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.