A very special breed

Setting off on my bike under a heavily clouded sky with rain forecast to a probability of 97%, I discounted Janine’s warnings with a manly ‘Well if I get wet, I get wet! Not the end of the world’.

Ah, but it can be, very nearly. In the past I’ve had some really miserable times in the rain, not least on cycle-camping holidays in Norfolk. We don’t get much chance to experience rain in La Gomera and one tends to view the risk lightly. This morning’s trip was important, I was heading into town to deliver to a new outlet a few copies of my book ¿Todavía silban?, the Spanish version of Do they still whistle? - which, incidentally, includes a story about the joyful benefits of rain. I hadn’t even delivered the books before the first drops began to patter on my cycle helmet. Within minutes I was engulfed by the first real downpour of the season.

I sheltered under the narrow awning of a bakery along with several other people, all of whom were pretending to be happy. The very worst thing about Gomeran rain, which is just as unpleasant as anyone else’s when it happens, is that you’re not allowed to complain about it. I scuttled into the bakery to buy a couple of loaves just as Jorge was about to emerge. ‘Mucha agua!’ I warned him, lots of water, wiping mini-cascades from my forehead.

‘Es buena!’ he roared, throwing his arms apart and gazing towards the ceiling like one giving thanks for a heavenly bounty. Jorge is unfailingly cheerful and often hands out boiled sweets from his pocket. Of course he was absolutely right, rain is only good, rain is a bounty anywhere (except in Norfolk when you’re camping) and intellectually I joined everyone else in celebrating this early gift of water for the reservoirs. But it could have waited until I got home.

I was also beginning to worry about sixty trail runners currently up in the rain-soaked hills. This is an amazing event. I’ve mentioned trail running before (The boy who wouldn’t eat), a sport for which this island is tailor-made with around 600 kilometres of footpaths, all of them through wonderful scenery in huge variety from gentle plains and ancient forest to expert-only climbs through wild crags. It has taken off in a big way in recent years with marathons and ultra-marathons that attract keen trail runners from all over the world.

But those who were up there today must be a very special breed of human being. They set off from San Sebastián at nine o’clock on Wednesday morning and were required to run a serpentine course around the entire island, a distance of 212 kilometres, to arrive back within 85 hours. On a Gomeran footpath you’re never far from an uphill climb and the ascents in this race totalled 13 kilometres, along with the downhills which can be even more challenging. Challenge was the whole point of course, the event was called the WAA 360º and subtitled The Challenge. WAA is a specialist company selling high-tech clothing and equipment for people who enjoy challenges. WAA stands for What An Adventure.

Not only did participants need to be up to this adventure physically, they also had to find their way along the route unaided, without marshals to guide them at critical decision points. The only help they got was a map on their mobile phone. There were four base camps at intervals around the route for optional food, shelter and rest but it was up to each competitor to devise their own race strategy.

My specific worry was that rain makes those rocky paths much more slippery, especially on the downhill stretches, and is also chilling. In northwest China a few months ago 21 trail runners - one of them a legendary champion - died when rain and high winds overcame them. One was rescued by a shepherd who carried him unconscious into a cave and lit a bonfire to warm him. So I was relieved to learn that an emergency meeting of the Gomeran race organisers had modified the route to avoid the highest, coldest and wettest stretches.

I also learned that, astonishingly, some of the participants had already arrived back in San Sebastián by the time I was sheltering from the drizzle on Friday morning. The first was an Italian whom everyone expected to win, a world champion, and he was photographed as he passed through the triumphal inflatable archway just after one o’clock in the morning, holding his arms aloft with a big smile on his face. One of those slight, wiry people who seem indestructible, he had run around the entire island in 40 hours and 8 minutes, commenting that it had been without doubt the most difficult race of his life. As a Gomeran by adoption I shall interpret that as a compliment.

Chain reaction

Circling the roundabout on my new electric bike (woo!) with Janine close behind on her electric trike (I was always jealous), I glanced at my watch. About 10 o’clock. Fine, we’d reach the beach in good time for a swim before the sun rose too high for comfort. Then I saw the other cyclist.

She was standing forlornly at the side of the road, a middle-aged lady in shorts, her green Dutch-style bike lying on the ground beside her. As we approached I watched her expression change from lost and lonely to dawning hope, a tentative smile. I braked slowly, heart sinking. Look, I’m just a normal human being and if another cyclist is in trouble I really don’t want to be there, I just want to carry on my way. But of course I stopped.

‘Qué pasó?’ What’s happened?

‘You speak English?’ she guessed, with a probably German accent. Not a Gomeran then, but that was obvious, she didn’t look Spanish and anyway Gomeran ladies don’t ride around on green sit-up-and-beg bikes. We quickly established that her chain had come off its front chainring. Good news in that it was a less demanding task than a puncture, not so good news that I would end up with oily fingers.

Also not so good was that her bike - with a low-slung frame designed for women to step daintily across without having to sling a leg over the saddle - had a chainguard, the classic kind that covers the entire top of the chain and wraps around the front of the chainring. Heart sank a little more. I had previous experience of chainguards.

You don’t see many of them on this island, at the moment. Pushbikes, as we used to call them, are in their very early days as a form of transport and are purchased mainly as a sports device. They have feather-light frames, wafer-thin tyres, no mudguards and certainly no chainguards. Slim young people wearing slippery shirts of rainbow colours and tight shorts with padded bottoms bend low over their handlebars, calf muscles swollen as melons, training for impossibly rapid ascents. They make me feel slow, even on my new electric miracle with streamlined battery and bright blue panniers.

But my bike, as I occasionally explain defensively, is not about speed and competition, my bike is my burro, my donkey. A beast of burden. Its capacious panniers are its reason for being in the world, or in my world anyway. Janine’s red tricycle is even truer to this role - cheerful, charming and with large baskets front and rear, it’s possibly the most attractive burro the island has ever seen. Visitors point as it hums past, pause to examine it when it’s parked. One Spanish visitor asked if we’d mind taking a photo of her sitting on it. Never mind your Instagrammers posing one-legged on clifftops, here’s one of me on a red triciclo!

There used to be six authentic, honking donkeys in and around our village just thirty years ago but now there are none. Bikes could at least partially replace them, but they haven’t. Two-wheelers with engines, yes, there are plenty of those, ranging from puttering little mopeds to roaring BMWs costing twenty thousand euros, but very few of them are used as a donkey equivalent. Not in the way that they are, for example, in a town called Durazno we visited in Uruguay where the entire population travelled around on motorbikes, often with two, three or even four passengers on a single machine, an entire family. If everyone in the world did that we’d be a long way towards solving the climate crisis. And the over-population problem as well if they tried to do it in Madrid, Paris or London.

So we’re not quite there yet in Gomera as an all-round cycling community. There is just one dedicated cycle track on the island, in San Sebastián, leading directly from the island’s very first traffic roundabout to the hospital. It’s far more popular with pedestrians than with cyclists. The planners failed to consult with Copenhagen before they built it so there’s a lot wrong from the cyclist’s point of view. A brave attempt, however, and I hope there will be more someday.

But, getting back to the lady with the chain problem: replacing a chain on its front chainring is usually not a difficult procedure. You take a small screwdriver from your travelling toolkit, hook it between the chain and the chainring then wind the pedals backwards while guiding the chain over the sprockets. Done in a moment. With a chainguard, though, you can’t get at the chain where you want to and even if you do, winding the pedals backwards will bring your screwdriver up against a support bracket of the chainguard and the chain will slip away from you. Aaagh!

‘I might have to take off the chainguard,’ I warned the German lady. She nodded sadly, in the manner of a wife agreeing to let a surgeon remove her husband’s leg. ‘I’ll put it back on again afterwards.’ She tried to smile. Anything, anything.

But I’m glad to report a happy ending. I managed to get the chain on without major surgery, fiddling my way around and inside the chainguard using a screwdriver, a tyre lever and several fingers. And although both hands emerged liberally covered in black chain oil, I cleaned them up with the disinfectant gel that has been part of my personal toolkit since the Covid-19 virus knocked us all off our sprockets.

Photo by Didier Ngoie of P&D Art

Helicopters

The three of us paused, looking up at the sky. Scanning around a little anxiously, searching with eyes and ears.

We’d been happily discussing the state of the tide, the temperature of the water and the southerly wind that ripples the sea surface and occasionally wafts in a few jellyfish, but the distant wop-wop-wop of an approaching helicopter is unmistakeable and always disturbing. If you’ve seen the Coppola film Apocalypse now you will surely remember the opening scene in which Captain Willard is slowly awakened from a drunken sleep by the insistent beating of blades on the stifling air of Vietnam. It turns out to be the ceiling fan but still drives him to smash a wall mirror with his bare fist.

In La Gomera we’re better behaved than that, but at the sound of a whirlybird we will usually fall silent and look up. What is it about helicopters? Why are they so menacing? Slow and wingless, crawling impossibly across the skies, they seem to presage disaster, something bad about to happen or already under way.

The helicópteros we see here come in several varieties. Least troubling are the dull green Army ’copters that occasionally head towards the military quarters on the high plain near San Sebastián. I’ve never yet heard one blaring out The ride of the Valkyries like Coppola’s mad general, which would be exciting but probably viewed as bad form these days.

Then there are the sleek blue and white machines of the police, perhaps searching the seas around the islands for migrant boats in difficulties, or for a yacht heading this way from Morocco or South America with a suspect cargo. On a different island altogether, the Italian island of Sardinia where in a youthful adventure we looked after a smart mansion on the Costa Smeralda – playground of the very rich – I was inspected at close range by an Italian police helicopter. It spotted me on the terrace overlooking the sea and whirled over to face me with its tail in the air, unmoving, probably taking photographs with a long lens. I stood my ground defiantly, nothing to hide except the glass of wine I shouldn’t have been drinking while painting madam’s windows.

So police helicopters here bring their own reminiscent frisson, but worse are the smart red machines of GES (Grupo de Emergencias y Salvamento), the Canary Islands emergency and rescue service. They spell trouble not for us but for someone who has got themselves lost on the footpaths, or twisted their ankle or tried to walk too far on a hot day with too little water. These aircraft are based around the various islands but can be summoned by Gomeran land-based rescue teams if someone needs to be lifted out by air. They may also be called upon in a medical emergency to fly a patient from our local hospital to the superb main hospital in Tenerife.

On the morning in question it was a familiar yellow machine that appeared over the headland and whirred across the bay. One of ours, as they used to say in wartime, with relief. It’s stationed here only in the summer months but remains close by all year on one of the other islands, a multi-purpose assistant to the emergency services that can perform search or rescue missions and is also employed to monitor outbreaks of fire.

If the helicopter has a large bucket swinging beneath it, the bucket is for water and a fire has already taken hold, probably in difficult terrain. That happened in La Gomera in 2012, when summer-dried vegetation and warm winds combined to create a fierce blaze that took two weeks to control and resisted complete extinction for three months. Anyone in potential danger was efficiently evacuated to safety and there was no loss of human life, but the fire ended up scorching nearly a fifth of the island’s surface including part of the ancient laurel forest, the Parque Nacional de Garajonay.

On that occasion the helicopter was joined by two others and six hidroaviones, specialised fixed-wing seaplanes capable of scooping water from the sea to dump over the flames. They passed over our house every few minutes to skim across the bay of San Sebastián in a truly astonishing display of skilled piloting. Watching them was both thrilling and terrifying, because the fire was close enough to sprinkle our terrace with ash and at night the hills were outlined by an orange glow in the sky.

So what prompted me to write about this now, so many years later? The yellow helicopter of course, but also the ash that settled overnight on our terrace and blew into the open windows. Not flakes of ash from burning vegetation but dark brown grains like fine sand. They came from the erupting volcano on La Palma, blasted several kilometres into the air to drift across and settle around us, a sobering reminder that this large ball we all live on has a vibrant life of its own.

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Fire remains the main potential risk but that of 2012 resulted in a considerable increase in government-funded resources to watch for any outbreaks and quickly quench them. In summer there are full-time teams employed on firewatch throughout the forest, along with ground and air-based firefighting equipment.

Fortunately we don’t need to worry too much about volcanic disasters as well because La Gomera is one of the older Canary Islands and hasn’t shown any significant activity for the last two million years. Its last major eruption was around four million years ago.

The speed of light

A young man in blue overalls with a white logo is climbing up and down the telegraph poles in our street, shifting his aluminium ladder methodically from one pole to the next, heading towards our house. His progress is relaxed but steady, which is the Gomeran way of doing things when everything’s going well. On the street lies a large coil of flimsy black cable which he is gradually unrolling to string along the tops of the poles, joining the confusion of other cables already there.

I pop my head out of the door now and again to see how he’s getting on. It occurs to me to wonder what the Spanish word is for those poles he’s climbing and I’m delighted to discover they are postes de telégrafo, telegraph poles just as in English, a name that goes back to the very beginnings of long-distance communication in the mid-nineteenth century, the old railway signalling system and the beep-bip Morse code. These poles are living history! They still serve the same purpose and are as close to nature as they always were, just slender trees with all their branches lopped off.

It takes the young technician over an hour to reach our house. He handles the coils of his cable very carefully because this is the latest and cleverest modern technology and therefore very delicate. It will carry light into our house and the light will carry signals at unimaginable speeds. We are about to get a fibra óptica connection to the internet. Optical fibre.

When we first came here some thirty years ago optical fibres were something scientists in white coats played with and wrote incomprehensible papers about. Now they’re everywhere, even here on this little Atlantic rock 350 kilometres off the coast of Western Sahara.

After he has threaded the cable through a hole in our wall the technician spends the best part of another hour connecting it to an enigmatic black box on the sideboard which reassuringly has the word FIBRA embossed on top. Peeling off layer after layer of protective sheathing from the end of the cable he eventually reaches a core no thicker than a hair from my head. ‘Increíble, tan finito!’, so thin, I comment, predictably. He shakes his head: there is still another layer to remove.

Light works in a different way from the old-fashioned electrical signals, of course. Thirty years ago you could see and hear communication taking place. During our annual winter escapes to La Gomera, Janine and I continued working with colleagues in the UK by the then-current technological miracle of fax machines, which chugged out their printed messages and diagrams line by line over the plain old telephone system, fondly known as POTS. One Christmas, two employees of an agency I worked with faxed me a photograph which began with three pairs of feet and over the next half hour worked its way up the legs and beyond to reveal three curvaceous young women in bikinis. The guys still laugh about that so it seems nobody ever made them pay the phone bill.

In our earliest visits we didn’t even have a POTS of our own. Most of the public phone boxes were limited to calls within the Canary Islands, or to mainland Spain if you didn’t mind the echoes, and the nearest telephone capable of transmitting speech across the Atlantic was in a cabinet a steep climb up the hill from our house. There was another in the centre of town, from where I phoned my Mum on our first Christmas Eve here surrounded by a street party and still wearing shorts from an afternoon on the beach.

Ah, those carefree days of youth, when everything was new and wonderful! But there is still new and wonderful to be found if you keep up with it. Finally the fibre man completes his optical connections with a dinky little oven to weld two fibres together and we are ready to see if it works.

The black box on the sideboard now sports four winking blue lights. Unfolding his portable computer the technician connects by wifi to the black box and then to his home base by the new cable. He measures the velocity at which signals travel outwards and inwards. They’re supposed to be the same and very fast, because this service is called banda ancha simétrica, symmetrical broadband. Frowning slightly, he reads the figures then announces that we’ve got around 100 megabits per second.

‘It’s supposed to be three hundred,’ I complain churlishly.

He nods a little sorrowfully. ‘You’d be very lucky to get that. Maybe if you were in town, near the exchange.’ It’s all the bends in the cable, he explains, they slow things down. You wouldn’t think light would be bothered by a few bends but it is, this is the unavoidable physics of optical fibres, which is why he has to be so careful not to introduce any outright kinks as he’s stringing the cable.

‘It’s fast,’ he assures us. ‘A hundred is fast.’ Of course it is, it’s ridiculously fast: 100 megabits per second is 100 million twinkles whizzing through the cable every second. At that rate we could download the whole of Walt Disney’s The tortoise and the hare in a matter of seconds.

Looking back, the old ways such as fax and the postal service now seem only quaint. It really is so much easier to do the same job by clicking a keyboard and sending a PDF file through the internet to arrive at its destination a moment later. There is, though - and the world has discovered this far too late - a huge downside to this efficiency. When you can exchange documents so quickly everyone expects you to work faster. Schedules shrink from weeks to days while the working day expands from eight hours to whatever it takes. Janine and I both suffered from this towards the end of our working careers.

Gomerans seem to resist such pressures fairly successfully. Office workers still go out to a cafe for their mid-morning desayuno (breakfast) of coffee and a snack. They still go out for a sociable lunch in the proper manner and there is a notable absence of little white vans delivering sandwiches to be eaten at desks. (How sad they are really, those damp, lonely sandwiches!) Symmetrical broadband is fine and dandy and everyone’s got it, but there’s much more to life than optical bits, even if they’re mega.

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For anyone who really wants to know, the broadband part of this technology refers to the transmission of many different frequencies all at the same time, which greatly increases the carrying capacity of a fibre optic cable. Symmetrical refers to the transmission speeds being the same for sending and receiving.

Meanwhile, the poor old fax machine has joined the venerable ranks of ancient technology. To my knowledge the only people who still use them are lawyers, whose livelihood depends on keeping things as arcane and complicated as possible.

For many years they were run a close second by the UK’s National Health Service whose Supply Chain department was still providing fax machines to its users in February 2019, on the grounds of patient data security or some such excuse, but someone finally decided it was time to move on.

What noise annoys?

'Good morning! Do you live there, in the village?'

We were cycling homewards as he called to us, in English, from the open window of his car. In San Sebastián it's not unusual for a car to pause briefly to exchange a few words with a friend as they pass a bike or a pedestrian or another car, and drivers following behind will generally indulge them without hooting. (Don't try that in Madrid.) In this case there was no hurry because we were already out of town, on a quiet local road where only a couple of sheep showed any interest, looking up briefly from the dry riverbed with weeds dangling from their mouths.

The car driver was a young man in a hired Fiat Panda. We told him, yes, we lived in the village. His response took me aback: 'How do you stand the noise?'

'Noise?'

Our village is near the town but definitely rural, no lorries rumbling through or noisy markets or wild parties at three in the morning. It's a small, quiet, country village.

'I was hoping to find somewhere to rent here for a few weeks,' the car driver continued, 'but I've changed my mind. The dogs!'

'Ah, the dogs...'

'There's always a [beep] dog barking. Listen!' A high-pitched yelping in the distance obliged him with a demonstration, floating across the village from someone's flat roof. Occasionally a deeper, throatier bark responded from someone else's flat roof.

I've discussed Gomeran dogs in an earlier story (Try not to look scared, 16 June 2016). They have progressed from being either hunting dogs or guardians of goat sheds and garages to much closer integration into family life as pets. Everyone's got one, except us. Many live cossetted lives within the house, others are housed more traditionally on a flat roof or in a garden kennel made from wooden pallets and scrap metal.

'You get used to it,' I told the English visitor. 'We don't really notice them.'

He pulled a face, shrugged and drove away. A towny, I thought, slightly miffed. He'd be happier with the roar of a motorway or aircraft taking off over his head. In our earlier existence in England we lived briefly under one of the flight paths from Heathrow Airport, where Trident jets and Boeing 707s screamed overhead every couple of minutes, drowning conversation. Our next-door neighbour would stand in his garden shaking his fist at them, face red with rage. He bought a noise level meter so he could phone the airport to quote decibels if a plane exceeded the permitted limit.

What's a barking dog compared with that? Today, newly sensitised, I registered the welcoming barks as we arrived home and felt strangely protective of them. These creatures endure boring lives for most of the day and the arrival of two people by bicycle, opening a door, unloading shopping and perhaps greeting a neighbour is a big event. Why wouldn't they bark? Sometimes we see a black-tipped snout peeking above the wall of a flat roof, a pair of ears pricked up to capture any disturbance.

Everywhere's noisy, in one way or another. In our village there are also cats, of course, which sometimes yowl mournfully at night until I open the door and hiss at them. There is also a flock of hens nearby with their strutting rooster that cock-a-doodles throughout the day, sometimes causing English city-dwellers we're talking to on the phone to pause in astonishment: 'Is that a cock crowing?!' This particular cock's predecessor crowed all day and also throughout the night, but not for long. 'Crowing at dawn is fine,' its owner commented, 'but not at three in the morning. No, no, no. Into the roasting tin for you, my lad.' You'd think that the process of evolution would by now have eliminated such over-enthusiasm in roosters but evidently there's an occasional throwback.

Nobody, as far as I'm aware, got impatient with the parrot that lived in a cage on a neighbour's balcony and was able to bark like a dog, yowl like a cat and wail like an ambulance siren. This was straying a little far from nature, if you want to nitpick, but constantly entertaining. Unfortunately its owners moved away before I could teach it to whistle the Colonel Bogey march.

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The title is a reference to that immortal childhood tongue-twister, What noise annoys a noisy oyster? A noisy noise annoys a noisy oyster...

So, what noise does a dog make? It goes woof, doesn't it? Woof woof! Or in the case of Snoopy in the Peanuts cartoon, arf arf!

Spanish dogs don't do either of those, they go guau, guau! In my unbiased judgement this is more authentic than either woof or arf. Pronounced correctly in Spanish it goes something like goo-OW! with a very gutteral 'g', right at the back of the throat, and is about as close as you could get onomatopoeically.

Spanish cats go miau which sounds much like the English meeow, so that's a draw, but for roosters I think English wins. A Spanish rooster is supposed to say quiquiriquí or kikirikí which sounds something like kee-kee-ree-KEE - and to be brutally frank, I've never heard one say that. Cock-a-doodle-DOO isn't very accurate either but - here's the key - it improves greatly if you slur it as though appallingly drunk. Try it, go on, it's fairly convincing. Cheers.

Colour it blue

Waiting briefly on the pavement at a zebra crossing - drivers are generally very helpful here, they often stop even before you're ready to cross - I was waylaid by a voice close beside me: 'Usted es el señor Drake, no?' You're Mr Drake, aren't you?

It was a man of similar age to me and clearly Spanish. I didn't know him, or at least I didn't recognise him, but this was not unusual in the strange era of Covid-19. A face mask, sunglasses and sombrero leave little more than a couple of ears for identification. While I searched for clues in his size, shape and general gait, I briefly fought a flashback image from Live and let die where an intelligence agent watching a New Orleans funeral procession casually asks the man next to him, 'Whose funeral is this?' to which the guy equally casually replies 'Yours' and produces a long, thin knife.

I admitted I was señor Drake. The man nodded and said he'd read an article about me in GomeraNoticias, an online news site, and recognised my hat from the photo. This I could understand: the photograph, which was specially commissioned for the article, captures me posing self-consciously in the park and the hat is by far the most interesting feature. It has a broad floppy brim, a chinstrap to prevent escape and a certain rumpled insouciance in its bearing, which its owner tries and fails to emulate.

We drew back from the kerb and chatted for a minute or two, with difficulty through our face masks and the noise of passing traffic, but I understood his reference to my professed love for the island which the article emphasised. 'Do you know there's a folk song about someone like you?' he asked. 'It goes: an Englishman came to La Gomera, saw the blue sky and didn't want to leave...'

My hat being recognised by a stranger was my first taste of fame. It only lasted a week and I never got chased by hordes of adoring females, but it was fun anyway. The article was one of a series about members of a local arts group, El Viaje Interior (The Interior Journey), that I was invited to join on the basis of this blog and the paperback book it spawned. During my week of glory the hat was recognised by one or two more strangers who glanced at me as though trying to remember something, by a few casual acquaintances who hadn't known I was a writer, and by some friends here or abroad to whom I forwarded links to the web page. And that was that: my hat and I walked off into the wings, upstaged by the next featured artist.

However, I was intrigued by that alleged song about Englishmen getting ensnared by the blue skies of La Gomera. To how many had it happened? I can think of only a handful. Even if you broaden it to 'foreigner', which would include one or two Scots, Germans, Dutch, Belgians, French and what-have-you, we don't seem numerous enough to merit immortalisation in a folk song. So I asked around among my network of informants – did they know of such a song?

Indeed they did, more or less. It turned out to be not specifically about La Gomera but the Canary Islands in general and celebrates not a man but a woman, described as a dreamer. It's a very short song, just a single verse, and seems to be a popular component of potpurri medleys by Canary folk groups. This is how it goes, translated literally:

To the Canaries came one day

An Englishwoman dreamer

Who wanted to see the sky

Always blue and at every hour

Always blue and at every hour

She wanted to see the sky...

(repeat)

It's not Bob Dylan standard but it has the great merit of being old, probably dating back to the late 19th or early 20th century when many well-to-do English took their holidays in the Canaries, mostly on the much larger island of Gran Canaria. The lady in question was probably a particularly enamoured London socialite who not only stayed in hotels in Gran Canaria but built one there as well.

Being also something of a dreamer (aren't we all?), this song got me thinking - was it the blue skies that drew us to La Gomera and caused us to tumble so hopelessly in love with it?

In part, I suppose. There's more to it of course - you don't just fall in love with someone's hair, or even their hat - but blue skies are certainly important. A blue sky is an enabler, it lifts the spirits, inspires people to get out there and do things. It helps shape the character of the people who live beneath it. I remember a fellow villager, a Gomeran, once commenting that he too hated the days when clouds covered the sky. They depressed him. It doesn't happen often, though, and as a visitor you'd be very unlucky to spend a whole day without even a glimpse of sunshine.

So, yes: we came to La Gomera, we saw the blue sky, and we wanted to keep on seeing it... Along with everything else we enjoy here of course, but let's keep it simple, a song is a song.

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The song works a little better in Spanish than in English:

A Canarias vino un día

Una inglesa soñadora

Que ver el cielo quería

Siempre azul y a todas horas.

Siempre azul y a todas horas

Que ver el cielo quería.

As for the blue skies: a song can never hope to capture the magic, and even in a painting it's remarkably difficult to reproduce the joyous, uplifting quality of a blue sky. Artists frequently have a go at it here in La Gomera, with varying degrees of success.

It's much easier to capture the dismal grey skies of northern Europe. For example, during a brief flirtation with oil painting many years ago I learned that the first essential for painting a Lake District landscape is a plentiful supply of Payne's grey, which is a colour created by William Payne in the eighteenth century and now universally available in oils, acrylics and watercolours.

All you need to do is slap it generously across the upper half of your canvas then stand back and admire the authenticity of the effect, perhaps wearing a damp Barbour raincoat for the full experience. I never learned to like Payne's grey.

Instinct for survival

There are moments in life when the clock seems to pause as it waits for a life-changing decision. Some are benign: will this house be our new home? Shall we buy that little black-and-white puppy? Some are more perilous, inviting adventure and potential catastrophe.

Halfway down the slope, Janine hesitated for a moment, looked around her, gazed down into the valley far below, and sat on a rock. 'I'm not going any further.' A truly life-changing decision, in the sense of avoiding death.

Along with two other people - Tino, our Gomeran guide, and a friend from the village, an Englishwoman who had settled here long before we did - we had left the path above and were scrambling downhill through scrub and rocks. I was now faced with meekly following our friends further downwards or rebelling like my wife.

We were on a steep slope. I like my steep slopes to be of the variety that level out as they descend so if you slip you will glide gently to a halt further down, as on a children's playground slide. This slope was of the malevolent kind that gets steeper as it goes and would reward your slip with a free launch into space like a hang glider.

A short while ago we had climbed to the top of the ridge on a genuine pathway, wide and winding, which Tino informed us had in earlier days been a camino real, a royal path, a sort of motorway for donkeys. An elderly neighbour long ago told us his father was the local postman and used to deliver letters by donkey, climbing up this very path to reach the settlements further inland. As supplementary evidence our guide pointed to a large hollow in a rock face that looked like a rough-hewn horse trough, which is pretty much what it was, a water trough for donkeys.

Not far away he pointed out something that I would certainly have missed otherwise - a series of small hollows in the top of a low rock, each about the size of a saucer and not much deeper. If I'd noticed them at all I would have put them down to natural weathering, but no, they had been carved out many hundreds of years ago by the guanches, the pre-Columbian indigenous Gomerans. 'Probably to make offerings to the gods,' Tino told us. 'They would pour goat's milk from a bowl into the top hollow and it would flow along these channels to fill the others.' I'm sure he told us more about that but I've forgotten the details.

He also showed us, on an isolated boulder protruding from the high plain above the valley, some crudely scratched lines. They were clearly artificial, too geometric to be natural, another trace of the guanche culture. There are many more such inscriptions around Gomera and the other Canary islands but nobody knows what they were for, whether they served a useful purpose or ritual, or just meant 'Steve loves Monica'.

And then he offered to show us a guanche burial cave. There are lots of these around the island too, many of which originally contained mummies but those have long since been removed. The common feature of such burial caves is that they are almost completely inaccessible for anything other than a gecko. I can't imagine how the guanches managed to deposit a dead body in a hole halfway up a vertical cliff face.

However, Tino assured us that the chamber he had in mind was perfectly reachable on foot, with good boots and a steady nerve. This, from a Gomeran, is a statement to be considered carefully then rejected. Gomerans are astonishingly sure-footed, they're born to it, and have no fear at all of heights, but Janine and I at that time lived most of the year in the flat fenlands of East Anglia where our house stood on a hill one metre high.

I picked my way carefully down the increasingly steep hillside to try and catch up with our two friends. 'We're going to chicken out,' I called to them. 'Janine doesn't like heights.' Tino had already turned left to disappear behind a large boulder with nothing but blue sky behind it, occupied by a solitary kestrel hovering expectantly. 'And I'm not so keen either,' I confessed. Be true to oneself, fear is not something to ashamed of, it's a healthy animal instinct.

I turned around. Decision made. The clock started ticking again. Janine and I scrambled back to the top of the ridge and sat down to wait. Half an hour later we were still peering anxiously down the slope. 'Hope they're alright.' I tried to suppress the wild imaginings, those terrible 'what if...' images it's hard to quell when looking over a cliff.

We were seriously beginning to plan how best to call the emergency services (no mobile phones in those innocent early years) when we heard a long, warbling whistle from much further along the ridge. Our friends had traversed a gecko track along the side of the hill and climbed up by a different route. And in another perfect demonstration of guanche culture, Tino had alerted us by the famous Gomeran whistle, the silbo. I don't know what message he whistled at us but it was probably something rude.

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The guanches remain strangely mysterious. The most likely theory is that they were originally Berber migrants from North Africa but there are competing theories even for that. Their rock inscriptions have never been definitively decoded. It's known that they worshipped the sun, moon and stars as well as various minor deities, and their sacred sites tend to be in high places that offer a closer approach to the sky. But I think that's about as far as I should go in this discussion, being a leading non-expert on guanches.

However, I'm on safer ground in mentioning the other absent protagonists of this story, the donkeys, because I have personal experience of them. There used to be six donkeys in our village, each of which would greet any passer-by with that hilarious in-out bellow that donkeys make, like a bull elephant trying to clear a hamburger stuck up its trunk. They've all gone now, and I miss them.

The bite of an angel

 Gossip, rumours and alternative facts of the ex-President Trump variety - these are a lot more fun than factual truth and will spread rapidly through any small community.

One morning last December we went for our usual morning swim from a beach in San Sebastián, where the sea had lost its summer warmth but was still fine at around 20 degrees. Not an ideal temperature for floating around lazily on inflatable plastic swans but that’s not what we do.

Pause for reflection: I’ve never actually owned an inflatable plastic swan. Nor even a bright green alligator. In those hazy, distant days of childhood in England we used old, patched inner tubes from car tyres, supplied mysteriously by my grandfather. But no, the point of our daily swim now is to keep fit. Muscle tone, bone strength, lung capacity, cardiovascular health… Regularly immersing your head in cold water can even stave off the dreaded Alzheimer’s, I’ve read somewhere. I think. Can’t remember where.

So it was a little disturbing when someone passed on the gossip, rumour or alternative fact that a swimmer that very same morning, at that very same beach, had been bitten by a shark. This was so obviously ridiculous that it had to be a joke. Look, this isn’t Bondi Beach or Hawaii, this is La Gomera! We don’t do sharks.

We do have fish in the bay. People with black neoprene wetsuits, snorkels and goggles swim out to observe them, especially further from the shore where there’s a line of sunken rocks designed to protect the beach from rough seas or Russian mini-submarines. Sometimes we see a shoal of tiny fish as we enter the water. Sometimes we see a larger fish leaping into the air with its tail wagging, perhaps to escape from an even bigger one, or just for the joy of being a fish. Occasionally I detect a fishy smell in a patch of water as I swim through, suggesting that something has eaten something else and left a few bits and pieces behind. This is real life in the marine environment and a hopeful sign that not everything out there has died from ingesting plastic bags. But sharks! Oh, come on…

That same evening we read in one of the island’s online newsletters that the town council had closed all the beaches, cordoned them off with red-and-white striped tape, because someone had been bitten by a shark. Oof!

Arturo in his café, at coffee time the next morning: yes, it was true. Bitten by a shark. She trod on it.

Well, at least we do things differently here. I had never heard of anyone treading on a shark, not even an Australian. Details emerged gradually from Arturo and others. The victim was a long-term resident here, a woman who swam regularly, and she’d trodden on the shark as she was walking into the water. The good news was that this was not the Bondi Beach kind of shark that takes a large mouthful from your leg then backs away to await results, this was something most people wouldn’t recognise as a shark at all. It’s called a tiburón angelote, angelshark, and is similar in shape to the little angelfish that people buy for their tropical aquaria, with a broad, flat body. An ambush hunter, its mottled brown colour enables it to lie unseen on the seabed until its luckless prey swims over, when it springs up, grabs it with double rows of needle-sharp teeth then sucks the whole thing in like an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.

This particular angelshark had not hoovered up Helga in her entirety, it had merely fastened its jaws around her thigh and tried hard enough for her to feel the suction, but she’s a lot bigger than an angelshark and quickly beat it off. She thinks that she stepped on it without realising as she was wading into the sea, quite far out, and it began to swim away but then she launched herself into an energetic crawl and it thought she was attacking it, so naturally it retaliated. Not the fish’s fault.

I thought it was very understanding of her to see it from the creature’s point of view in this way, but then, foreigners who choose to live in La Gomera are of course extraordinarily wise and understanding people. The Gomerans themselves dismissed the event as being of little consequence and the beaches opened again the next day, once the identity of the perpetrator had been established. The angelote is not really a shark in the everyday sense of the word and they will never attack as long as you don’t tread on them. ‘Look,’ said Miguel, another daily swimmer, ‘if you tread on a dog’s tail, what’s it going to do?’

We’ve never seen an angelshark in more than thirty years of living here. Normally they hunt much further out from the shore, where non-expert snorkellers may mistake them for rays because they look much the same, but we have now taken to splashing more enthusiastically as we walk into the water, just in case. Helga has two rows of little toothmarks on her thigh to boast about and a good story to tell her future grandchildren, who won’t believe her. Bitten by an angel?! Oh, granny...

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Our angelshark is of the species squatina squatina but there are many more in the same genus, squatina. They’re found over large areas of the globe, including the coasts of Britain, but this one is classified as an endangered species. They are fished commercially for food, and overfished as is normal practice these days, but catches are now regulated to try and conserve them.