The boy who wouldn't eat

Mongo's mum Ana was worried. 'He's stopped eating!'

Well, yes, we had noticed that he was losing weight, young Mongo. 'All he wants is lettuce!' wailed Ana, despairingly.

'He only eats lettuce?'

'Well, lettuce and tomatoes. Carrots. Vegetables. When I try to make him eat meat he just pushes it around on the plate then eats scarcely enough for a hamster.'

There's this thing about meat, which I've mentioned before (Where do all the carrots go? 10 February 2016). Gomerans do love their meat. And are amazed that we two foreigners don't eat meat at all. When J pointed this out to Ana - 'You can live without meat, Ana, we've been vegetarians for forty years' - she politely dismissed it as foreign nonsense. 'He's a growing boy, he needs meat!'

Mongo was indeed growing and, to be perfectly frank, he had been growing a little too much. Compact like his mum and dad, he was swelling alarmingly sideways, clearly destined to join the legions of lumbering youths who spend their time slaughtering each others' avatars online with lollipop sticks clenched between their teeth like cowboy cheroots.

It seemed, however, that Mongo had recently experienced some kind of Road to Damascus event. He had been dramatically converted, transported in a flash into the unfamiliar world of Health and Fitness. I have no idea what did this to him. A first tentative tasting of some salad garnish as well as the steak? A compelling lecture at college on lifestyle choices that included nutrition as well as sex, drugs and global warming? Or a new and lovely girlfriend who crunched carrots instead of cheese-and-onion crisps?

Whatever - someone or something had hurled him off his track towards obesity and on to a different one altogether. 'He's taken up running now!' announced Ana one evening, with an exasperated roll of her eyes. 'He goes out every morning for half an hour, then again when he's finished college. Running around the town.' She gave that wonderful, palms-up Spanish shrug that says, who on Earth can explain such a thing?

We tackled Mongo about it one day. 'Your mum is worried that you're not eating enough. Especially now you've taken up running.'

Mongo gave the same shrug as his mother, rolling his eyes, but instead of stomping off in a teenage huff he launched into a lucid explanation. What he ate was a balanced diet - vegetables and fruit for the vitamins, a little carbohydrate like potatoes or pasta, a little protein like fish or meat - not too much of anything.

Vitamins? Carbohydrate? Protein? This was earth-shaking stuff, cataclysmic! This was not the way dyed-in-the-wool Gomerans speak of food!

But times are changing, have already changed. The seafront promenade is popularly known as the Avenida de Colesteról, Cholesterol Avenue, from the scores of old and young who jog, stride or waddle along it every morning to flush the clutter from their arteries.

Mongo, however, had propelled himself into a different category altogether. Here was Ana, a month or two later, anguished: 'He's started running on the caminos, the footpaths!'

'The footpaths?!'

'The footpaths and the senderos, the tracks, up in the hills!'

Now, this was truly impressive. The footpaths of La Gomera are its treasure, its glory, and one of the main attractions for visitors. You can walk over most of the island. The long-distance paths known as caminos reales, royal paths, are interlinked by some 600 kilometres of minor tracks. For the most  part they are well maintained and not dangerous unless you're drunk, but for me they are not things to run on. They are not paved walkways, they are lumpy, twisty and up-and-downy, scratched into the landscape over the centuries.

Mongo, however, had taken to running along not only the caminos reales but the whole complex network, minor paths, goat tracks and all. He had discovered an astonishing new sport called Trail Running. New to me, at least. But this island is tailor-made for it and so, it soon became clear, was Mongo. He entered himself in a local competition against dozens of tough, knobbly-legged athletes, and he won it.

Then he entered another competition in Gran Canaria, a much larger island, and he won that too. Soon he was invited to join a trail running club, a team, and he kept on winning. Mongo had inherited from his ancestors an ability to skip light-footedly along the tracks like a goat, speedily and effortlessly. He was also bright enough to plan his races well, pace himself through the course, pressure the leaders until they began to flag then dance past them to breach the finishing tape fresh as a daisy.

In one of the more prestigious Canary Islands trail running events he came in first by a large margin and took away a substantial cash prize, which enabled him to travel to a world-class competition overseas. Ana, distraught: 'He's going to Chile, to Patagonia! The mountains! And he's never seen snow in his life!'

Nor had Ana but she knew it was nasty cold stuff. I was with her all the way on this, snow can be beautiful in photographs but in reality it's damp, cold, clingy and generally to be avoided. And in Patagonia it's not just snow, it's snow at thousands of metres above sea level, where only rock trolls and turkey vultures venture in safety.

'How long is the race?'

'Forty two kilometres!'

Aargh. Patagonia, though, was where Mongo wished to go. By now he had acquired a voluntary trainer, an expert in physical education who knew everything there was to know about vitamins, carbohydrates and proteins. They spent a few days on the slopes of Mount Teide in Tenerife, the highest peak in Spain at over 3,740 metres, where Mongo experienced extreme cold and even a little snow, but was undeterred. He flew to Chile, ran the 42 kilometre Patagonia marathon and won it.

This is absolutely true, I have not invented it to make a good story, he won it against seasoned competitors from all around the globe. The once-chubby Mongo went on to become a world champion in this dauntingly strenuous sport and he now gives inspirational talks to the local schoolkids: you don't have to become a potato, you can turn into a butterfly or gazelle or whatever you want to be. He has also placed La Gomera firmly on the global trail-runners' map, and world-class events are now held here as well as in Patagonia.

Ana still worries about him, I'm sure, but perhaps not so much these days.

How they stopped the hooting

 A well-heeled gentleman called Don Antonio González Martín launched the invasion way back in the early 1920s, proudly importing the very first. It was unloaded from a ship at the quay near Vallehermoso, in the north of the island, dangling inelegantly for a while from the pescante, the dockside crane, before settling its wheels gently and irrevocably on the ground. Probably to excited cheering and throwing of caps into the air.

Don Antonio couldn't do very much with his new car because there were no roads to drive it along. The only highways were the narrow, stone-paved donkey paths called caminos reales which wriggled their way along the hills and valleys. He reportedly made a few pesetas by giving people paid joyrides around the town in the first car they'd ever seen. (In a nice irony, tourists can now get a paid ride around San Sebastián, the island's capital, in a horse-drawn carriage.)

Less than a hundred years later, the four-wheeled invaders had multiplied to the point where they were causing serious headaches for the Traffic and Road Signage team of San Sebastián's Ayuntamiento, the Town Council.

I imagine Señor Enrique, let's call him, talking one day to his young assistant: 'You hear that, José?' Nodding towards the window.

'Hear what, Enrique?'

'The hooting.' Somewhere in the distance a car horn is blaring, pausing, blaring again with increasing desperation. 'That, José, is the sound of failure.'

'It's just someone who can't move their car because some other blighter's blocked them in.'

'Exactamente!' shouts Enrique. 'Exactly! People park wherever they want. If there's no space they park anyway. They just stop the car, get out and leave it. Blocking those already parked, blocking the traffic. It's chaos. It's anarchy.' Enrique waves a finger menacingly towards his assistant. 'This fine and ancient town has become nothing more than a huge, messy car park. It cannot go on, José. Think of something.'

Within a week, José has the solution. They will paint lines along every road in the town to guide correct parking behaviour - white for 'Yes you can, sometimes', yellow for 'No you can't, except perhaps on Sundays', and zig-zags for 'Don't even think of it'.

'José.' A couple of weeks later.

'Enrique?'

'Nobody is paying the slightest attention to your paint, José. They still park anywhere they like. The yellow no-parking lines are already beginning to wear off from being scrubbed by tyres.'

Gomerans are a proud and independent people, not noted for docile obedience. José sighs and reluctantly has to admit, there is only one answer. 'We'll have to enforce it.'

'Do what?'

'Fine them. If they park on a yellow line you stick a multa, a parking ticket, under their windscreen wiper.' José once spent two weeks in Madrid on a student exchange scheme.

But this seems to Enrique a somewhat dismal idea - and in any case, where will they find a Gomeran prepared to stick a parking ticket on a car they know perfectly well belongs to Uncle Manolo, their neighbour Juana or their third cousin Alberto from up the valley?

I'm not sure how the next step happened, the escalation, but I don't believe anyone here would have proposed it seriously. A traffic management adviser from Gran Canaria, perhaps, or Barcelona.

People laughed in disbelief when they saw the newly-installed parking meters. Little boys found them great to swing around, whooping. Dogs loved them. People hung their jackets on them conveniently while they locked up their car for the day.

The Ayuntamiento responded robustly by employing uniformed strangers from Tenerife to apply penalty tickets.

'José.'

'Enrique?'

'Do you know what we found in the Council letterbox this morning?'

'Umm...'

'A large pile of parking tickets. All torn in half.'

The parking meters rusted and died.

José, being a resourceful young man, set about analysing traffic flow to see what could be done statistically, logistically or geographically to ease the bottlenecks and discourage antisocial parking. He came up with a clever rerouting strategy involving the extensive application of one-way streets, No Entry signs and white arrows painted on the road at approaches to junctions.

I remember discussing the results of this with Lorenzo, who lives near the centre of town. The main problem was that nobody knew how to get anywhere. 'You need a lookout standing on the car bonnet,' Lorenzo complained, shielding his eyes like a sailor peering through the storm. 'Junction coming up, left turn at fifty metres! Straight ahead for a bit... sharp right here... whoops, it's no entry, back up, back up!'

It took only a couple of months before the signs were removed and the white arrows painted out. Then followed a long, injured pause while nothing happened.

Or nothing seemed to be happening. In reality, José was incubating a final, draconian solution to the town's traffic problems.

'Say again, José?'

'Remove the cars, Enrique. Keep them out altogether.'

'You surely can't be suggesting...'

'Install traffic barriers. Pedestrians only. Replace the asphalt with paving stones, ornamental trees, benches for the elderly. Return the streets to the people.' Flushed and excited, José feels he is on the verge of making history.

Others feel the Council has lost its sanity. Public consultations are characterised by impassioned soliloquys about urban dictatorship, misuse of public funds and the foolish idealism of woolly-hat environmentalists.

In every bar and café along the proposed pedestrianisation routes are heard howls of rage and protest, mostly from the proprietors. 'People park outside here to pop in for a quick coffee and a sandwich. This lot are trying to put me out business!'

This is the nub of the problem, of course: people habitually park outside everywhere just to pop in. To snatch a quick coffee or beer, to buy their newspaper or groceries, to check their lottery winnings... This is precisely what José is trying to combat.

He is helped by the known principle that outrageously bold and expensive schemes are always much easier to fund than pussy-footed tinkering. Europe steps in and gives José all the money he needs. The big yellow diggers arrive and the town's main shopping street becomes a nightmare of mud, trenches and wobbly little bridges.

When the diggers finally move out again, and teams of extraordinarily patient artisans finish the job by laying little blocks to cover every square centimetre, the street is unrecognisable.

It looks wider and brighter. It's strangely quiet. A lingering scent of fresh cement has replaced the acrid stench of car exhausts.

Over the following weeks and months, slowly, timidly, café tables begin to spread into the street from their doorways. People take to strolling to browse the shop windows. In the evenings they stroll to do nothing much at all.

Something magical has happened. The place has begun to look like Paris.

Meanwhile the cars get parked tidily in new parking spaces on the outskirts. Nobody has to hoot any more, and people perhaps feel a little fitter from having to walk a few metres.

Not long afterwards, the other main street gets pedestrianised as well.

Urban Design magazine devotes an entire issue to the extraordinary success of this visionary scheme, José lands a top job in the Traffic Planning department of Torremolinos and Enrique is voted Spanish Civil Administration Man of the Year.


There's a touch of poetic licence in all this, I admit (with grovelling apologies to the Ayuntamiento de San Sebastián). But it's wonderful when a bold, controversial and ridiculously expensive scheme turns out to be a really good idea.