Steps as well!

One morning recently, just after breakfast, a guy in a yellow mechanical digger armed with a vicious spike set about shattering the surface of our street. Noisy, dusty and highly significant.

We need to go back three decades to understand the importance of this attack.

Among all the exciting memories from our early years here, one of the most vivid is a near-death experience as I skidded at high speed down a steep, dusty slope while supporting the rear end of a very heavy wooden sideboard.

At the front end was the owner of the furniture shop where we'd just bought the sideboard, a stocky Gomeran well accustomed to lugging heavy furniture around steep slopes. My Spanish at that time needed thought, concentration and preferably a dictionary so all I could do was scream 'Whoa...!' as though to a bolting horse. He must have detected the panic because he paused long enough for me to remember the word despacio, slow, por favor.

Our elderly neighbour Feli watched in amusement. A little later, when things had calmed down, he commented 'Soon it'll be easier. They're going to pave the streets,' adding hand gestures to aid understanding as he'd already learned to do.

Paving stones! This was big news. The village, although not far from the island's capital San Sebastián, was decidedly rural. Most of the villagers kept animals of some kind - chickens, turkeys, goats, pigs, sometimes all of those - and there were six donkeys lodged around the place who would occasionally converse in demented hootings.

'Paving and steps,' Feli amplified.

Steps as well! Gosh. Paved streets and steps would lift the settlement to a different plane altogether. We would transform from rural backwater to urban satellite. That was beginning to happen already - many of the younger inhabitants worked in the town - but it simply didn't look the part. Townies looked down on the village as a farmyard, dismissing the villagers as bumpkins who would squint at visitors suspiciously from half-closed doors. They weren't and they didn't, but people enjoy being rude about others.

It's true the villagers had been a little wary at first, a little shy, but very friendly when they got to know us. In fact they were proud that foreigners would choose to live in their village - we were not the first, there was already a house occupied by outsiders. The only thing they didn't understand was why foreigners moving to Gomera liked old houses and would spend time and money on restoration when they could just knock them down and build smart new ones.

We waited impatiently for skilled artisans with leather patches on their knees to turn up and lay our new paving slab by slab in clever patterns. 'They might not do that,' Feli warned, managing expectations.

He was right, they arrived with wheelbarrows, a concrete mixer and a modern system for creating paving slabs without the slabs. Pouring a thick layer of concrete over a reinforcing mesh, they sprinkled the wet surface with a coloured cement powder then embossed it with a random slab effect by treading on patterned rubber mats.

At first I felt cheated. Streets in town were awarded proper paving stones. It looked attractive though and I grew to like it. And it was very practical, no poorly-laid slabs to wobble or break underfoot, no cracks for weeds to sprout.

Best of all, I discovered from the cement sacks that this clever system was supplied by a firm called Bomanite based in Leighton Buzzard in the UK. Feli was delighted to hear that too, although he couldn't manage to say Leighton Buzzard.

Feli is long gone now, these three decades later, which is sad. So are most of the animals in the village, which is also a little sad, but Gomera has largely moved on from subsistence farming. And now we've lost the faithful old paving too, freshly torn up by a monster road drill. There was nothing wrong with it, good as new, but it had to be sacrificed in order to lay new water pipes throughout the village, seriously large tubes of high-tech plastic linked by chunky metal joints and valves, replacing the spindly old iron pipes that leaked as much water as they delivered.

Once installed, the pipework was buried beneath the same system of embossed concrete as before but in a cheerfully brighter colour and with inspection covers for access to the valves. There's even a bright red cover at the end of every street labelled Bomberos, firefighters, with a high-capacity connector beneath for fire hoses.

Feli would have loved it all I'm sure, even though the cement sacks tell me that this time they came from Córdoba in mainland Spain instead of Leighton Buzzard. Only a minor disappointment.

The third chair

Two middle-aged women stood uncertainly in the outdoor terraza of the restaurant, each pointing to different tables. They finally selected one in the corner next to us but then changed their minds, something wrong with it, headed towards another, changed their minds again and returned to the corner table but called a waiter to turn it diagonally and add a third chair. I've no idea why but they were right, it looked better.

When they'd settled, I commented lightly 'Ahora todo perfecto!', everything's perfect now, which established that we were Spanish-speaking foreigners and probably to be avoided. The two women smiled politely and nodded as they picked up their menu cards.

I was wondering about that third chair. If it were meant for another female companion, this could be a girlie night out and likely to become raucous, although at least they wouldn't be shouting about football. The waiter brought them both an elegant glass of beer.

A minute or two later the missing third element arrived in the form of a husband. He approved the ladies' choice of table, nodded affably towards us, sat down then leaned over towards me and said 'Usted uno, yo dos!', you one, me two, smiling broadly and pointing at the women.

I should, of course, have made some cutting remark along the lines of 'Goodness gracious, you expect me to laugh at a grotesquely macho comment such as that, which has absolutely no place in modern society and least of all in Spain where women are treated with the greatest respect and… etc etc,' but I didn't, I pulled a stricken face and said 'Oh, that's not fair at all, I'm off right now to find another.' No point in spoiling someone else's evening. The women probably exchanged eye-rolls but I didn't notice because the new arrival was already engaging us in conversation, clearly out to enjoy himself, and he needed an audience.

He asked where we were from. England originally but now La Gomera, we told him, at which his wife clapped her hands delightedly. She was also from Gomera! We spent a minute or two discussing this happy coincidence in more detail until hubby interrupted to say he wasn't from Gomera, he was from La Palma. I assured him that being from La Palma was almost as good as being from Gomera.

But in fact, he continued, he had spent most of his life in Venezuela. Oh, right. It's difficult to enthuse about Venezuela these days. He didn't try to defend it, running a finger across his throat to illustrate the quality of life there, and we all agreed that it was much better here in the Canaries, whichever island you choose.

He felt this needed a toast and raised a glass of what I suspect was a very expensive red wine that the waitress had just poured for him. 'Le invito!' he offered, have one on me, but unfortunately I already had a full glass of the house red. We all clinked glasses anyway: 'Salud!'

This little incident took place on a brief visit to Santa Cruz in Tenerife, but it illustrates three important features of Canarian life. One, eating out is much more common among ordinary folk here than in Britain, partly because it's cheaper but also because, like all the Spanish, Canary Islanders are brought up to view communal eating as normal and everyday, whether it's breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Feature number two, there are Gomerans everywhere if you look for them. Number three, there are Venezuelans everywhere as well.

Numbers two and three are directly attributable to a mass exodus of restless young Canarians during the mid-1900s, seeking a better way of life than subsistence agriculture. The Canary Islands were largely neglected by Spanish governments on the mainland, especially during the 36 years of General Franco's dictatorship from 1939 to 1975. Many Gomerans tried their luck in the much larger island of Tenerife, while many others headed across the Atlantic to Venezuela.

There is still a steady drift of young people across the 30 kilometre channel that separates Gomera from Tenerife, simply because there are more job opportunities there. We've found Gomerans working as taxi drivers, waiters, shop assistants and hotel receptionists, while others we know have left for posts in the social services, civil administration, finance and all the other things people do.

I don't know of any who have emigrated to Venezuela lately, however. The flow is now in the opposite direction. Several of our more elderly neighbours had brothers or sisters in Venezuela who decided years ago to cut their losses and come back home. There are also Venezuelan immigrants here from the indigenous population. Many already had family links with the Canaries and in any case they speak Spanish. There is a particularly strong feeling of kinship with Venezuela but we also know Gomeran residents from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and, especially, from Cuba. There are lots of those, even more than Venezuelans. Cuba lies over 6,000 kilometres across the Atlantic but there are still many close family ties.

There is even - I happen to know - a Canary Islands association in Havana, the Asociación Canaria de Cuba. We were told about it during a visit to Cuba a few years ago and called in, of course, to say hello one afternoon. It has its own clubhouse complete with cafe and bar, in which we found a good sprinkling of members sitting around chatting or playing dominoes. We were greeted by a small, plump, bald and utterly delightful president who served us beer then spent the next half hour chatting. Canary Islanders are reliably sociable wherever you come across them.

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

I touched on the topic of emigration from the Canaries in a story a few years ago, The clandestine emigrants, December 2016.

The current population of Gomera is predominantly the result of a violent immigration, the Spanish conquest of around 1450, when many of the original guanche natives died. The numbers of inhabitants slowly increased after that, with a census in 1787 recording nearly 7,000 while a century later there were just over 15,000. During the 30 years from 1900 to 1930 the population climbed steeply to 26,000 and reached a peak of 30,747 in 1960, supported largely by fruit exports to the other islands and mainland Spain.

From that high point, emigration to Tenerife and South America (especially Venezuela) brought a decline and by 1990 there were scarcely 15,000 inhabitants. When we two arrived not long after that you could sense the decline by the large numbers of abandoned houses both in the towns and in the countryside.

However, since then agricultural exports have picked up again, tourism has taken off, emigration has slowed to nothing more than a normal healthy trickle and young couples continue producing babies, although typically just one or two rather than the 10 or more of their grandparents. The island's population is now around 21,500 of which some 9,000 live in San Sebastián. In England that would count as more of a village than a town, but here it's our island capital and holds its head high.

For the figures quoted here I'm indebted to an article by Pablo Jerez Sabater in the online magazine Canarias Ahora dated 7 January 2015.

Whatever floats your boat

 On the asphalt of the beach road in San Sebastián there is a long diagonal scar which I try to avoid on my bike because it's deep enough for an uncomfortable jolt. It was caused by a big yellow bulldozer during a complex operation to cast and transport gigantic concrete blocks with which to lengthen the jetty on the opposite side of the bay.

They were extending the jetty in order to allow longer cruise ships to moor. Cruisers had been growing steadily longer and taller for years and this was the second extension of the jetty since we first arrived over thirty years ago.

The most astonishing aspect is that some of those longer cruise ships are short ones that have been lengthened by cutting them down the middle, heaving the two halves apart and inserting a new section. Unbelievably, the new section is constructed in advance complete with decks, cabins, windows and services, then simply slotted into place. Weld up all the joints, move in with the paint pots and in no time at all you've got a longer ship. But how can they manufacture an entirely new section of a huge ship so very precisely? How can they avoid little changes in level at the deck joints that you could trip over in your flip-flops?

By contrast, the reason it's done is very easy to understand. Longer cruise ships carry more passengers, reducing costs for the cruise company. A cruise can now be as attractively cheap as a boring old package holiday hotel in Crete, Goa or Torremolinos.

There's a downside to that, though. Some people book a cruise who really shouldn't, and it seems to be a particular hazard for the Brits. A package hotel abroad can be comfortably British in ambience, and so indeed can a cruise ship, but the snag is that the ship will dump you daily onshore where things may be disturbingly foreign. San Sebastián is as friendly a place as any you'll find but it doesn't do the Full English Breakfast or Fish 'n Chips or an Irish pub with pints of Guinness. And the bars and cafes are run not by British expats but by Spanish-speaking Gomerans or Latin Americans with minimal understanding of English. If communication hitches and cultural oddities make you nervous it might be better to stay on board the ship, sipping a rum and coke by the swimming pool.

We met a couple a few years ago who should have stayed on board. Both looked anxious and a little desperate. Recognising us as something other than Gomeran, the husband accosted us at our cafe table: 'How do you get out of this place?'

Bus, taxi, walk, hire a bike - there are lots of ways to leave San Sebastián, we told him. What exactly…

'Isn't there some nice little resort near here? Somewhere you can get a decent cup of tea?'

Santiago on the south coast you could loosely describe as a nice little resort, although with perhaps worryingly large numbers of locals wandering around, but the early bus had left long ago and the next would be an hour's wait. They could take a taxi, we told them, but that would be a half-hour trip and a fair pocketful of euros. Not sure about the cup of tea either. We watched them heading back towards the ship.

It's a sad fact that some people really shouldn't go on holiday at all. Recently another couple were safely seated at a cafe table with a colourful jug of sangría in front of the wife, hubby with a mug of beer, blue sky overhead, but both looking a little tense. I asked if they were enjoying their cruise. He wasn't, she was, apart from having a glum husband. 'I can't get him out of that chair. Won't go and look at the tower in the park, doesn't want to see the church or Columbus's house, just wants to sit here knocking back pints of lager.'

Hubby's face darkened to a deeper purple. 'I never wanted to come on a blinking cruise in the first place, it was her idea. I can't wait to get home, to be honest.'

Perhaps he'd just got traveller's tummy. Most of the cruceristas enjoy themselves in San Sebastián, it gets top marks in post-cruise surveys, and as the cruise ships grow longer and more of them arrive - several a week at peak season - the bars and cafes have learned to cope better. Nowadays any waiter or waitress will understand 'pint of lager', 'white wine', 'white coffee' or 'sangría' pronounced the English way, as well as the equivalents in German.

George from Manchester had the right attitude. He asked permission to sit at our table, as there wasn't anywhere else, and introduced himself cheerfully. 'Enjoying your cruise?' I asked him, the standard opener.

'I am, I am,' George said. 'Doing me best, anyway. I'm on me own now.' His wife had died a couple of years ago. We listened to his story, advised him where to go and what to see, treated him to his beer and eventually waved him on his way. Brave of him, I thought. But perhaps he'd meet a similarly plucky lady on board his cruise ship and start a whole new phase of life. Careful of the joints in the corridors though, we should have warned him.

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

Lengthening a ship is called stretching, which makes it sound easy, and in fact it's not a new technique at all but goes back to the late 19th century. At first it was done to create space in existing ships for a new type of steam engine that was more efficient but also much larger.

I touched on the topic of cruise ships in a previous story, Judgement of nations (22 June 2017), but what triggered this fuller account was a film from Uruguay about a crew member on a cruise ship who happens upon a mysterious doorway that leads to an apartment in Montevideo. Yes, I know, but it's magic realism and supposed to be symbolic. (Window boy would also like to have a submarine, directed by Alex Piperno, 2020.)

That reminded me that we are now into October and the cruise season is almost upon us. It continues throughout the winter until around Easter.

A large proportion of the passengers who come ashore will order a jug of sangría, which is properly pronounced san-GREE-a, not SAN-greeya. It comprises red wine, chopped fruit, lemonade or sparkling water and usually a spirit such as rum or brandy. The word in Spanish also means 'bloodletting', but it's probably better not to know that.

Saintly thoughts

 At around eight-thirty in the evening there came a knock on our front door. I opened it to find young Agustín standing there, looking puzzled. 'Why aren't you two down on the plaza with us?'

We could hear cheerful music from a live band with guitars and the tinkly little mini-guitars called timples, and people singing along to traditional Canary Islands tunes. The plaza was decorated with strings of colourful bunting flapping in the breeze.

'There's food and wine,' Agustín added needlessly. There's always food and wine.

I hesitated. The reason we weren't on the plaza was that this party was in honour of San Benito, one of the two patron saints of the village, and the people celebrating had all honoured him in the proper Catholic manner. They'd earned the right to party afterwards, while we certainly had not.

We hadn't attended Mass in the chapel, despite the urgent clanging of the bell. (Nobody clangs a church bell as urgently as Miguelito, who is otherwise very limited in his capabilities but put a bell rope in his hand and he's matchless.) We hadn't followed the effigy of the saint in solemn procession around the streets of the village, led by a folk group performing the weird and spine-tingling Gomeran chanting to the rhythm of drums and castanets. We hadn't followed the saint back into the chapel to make sure he was safely back in his niche.

All we did in the way of involvement was wave to a few people from our balcony. Not to the priest, dignified in his flowing robes the colour of rich cream, because he diplomatically took care not to see us.

In short, it would have been hypocritical to join in the jollity afterwards. I couldn't face trying to explain this to Agustín so we pleaded tiredness, been a long day, lots of exercise and so on, none of which he believed but in the end he gave up and headed back to the plaza.

Janine was comfortably stretched on the sofa with a book in her hand. 'He was disappointed,' I told her.

'He was just being polite.'

'No, he looked really disappointed. As though he'd sort of failed. I feel guilty for turning him down.'

After a minute or two of reiterating to each other our perfectly valid and praiseworthy reasons for not joining the party, the guilt got the upper hand. We put on our shoes and stepped out of the front door to meet Agustín approaching again, this time holding two plates of bread and cheese, accompanied by Roberto with two plastic beakers of red wine.

They paused, momentarily confused, then broke into big smiles. Agustín handed his two plates to Roberto, who somehow managed to grab them without spilling the wine, then took Janine's elbow to help her down the steps.

I suspect it had been decided that the real reason we didn't want to join the party was because Janine's balance is unreliable and, especially in twilight, the steps down to the plaza could be tricky. With me on one side and Agustín on the other she was fine but someone else came bounding up the steps to hold my elbow as a second level of safety while another guy went down the steps backwards just in front of us in case the three of us screwed up and let her tumble.

I have to admit that by now I was close to emotional meltdown. I mean, it was just so nice of them. One way or another, they were determined we weren't going to miss out on a village party. The clue is right there, of course: it was a party for the village. The religious business was as important as ever but this time they'd brought in a folk group to sing and play, solemnly for the procession then in fiesta mode for the rest of the evening. We hadn't recognised that crucial difference.

So we did our best to make up for this blunder for the next couple of hours, eating and drinking, meeting and greeting, chatting. It reminded me nostalgically of the now sadly defunct Asociación de Vecinos, Neighbours' Association, which used to organise such events much more often. Now we'll have to wait for the next saint's day to come around.

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

San Benito Abad, 'the abbot', seems to have favoured a very ascetic form of monasticism in 6th century Italy and successfully promoted his Regla, a strict regime, as an aspiration for others. It's interpreted perhaps a little leniently here.

However, as I see it, the saints' days are an important factor in Catholicism's continuing success in the modern world. Each village has its own saint or saints, so there's direct ownership. In celebrating the saint they're celebrating their own little community. What's more, in any Catholic event there are required reverences of course but afterwards you are allowed to frolic.

Which leads me to a question I regularly ask myself and have never managed to answer satisfactorily: if you took religion out of the picture, is there anything else that could take its place as a social glue?

On present evidence, the answer seems to be no. Our village has an annual non-religious fiesta which used to include fun stuff like wheelbarrow races but mostly its focus now is on the dance in the evening which brings in all the young people and ageing boppers from miles around. It's not really about us, the village community.

On a broader scale there's a Día de Canarias, Canary Islands Day, and even a Día de la Hispanidad which is to celebrate being Hispanic wherever you live, but nobody seems very sure what to do with either of those.

By far the jolliest annual event is the Romería in January with multiple groups singing and dancing in the streets of San Sebastián - but that's in honour of the patron saint…

Or some prefer the annual Carnaval with its elected Queen and a carnival procession of decorated floats, but even that is a kind of rebellion against authority including the church. Several days of fun end with a mock funeral in which a giant sardine is carried slowly through the streets to a doleful drumbeat, followed by an irreverant bishop spraying the crowd with holy water from a chamber pot. Take away the religion and all you're left with to deride is the local council, a much more modest target.

The toddler and the pigeon

Watching a very small boy trying to catch a pigeon that was pecking the ground around the cafe tables, I wondered why the bird kept running away rather than taking off to land out of reach. Had it learned that miniature human beings who try to chase you normally fall over? Were the breadcrumbs worth the risk? Was it enjoying the game, or was it just a very stupid pigeon?

It looked a bit stupid as it scuttled in front of the toddler with its head comically bobbing backwards and forwards, but of course they all do that. Scientists claim the pigeon is not bobbing its head at all, it's thrusting it forward then holding it fixed in space while the rest of the body catches up. Stabilising its vision to ensure maximum awareness of its surroundings. Clever. Chickens do it too, and various other birds. I've never managed to see it as anything but bobbing.

'Well?'

'What? Oh, right. Say it again, I got distracted.'

A favourite activity when otherwise doing nothing but sitting around in cafes (as already mentioned in Four bitches, 30 July 2016) is to improve our grasp of the Spanish language by reading aloud from a novel. Person A interprets the Spanish text into English, person B has to translate it back into Spanish, swapping roles every few minutes. But it's so easy to get distracted when you're sitting in the open air outside a cafe.

During a coffee break the other day on a windy morning, I got distracted by a supermarket carrier bag flying past my legs. Snatching at it far too late, I watched it settle briefly on a flower bed then lift into the air again to swoop behind some palm trees and out across the plaza, heading towards the beach and the sea.

A minute or two later it came flying past our table again. This is a known and fascinating feature of this particular cafe. The prevailing northerly winds interact with the surrounding buildings to form large eddy currents like whirlpools in a lake, reliably carrying paper serviettes and plastic bags in endless cycles past the tables.

'I'm not going to chase after it,' I assured Janine. That way madness lies. Every minute of the day in thousands of towns around the world there are carrier bags, chip packets and sweet wrappers escaping into freedom and many of them end up flying out to sea. Catching one of them isn't going to save the planet.

After about half a dozen circuits the carrier bag whizzed past at low level and wrapped itself around a chair leg. I lunged, grabbed it and banged my head on the edge of the table.

'You said you weren't going to…'

'I know, I know.' But what can you do against such deliberate taunting?

You could view (and I do) a susceptibility to distraction as a necessary element of the human survival kit. It's not useful to be immovably focused on a Spanish novel if there's a sociopath with an axe creeping around the place. In more relaxed situations, however, this instinct can be a social liability. We once had a friend who would so frequently stop listening because there was something more interesting going on behind you that we immortalised their name as a technical term. 'I've just been Xxxxed!'

The fact is, though, everyone does it occasionally. Janine will sometimes - very, very rarely - lose contact if I'm rambling on while a dog is playing games nearby. Me, I tend to be lured away by toddlers chasing pigeons. Pigeons chasing other pigeons are quite hard to ignore as well.

The most impressive resistance to distraction I've ever witnessed was when a young man, a complete stranger, engaged me in a one-sided conversation about how he'd come to Gomera in order to find himself. He was still rummaging deeply among his psychological intricacies as I politely left him in order to watch a helicopter performing acrobatics above the bay. I decided that a large part of this guy's problem was an ability to remain resolutely focused on himself while a simulated air-sea rescue was going on behind him.

And since you ask: no, the toddler never did manage to catch the pigeon and yes, he did fall over.

A mist opportunity

Somewhere along a trail in the forest, all four of us stopped at the same time for no apparent reason. We stood looking at each other amid the dark, lichen-covered trees. It was a very strange moment. So strange that I was later moved to try and capture it in poetry, which fortunately is a rare event:

In the vivid silence

Ancient timbers stir, whispering fearfully of life and death:

This is how our time will end, in mist and shadow.

Softly among the leaves a bird sings reassurance

While fragile sunlight soothes the fallen trees.

Yes, I know, stick to prose. I only resort to poetry when overwhelmed by emotion. I once wrote a love poem on a birthday card for my future wife Janine, not long after we'd first met. It almost brings me to tears now, or laughter: such a painfully young poem! Another was after a visit to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria which tapped the other extreme of my emotional range.

On this occasion we were taking two friends on a trip around the island, both keen photographers on their first visit here, who had already spent hours ecstatically crouching for creative perspectives of the stepped agricultural terraces or for colourful closeups of wild flowers, but we felt no visit to La Gomera was complete without at least a short stroll through the Parque Nacional de Garajonay, the island's national park with Unesco World Heritage status. Predominantly ancient laurel forest, it covers 40 square kilometres, more than 10 per cent of the island, so you're almost certain to encounter it but driving through by road is not the same as making your way on foot amid the soaring trunks, the soft sounds and the subtle scents, the feel of the earth and stones beneath your feet.

So what happened in the forest that morning to evoke such a visceral response?

Partly it was because we'd departed from the bright sunshine and clear blue sky of San Sebastián. The lush, damp greenery of the forest was an extraordinary contrast, too fast and too dramatic, a finger-click transport to a different planet.

And forests are so much grander than we are. So solid and timeless, so humbling. So beautiful when in cheerful mood yet so threatening when sombre.

But perhaps above all it was the mist. Light, swirling mist is a frequent characteristic of the park and can be a nuisance on a car trip because it may lurk around any of the hairpins, waiting to engulf you. As you drive to the higher regions of the island (which rises to nearly 1500 metres) you may emerge above the mist, when it will present you with a sea of cotton wool that completely hides the spectacular landscapes beneath.

So yes, it can be inconvenient occasionally. On the other hand the mists are the key reason why La Gomera is rich in water deep down beneath the ground, feeding its many springs. The forest encourages the mists to form and the trees trap moisture to soak into the soil.

Which brings me to the point of this story. La Gomera is about to launch a bold new scheme in its bid for a more sustainable future. We glimpsed its early beginnings during a forest walk a few years ago when we paused to picnic at a residential camp in the heart of the Parque Nacional, near the village of El Cedro. The camp provides accommodation for groups of young people to spend a few days living amid La Naturaleza, Nature, a novel concept many of them will only have heard vague rumours about. Everyone needs to slosh through mud wearing gumboots at least once in their life, and smell fungi on rotting timbers, and watch spiders eating flies.

El Cedro camp also performs a research role in the forest and at that time (perhaps still) it was hosting a trial apparatus for extracting water from the mists. It's such a simple idea that it's hard to believe it works, but it really does. You hang up a large net vertically, place a trough beneath and leave it alone overnight. Mist will condense on the net, trickle down and fill your trough with water.

The technique is well known and has been employed for many decades in South America particularly. They've also been using it to a limited extent here in the Canary Islands where, for example, an enterprise in Tenerife markets bottled water produced from mists drifting up from the sea.

The current proposal in Gomera is to use mist collection to help supply irrigation water in drier areas of the island. The first three installations have a projected cost of around a million euros, so somebody certainly believes in it. This is part of a general effort to shift towards a more enlightened approach to agriculture and energy, with the challenges of climate change in mind, and could serve as a model for other islands of the Canary archipelago.

I feel quite proud. I think I'll add another verse to the poem.

In the vivid silence

Ancient timbers stir, whispering fearfully of life and death

While giant cobwebs seize water from the darkness

To nurture life where once was none.

Umm…

In the form of potatoes, carrots and onions

And possibly bananas and grapes and things.

Needs a little more work.

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

The mist collection project was described in the online newsletter GomeraNoticias of 25 November 2021 and was due for completion towards the end of 2022. Timescales for ambitious and expensive projects tend to slip but they usually get done eventually.

The company producing bottled water from the mists is Agualternativa Ingeniería S.L. based in Santa Cruz, Tenerife. They claim to be the first company in the world to do so, marketing it as a premium product with the label Garoé Mist Water.

And incidentally, the Spanish name for this kind of mist harvesting device is captanieblas or atrapanieblas – something that captures or traps the mists. In English it's called a fog fence. Oh, the beauty of Shakespeare's mother tongue! 

Get back

Doña Guadalupe, normally a quiet but cheerful old lady with a mischievous sense of humour, was distraught. Her weatherbeaten face creased in pain as she told us the news: 'She's been accepted,' she cried despairingly, as though her granddaughter Yami had just been enrolled in the Chicago mafia.

'But that's wonderful! Congratulations! There's a lot of competition for…'

'No, no, it's a tragedy. She'll be off to La Laguna, and that's it. We've lost her.'

La Laguna is the site of the university campus in Tenerife. Guadalupe wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her black widow's dress.

'But you must be proud of her, surely? What's she going to study?'

'Oh, I don't know. Something social.'

Social sciences, perhaps. It didn't really matter what she was studying, the point was that she was leaving La Gomera for a different life on a different island.

'But she'll come back here for the holidays, the fiestas…'

'Sí, sí, claro.' Of course. But Yami would be changed. She wouldn't want to stay. She wouldn't want to work the family farm, have babies, join the family meals at weekends. She would have ambitions, she'd want a career, and there aren't too many career opportunities on a small island. They'd lost her.

What triggered this decades-old memory was reading about the 2021 documentary series Get back about the Beatles. The group had a global hit in 1969 with their song of that title, which has a very simple chorus:

Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged…

The song enigmatically features two characters called Jojo and Loretta, both of whom went away from where they belonged and perhaps they'd do better to go back there.

It all depends, though, doesn't it… Do they know where they really belong? Does anyone?

Not me, that's for sure. I was born into a restless family. My life began in the busy city of Nottingham in the industrial heartland of England but I'd barely learned to crawl before they whisked me away, bye bye Nottingham, all the way to genteel, elderly Bournemouth on the south coast. We left there after a couple of years to fetch up in Teddington near London, then Twickenham near Teddington, then…

We perched for the longest time in Windsor, home also to the Queen. I once wished her 'Good morning, ma'am' while riding a horse in Windsor Great Park. Both of us riding, she and I, so it was a memorable moment but she was already married to the Duke of Edinburgh so as a blind date it was a bummer.

The fact is I should have tried harder to find a partner with her feet planted firmly in the ground but instead I married another rootless wanderer. More by luck than judgement Janine and I finally arrived at the only place that has ever felt like home. If we belong anywhere at all, it's here in La Gomera.

I'm deeply grateful to the island for that, but also deeply envious of the true Gomerans. How wonderful it must be not only to feel you belong here but also to know it's an indisputable fact. An authentic Gomeran has roots reaching all the way down to the Spanish conquest in the mid-1400s, with surnames to prove it. And even further: some have surnames or first names donated by the original indigenous population, the guanches, and on average each Gomeran retains around 40 per cent of guanche DNA in their body's cells, with some as high as 90 per cent. How's that for belonging?

But we need to finish the story about Yami. Wise old Granny was absolutely right, Yami studied well and emerged with a good degree, won a place in the Social Services in Tenerife and stayed there, happily settled with a lifetime partner. She comes back for the holidays and fiestas, of course.

Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged…

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The Beatles song

The television series Get back was released on the Disney+ streaming channel in November 2021. It documents the Beatles creating tracks for their album Let it be in 1969 and it seems they had a lot of fun. As part of the album's launch publicity the group played Get back, along with other songs, live and loud on a rooftop in Savile Row which caused indignation among the uppercrust tailors but taxi drivers passing by loved it. Search the song title on YouTube to see the video.

Population of La Gomera

Many granddaughters and grandsons choose to stay here, thank goodness, or the place would soon be empty. In fact the impression is that the island's population is slowly increasing - there are lots of babies and toddlers around - and this is supported by the figures. Wikipedia reckons there were about 18,300 inhabitants in 2001, which by 2020 had risen to over 22,400. Some 9,000 of these live in the capital, San Sebastián. A small part of the increase is due to newcomers settling here including South Americans, who fit in very well, and a few Europeans like us who speak Spanish a lot less convincingly but generally do our best.

Guanches

The island's original inhabitants are mentioned in several earlier stories, notably The tragedy of the broken bowl posted in this blog on 10 July 2018 and published as story 40 in the paperback book Do they still whistle?

The luggage illustration

I snapped this poignant bronze sculpture in the year 2000 on the concourse of Atocha railway station in Madrid.

Don't wet the outside

Disasters can happen in the blink of an eye. Afterwards comes the regret: if only you hadn't glanced away for a moment, jumped into the water, climbed so high, driven so fast…

I've had my share of them, but why did I remember this particular one after so many decades? It came to me while watching the workmen laying paving blocks on the newly reformed plaza in town (see the earlier story Shady business). One of them walked over to a palm tree, picked up a litre bottle of water standing next to it, unscrewed the blue plastic top and took a long swig from the neck.

By then the water must have been unpleasantly warm. There's an easy solution to that problem and it doesn't involve plastic bottles. But first, the disaster.

After we'd bought our little house in La Gomera many years ago there was a lot of building work to be done and we turned up daily to solve or forestall any problems. In a different time and place, in England, I narrowly prevented an enthusiastic workman from knocking a large hole in the wall for a door halfway up the staircase. He was looking at the plans upside down.

This particular morning, in Gomera, we were specifying where we wanted the electrical sockets positioned, which is something you will always get wrong but you have to try. Luis the contractor was marking the locations with a red felt-tipped pen. This sounds easy but it wasn't because the rooms were cluttered with bricks, tools, cement sacks, a wheelbarrow, a cement mixer and, in the front room, Isidro, perched on a scaffolding platform to plaster the ceiling. One of his arms was entirely covered with plaster, which made me wonder if his wife used a hammer and chisel to get his shirts clean. He always turned up looking immaculate in the morning.

Anyway, ducking under Isidro's platform we emerged in front of Mongo who was shovelling sand into the churning drum of the mixer. He stepped back politely to let us pass, tripped over a large ceramic jug just behind him and saved himself only by throwing a hand out to the wall. The ceramic jug could do nothing but tumble over and break. It split in two quite neatly around its plump middle.

Isidro and Luis froze, gazing at the water spilling across the concrete floor. Paco hurried in from another room, nodded and observed quietly, 'That's the porrón'.

Mongo stared forlornly at the two halves lying on the floor then toed away the top half. He picked up what was left of the base. 'We can still use this.'

We'll draw a veil over the comments about that idea but it quickly became obvious that the defunct porrón played an essential role in the operation, supplying cool drinking water in a hot climate. Nobody really blamed Mongo, nobody blamed anybody, it was an accident, but of course we felt guilty for being the primary cause.

'We'll get a new one,' we assured them.

'No, no,' Luis protested, waggling a finger, 'it wasn't your fault.' Then after a moment, 'They sell them in the ferretería in town.'

He was referring to the main source of such equipment in those days, an ironmonger's in the centre of town that could supply you with anything from five brass screws to an industrial power drill, along with a paella pan, kitchen weighing scales, stepladder, ornate flower vase or porrón.

There was a row of those along a high shelf in different sizes and a colour choice of terracotta or pale sand. Certain features were common to all: a bulbous shape, a handle at the top, a nozzle with a large hole for filling the vessel and on the opposite side, a spout with a much smaller hole from which you pour a stream of water into your mouth. The spout looks a bit rude but that just adds to the charm. The design of these things must go back centuries. I bet Columbus had a few of them on his ship when it arrived here in 1492.

We chose one similar to the accident victim. Its price was 960 pesetas, around 6 euros, equivalent to over 10 euros nowadays but still a bargain for something that looked almost hand-crafted, beautiful and timeless. 'Don't wet the outside,' the proprietor warned us.

We took it back to the building site that would one day be our house. Effusive greetings and thanks. 'It needs preparing, though,' Luis said. 'Don't wet the outside.'

'Very important not to wet the outside,' Isidro emphasised.

'Fatal,' emphasised Luis, which doesn't actually mean fatal in Spanish but is definitely something to be avoided.

'What you do,' Paco instructed, 'is to fill it with water - inside, don't wet the outside - and add a glass of anís,' by which he probably meant the aniseed liqueur called Chinchón, after the Spanish town where they make it.

'Or rum,' offered Mongo.

Luis shook his head. 'You don't need anís or rum, just water. Fill it, leave it for a day, empty it, fill it again. When the water stops tasting of clay, basta, enough, it's done, the porrón is ready.'

'It's much better if you add a little anís,' Paco objected. 'Sterilises it.' I absolutely love the Spanish propensity for arguing at length about anything at all. After listening for a minute or two I handed Luis the porrón. 'You do it. Please?'

A couple of days later we saw the porrón tucked away safely in a quiet corner of the building, filled with water and cool to the touch como Dios manda as they say in Spain, as God commands, as things should be.

Which brings me to the main point of this story, which is that the porrón is a simple but clever device that not only holds water but also keeps it cool, yet is inexorably disappearing from the building sites. Everyone buys bottled water instead. I can feel a rant coming on here but I'll save it for the notes, below.

Filled with nostalgia, I decided to see if it would still be possible to buy a porrón in San Sebastián. The old ironmonger's is long gone but there is another wonderful shop that supplies catering equipment to the restaurant trade and anyone else who cares to wander in, such as a nostalgic foreigner. To my delight they could offer a porrón - and not just one dusty remnant from the back of a cupboard but a collection of bright new ones prominently displayed on a low shelf, with a choice of sizes in either sand or terracotta colour.

I see hope on that shelf. Hope for a brighter future when more people realise that water in plastic bottles is a wasteful nonsense if a humble ceramic jug will do a better job and last forever.

Yes, yes, don't say it: until someone trips over it…

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

Surely this is not a porrón but…?

Correct. A ceramic vessel such as this to drink water from is properly called a botijo, while a porrón is a glass vessel with a long, conical spout from which you drink wine.

In Gomera, Tenerife and probably the other Canary Islands the water vessel has come to be called a porrón. Perhaps because the glass porrón would have been uncommon in earlier times - you'd have drunk wine from a wineskin.

How does it work?

The botijo is made from clay and oven fired but not glazed, which means it remains porous. Not so much that all the water drains away, just enough for it to evaporate slowly through the sides, and the evaporation cools the vessel.

Back in the days when milk in the UK was left in bottles on your doorstep, in summer some people would leave a ceramic sleeve for the milkman to slip over each bottle, standing in a bowl of water.

My family also had a little cabinet called an Osokool, made of porous ceramic with a hollow on the top that you kept filled with water. We used it for milk, butter and anything else that might go off in the heat.

Okay, now the rant

I need to talk about water. One of the most extraordinary changes I've witnessed in recent years is that people no longer drink tap water. The water hasn't changed, but people have. A myth has unaccountably grown that tap water here is full of minerals and gives you kidney stones. The truth is that it really isn't 'hard' water, it's relatively soft, and anyway some mineral content is good for the body. People get kidney stones because they don't drink enough of it. It's very common to see an elderly man pop into a bar for a small glass of red wine to quench his thirst.

Along with that myth has grown the general concept that tap water is bad, unclean and smelly, which is also untrue. We keep a jug of it in the fridge and it's absolutely fine. By contrast, water stored in plastic bottles is very likely to absorb noxious chemical additives that leach from the plastic, particularly in a hot climate.

But I'm fighting a lone, losing battle here. Short of some Chernobyl-style catastrophe involving plastic bottles, they're not going to go away. There are now vans that spend every day delivering nothing but bottled water to the supermarkets and cafes.

Anís

To finish on a sweeter note: Chinchón is a very pleasant liqueur, a close cousin of French pastis such as Ricard or Pernod. It comes in sweet or dry varieties but in Gomera I've only seen the sweet one. It's a clear liquid that, like pastis, turns milky white when you add a little ice or water. If you mix it in a ratio of three parts water to one of liqueur it makes a refreshing drink and the ideal vessel from which to swig it is a botijo - or if you're in La Gomera, a porrón - because any water you put in it subsequently will retain a light, refreshing hint of aniseed.

Shady business

The nerve-shredding screech of a disc cutter greeted our arrival at a cafe table. A guy on a stepladder was attacking the white-painted framework of a toldo, a permanent canopy over a nearby group of tables in the main plaza of San Sebastián. The structure was already half dismantled. Strange and intriguing, because it had been erected just a few months ago.

There are local companies who will custom-design and install any kind of canopy from a simple awning over a window to a giant, freestanding structure covering an entire terraza of tables. The one currently being demolished was one of those, a splendid shelter with double-pitched canvas roof and drop-down windscreens of clear plastic on all four sides.

Toldos have been staging a stealthy takeover of the plazas and pedestrian streets in recent years. I'm not sure I like them very much. However, let's try to be fair and dispassionate. Arguments in favour of toldos: they provide reliable protection both from the sun and from wind and rain. Furthermore, they are versatile. If the wind changes, roll up the northerly set of screens and drop down the southerlies. If a downpour starts splashing in all round, drop down all the screens and you've got a cosy marquee.

Arguments against: they're not most people's idea of beautiful, and they rob us of that lovely, higgledy-piggledy collection of cafe tables scattered across a plaza, each with its sun umbrella, that adds such warmth to the empty paving. By herding all the tables into a canvas-covered corral you destroy their carefree charm. If you really want a roof and walls around you, why not sit inside the cafe?

The undeniable reality, however, is that the toldos are popular. While the pale visitors who stumble off cruise ships sprawl in full sunlight with their faces turned blissfully to the sky, people who live in near-permanent sunshine seek shade, and a toldo is today's way to do it.

Which is why it was so surprising to see this relatively new one being torn down. Was it possible the cafe's proprietors had spent the last few weeks gazing doubtfully at their creation and decided it was a mistake? Unlikely. Had they perhaps put it up without prior permission from the town council? Unthinkable. Or was the cafe itself - terrible thought - closing down, its business ruined by the Covid plague?

'No,no,' Isidro assured me, seated at another cafe table nearby. Isidro is a regular and knows everything about everything. 'It's because of the plaza. Las obras, the works.'

Ah, of course! Of course. Watching more closely, the men with the disc cutter were not just hacking the structure to pieces, they were very carefully separating the welded joints then stacking the components out of harm's way. One day it would rise again, somewhere.

The works Isidro referred to were a long-promised project by the town council to reform the main square. It's becoming a bit of a habit - this is the second time in 30 years! In our earliest days here the main square was actually a circle, a delightful cobblestoned area furnished with palm trees, flower beds, benches and a newspaper kiosk. Charmingly simple and rustic. Instantly recognisable as San Sebastián de La Gomera. I keep a photo of it on my phone to upset any locals old enough to remember it.

'The old plaza!' nodded Isidro, smiling wistfully. 'It was pretty. The palm trees are still there, most of them.' He nodded towards the cluster of palms in front of the town council building. It's true, they stand gracefully waving where they always were, planted in the ghost of the vanished circle.

So why did it have to go, that pleasant old plaza? Its chief sin was that traffic circulated around it so when the space was needed for a dance or concert they had to close the roads and divert the cars. It was also too small for a sizeable event. One year when we arrived for our winter sojourn the circle had already gone, replaced by a much larger, conventionally square plaza with traffic tidily routed away to one side. Much less attractive but functionally more effective, undoubtedly.

There was a snag, though, with this new design. The entire surface of the plaza sloped gently down from the seaward end towards the town. Not only did this mean that heavy rainfall flowed from the plaza into the town rather than the sea, it also meant that the seaward end required a series of broad, shallow steps down to the road and beach level. I'd guess that the steps were a deliberate architectural feature to add interest to an otherwise very plain square, but they were not such good news when you were drunk, dancing, wearing high heels or pushing a wheelchair.

Even worse was that the slope also required steps along one side of the plaza, fairly high at the seaward end but diminishing in height as they neared the town. It was unnerving to sit at one of the cafe tables and watch visitors approaching these variable steps, especially at the shallower end where they were close to invisible. You felt like calling out, 'Hey, watch out for the… whoops…!' as they stumbled at the unexpected change of level.

Definitely high time for a rethink of the plaza, then, but as the current layout is painstakingly destroyed I have little idea how it will be reborn. The general idea seems to be send in the mechanical diggers, always a favourite solution, to reduce everything down to a reference level of the seaside roadway. But first you have to remove the surface paving, which consists of very small bricks.

There are an awful lot of them. Watching a couple of workmen in red shirts pulling up the bricks, I found myself wondering how anyone could stay cheerful and motivated on an interminable task like this. There are literally thousands of square metres of them, each brick scarcely more than handsize, all of which have to be individually lifted and stacked on wooden pallets to be transported by a fork-lift truck.

Then at some time in the future all the bricks will all have to be relaid. One at a time, each one carefully aligned and levelled with its fellows. A worker might manage to lay just a few square metres in a day, facing the next morning a vast expanse of empty concrete still to cover, brick by little brick.

There must be a survival technique to cope with this kind of challenge. Discussing yesterday's football might get you through an hour or so. Then what? Anecdotes. Politics. Plan tonight's TV. Count the bricks. Give each a name as you place it: Ernesto, Elena, Enrique, Efigenia… Decide between a doughnut and a chocolate croissant for the mid-morning treat. Plan how to spend your retirement if you ever get there. Breaking News: Workman found curled up behind a pile of bricks on the plaza sobbing 'I can't go on... I can't take another [beep] brick, I really can't... I want my Mum...'

Anyway, the toldos. It's obvious they all have to go while the plaza is reformed, but I'm sure they'll be back. They're too popular to abandon. For me, however, a sun umbrella every time, please.

(Pause for mature consideration.)

Except perhaps when the umbrella is yet another flamboyant advert for Coca Cola. Or when a gusty wind turns it inside out and breaks its spokes. Or knocks it over and spills my beer. Or the sun keeps moving and obliges me to shuffle the table or the umbrella sideways to chase the shade...

Okay, toldos do have their advantages.