep an eye on things. In contrast to the Policía Local they occupy a splendid, fortress-like building on a hill overlooking the town.

The Guardia was once an important tool of subjugation for the Generalísimo, Francisco Franco, and today’s Guardia still has the official motto Todo por la patria – all for the mother country. However, the Guardia themselves are now far removed from that dark history, a well-respected body of men and women, the kind Granny would be delighted to see her grandchild sign on for while other grannies’ offspring roam the world in bare feet.

Bring your own powder

It was a tense moment. The two men circled slowly in a Wild West stand-off, weapons poised, each waiting for the other to make a move. Whose nerve would break first?

Suddenly - the oldest trick in the book - Lorenzo glanced sideways with a startled expression. Miguel looked in the same direction and Lorenzo leaped forward, squeezing his weapon as he went. A jet of fine white powder hit Miguel unerringly in the chest.

‘Aagh! Cabrón!’ (you swine!). Miguel set off at a gallop after his opponent who was disappearing into the crowd, hooting with laughter.

We were witnessing the very beginnings of a culture change. A big one, for which you can award much of the credit or blame to Gomera’s close neighbour, the island of La Palma. And Cuba.

Not so long ago the Día de los Polvos, Powder Day, was a minor event of the week-long party known as Carnaval that fills a fiesta vacancy between New Year and Easter. Aimed mainly at the kids, Día de los Polvos was assigned to the quiet Monday before the big procession of carnival floats and dancers on Tuesday. It was basically a licence for young boys (it was always the boys) to unleash their inner hooligan, chasing each other through the streets with big tubes of talcum powder.

Some of them also targeted unwary foreigners, which they were not supposed to do at all. More than once I had to severely warn a threatening urchin ‘Do not attempt to spray me, young man, or there will be grave repercussions,’ then scold him severely when he sprayed me anyway. After the first couple of years we learned to stay at home on the Día de los Polvos.

The change came about fairly quickly when a few grown men realised that these young delinquents were having a lot of fun. Fuelling the transformation was the television coverage of the Fiesta de los Indianos in La Palma, which the Palmeros had long ago turned into a major attraction that drew crowds not only from all over La Palma but also from the other Canary Islands and even mainland Spain. As in the rest of the Carnaval celebrations this is a day for letting loose, for unlimited fun and loud music, but the chief characteristic is that everybody wears white clothing and pours talcum over everybody else. The music is always Cuban, which is almost impossible to resist dancing to, or jiggling or at the very least twitching, and the air rapidly becomes a swirling fog filled with wild white figures gyrating inside it.

For me the images transmitted by those brave television crews are a stark warning to keep well away from the madness, but other people find it strangely compelling. No doubt under pressure from these more party-minded citizens, the town council here in San Sebastián decided a few years ago to add a little something to our own very low-key event. They organised a dance in the evening for adults, clearly labelled as a special dance for Día de los Polvos. A salsa dance band would play in the main pedestrian street, cafes and bars would be open until late and kioscos would stay open all night.

Guidelines were issued on how one should dress for this occasion, although everyone knew already from observing the Palmeros. White clothing is obligatory as well as practical, given that any other colour will soon turn white anyway, but you are also supposed to present an old-world appearance, vaguely 1800s, with the men parading in smart white suits and a panama hat while the ladies swish beside them in long white dresses. Optional accessories are a white sun-umbrella for the women and a small leather suitcase for the men. Oh, and a big cigar, and a bottle of rum. And bring your own talcum powder.

It was an instant success. Locals prepared for it with typical enthusiasm, turning up in their hundreds to fill the town with music, laughter and a sweet-smelling fog. Amazingly, it has now become one of the most popular features of Carnaval, with two Cuban music groups playing in the evening followed by an all-night dance with two full dance bands.

On the morning after the revelries of Día de los Polvos the pedestrian streets, lamp-posts and shop windows have mostly turned white like the revellers, but the council sends in a clean-up team and a neat little electric vehicle armed with a high-pressure hose to wash it all away.

Ironically, this year the event followed immediately after the heaviest calima we’d had for at least thirty years. Calima is extremely fine dust from the Sahara desert which hangs in the air like a dry fog. Usually it’s more misty than foggy but this time it was denser than a Delhi smog and turned cars and streets a dull pink, so what with that and the talcum powder the town ended up looking like grandma’s bedroom after the kids had run amok with her make-up. Smelled nice though.

--------------- NOTES ---------------

So what’s it all about? Why the talcum powder, why the old-fashioned clothes? The clue is in the La Palma name for the event, the Fiesta de los Indianos. Its origins go back to the 19th century when Palmeros who had emigrated to the Indies - that’s the West Indies, and especially Cuba - returned home considerably richer than they’d left, dressed like gentlefolk instead of peasants, smoking big Havana cigars, drinking Cuban rum and even trailing creole servants to carry their luggage in leather suitcases. They were aping the European colonials who had occupied Latin America. Perhaps a little too showy, perhaps a little boastful of their new wealth, perhaps deserving the gentle mockery they received in the annual fiesta. The event was incorporated into Carnaval somewhat later, in the early 1900s.

The white powder is a bit of a mystery but among the various explanations I’ve read, the most likely is that in Cuba in those early days some blacks and dark-skinned creoles practised rituals that involved whitening the skin. Whatever they used it wouldn’t have been talcum, which is a modern convenience. And one for which I’m sure the local sell-everything Chinese bazaar is deeply grateful. In the weeks leading up to Carnaval they stock up with pallet-loads of the stuff, hundreds of giant tubes, all of which get sprayed into oblivion in the course of a few hours. Beats the heck out of selling it in tiny dispensers for the comfort of baby’s bottoms.