Sugar and spice

 José was already fishing in the fridge for a bottle of beer as I approached the counter. A man of few words, he pushed it towards me together with a glass, took my five-euro note and headed for the till.

Right next to me, in a glass display cabinet on the counter, something was trying to catch my eye. Among the usual late-afternoon remainders - a couple of those little sponges called madalenas, a croissant, a cream bun - was one I'd never seen in there before.

José came back with my change, nodded affably and turned away. I hesitated heroically.

I'm not usually tempted by sweet stuff. Long ago, after a few miserable years as an overweight teenager, I weaned myself off sugar. Cakes, meringues, Death by Chocolate puddings, After Eight mints could no longer touch me. Chocolate digestives hung on for a while but finally I banished them too.

Which is just as well because there is a lot of temptation in La Gomera. Your typical Gomeran has a very sweet tooth. There are four specialist cake shops in San Sebastián alone. They all sell bread as well but mainly they sell cakes, tarts, pastries and biscuits. The supermarkets sell sweet biscuits in family size bags and so do several of the bars and cafes.

José doesn't do bags of biscuits but he does have a selection of cakes and buns. He also offers Kit-Kats, Mars bars and suchlike, as does any other cafe, but the crucial difference is that José's cafe is in the hospital.

I had recently become a regular afternoon customer because of Janine's broken arm (reported in a previous post, Life and limb, 6 May 2023). Once the arm had glued itself together she needed twice-weekly rehabilitation sessions, which I wasn't allowed to watch, the rehab gimnasio being strictly for patients.

The obvious solution was to head for the cafeteria. While a therapist in white overalls was bending my wife's arm in unwelcome directions I could provide moral support a very short distance away over a glass of cold beer. This is what marriage is all about, we try to share the load.

During one of these afternoon sessions, sipping my beer, I got to thinking deep thoughts. The beer was a bog-standard Pilsen because that's all José is allowed to sell. My normal preference would be for one of the special beers - longer matured, fuller flavour - but they are also a little higher in alcohol and the Spanish health service is very sniffy about alcohol. It's tolerated but reluctantly, we're allowed a few per cent by volume but no more. You can't have wine in this cafe at all, not even if you're ordering a burger and chips or a fried egg sandwich.

If alcohol is viewed with disapproval, I thought, should sugary snacks be so freely permitted? Even the humble madalena cupcake is very sweet while all those candy bars are little more than flavoured sucrose. Sugar is bad, isn't it? Obesity, diabetes, blood pressure, rotting teeth…

And how about that other display cabinet full of colourful packets of crisps and other fried munchies laced with oil, salt and those tasty, toasty acrylamides? Junk food designed to be irresistible.

All of which accounts for the internal battle I was fighting that particular afternoon, standing at the counter with my beer bottle and glass, trying to be resolute. I crumbled.

'José. I'm going to have that doughnut.'

José ambled back, picked up the cake tongs and extracted the doughnut.

'I can't resist them,' I told him guiltily.

José nodded understandingly. 'They're very good, these doughnuts.' Placing it on a plate with a paper serviette, he slid it across the counter. 'Buen provecho,' enjoy it.

He didn't realise what he'd just done. I crept over to a corner table with my doughnut, seeking shelter. What was it about these damned things? Locally made, ring-shaped in the proper manner, they are fluffy in texture, fried only lightly, not over-sweet and with a hint of citrous flavour. They tap into something profound, the lingering remnant of the biological urge.

On the following session, as José pushed my standard Pilsen beer across the counter, he indicated the display cabinet apologetically. 'The doughnuts have all gone.'

'That's just as well,' I assured him. 'I'm better without doughnuts.' He shrugged doubtfully - why would anyone be better without doughnuts?

A few minutes later he came over to my table with a slice of Spanish tortilla, a piece of bread and a little bottle of salsa picante, spicy chilli sauce. Deeply touched, I thanked him, not too profusely because the Spanish get uncomfortable if you do that - just accept the gift - but what particularly affected me was that little bottle of chilli sauce. I can't really explain why, but I guess it's because it made the gesture more special, like adding a ribbon to a parcel.

And - no argument here - a slice of tortilla is surely a much healthier snack than a doughnut. The beer, I think I'll simply leave out of this debate.

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

A Spanish tortilla is, of course, not at all the same as the Mexican pancake thing, it's a potato omelette.

As for the doughnuts: Spain has sensibly chosen the American spelling donut because the English version would be unpronounceable in Spanish. Many English words are unpronounceable in Spanish.

Oh, and the acrylamides. Having mentioned them, I had to investigate the latest opinions. Are they carcinogenic? Does eating potato crisps, burnt toast, over-roasted potatoes or the crunchy rim of a pizza significantly increase your risk? The most attractive answer seems to be probably not, because while some studies have claimed to reveal an effect others have failed to find anything at all.

Flat and wide or tall and thin

From the corridor we shuffled cautiously through a half-open door into a darkened room. Looked for somewhere to sit, aware of shadowy figures watching us from around the walls.

A young woman shifted sideways to leave two seats vacant.

'Gracias.'

'Nada.'

We sat down to wait along with our fellow patients. There was no noise except the occasional sound of footsteps approaching and retreating along the corridor, the click of a door, a distant loudspeaker summoning someone for examination.

We were there for J to have a routine eye check. Hospital waiting rooms are terrible places, forlorn, troubling, because everyone has something wrong with them and secretly fears for their future.

The anteroom for an ophthalmic consultation is especially terrible because everyone has had drops put into their eyes and is waiting in gloomy twilight for their pupils to expand, so the ophthalmologist can peer inside.

'Good hospital, this,' an elderly man remarked to his neighbour, breaking the silence. 'Now that it's finally open. Better than the old one.'

The great thing, sometimes, about the Spanish is that they never speak in hushed whispers. If you're going to say something, you say it as though you wish to be heard, not only by the person you're addressing but by anyone else who cares to take an interest. In cafes this open and sharing approach can raise the ambient noise to painful levels, but in our dark, silent chamber it was as though somebody had toggled a back-to-life switch to awaken a nest of dormant zombies. You could hear the creaking of chairs as people sat straighter, catch the glint of spectacles as they turned their heads.

'The old hospital was a disaster,' answered the second elderly man. 'Nowhere to sit, everyone crammed like sardines in the corridors. And you couldn't get through the entrance for people queuing at the reception desk.'

'That's right!' agreed the first. 'What kind of architect designs a building where you can't get through the main door?'

'Loco, crazy. This is different altogether. Big foyer. Glass doors that slide open for you. Modern.'

Murmurs of assent from around the room. 'Modern!'

'Mind you,' continued the second man, 'I don't understand why they built it flat.'

'Eh? Flat?'

'The whole building. Flat. Low and wide.' He demonstrated with a sweep of his hands, visible now that our eyes were beginning to adjust to the gloom. 'If they'd built it tall instead of flat it would have taken up less land.'

'It's got two floors.'

'Poof! That's what I mean. Flat. They could have gone up five, six, seven floors and taken up less good farmland.'

Somebody else chimed in: 'That's right, covered less land that could have been used for farming!'

'But it wasn't being used for farming, was it?' objected another patient. 'People used to dump old cars on this site. Supermarket trolleys, broken bikes, old floor tiles. The land hasn't been farmed for twenty years.'

'Apart from which,' offered somebody else, 'this hospital, being low and wide, fits in well with the terraces on the hills behind. You hardly notice it.'

'Who wants an invisible hospital? A tall, narrow one you'd be able to spot miles away, know where you're heading.'

The waiting room divided itself into those in favour of a wide, flat hospital and those who would have preferred a tall, thin one.

This is why no waiting room, cafe or public plaza on this island is ever silent for long. Canary islanders, like most of the Spanish population, will always find something to discuss. And they will always divide into two or more factions, because where can you go in a conversation if everyone agrees with everyone else? Unless, of course, the disagreement is with a common adversary such as the local council or the Spanish government, in which case the competition is to find innovative new infamies for everyone to agree about.

We have witnessed intense and heated discussions about - to take a few random examples - gas and electric water heaters, Movistar and Vodafone mobile phone networks, potatoes, yams and old coins. The old coins were the subject of an earlier post (Four bitches, 29 July 2016). The potato dispute we initiated by enquiring about the best variety for papas arrugadas (see Wrinkled potatoes, 25 May 2017).

Yams came up during a family feast when the argument was whether a lump of cooked yam, which looks like a section of freshly exhumed leg from a marshland burial, should be sliced lengthways or across. I can't remember which side won that argument.

Notes for the serious student

The new Hospital de La Gomera opened its doors in 2010 on the outskirts of the capital, San Sebastián. It's a very modern, high-tech building with clever external mesh screening that shades the sun and promotes natural ventilation, a flat roof with vegetation to provide natural climate control and skylights to funnel natural light into the interior. It's not particularly pretty but nobody expects a hospital to look pretty.

For many years after the new hospital opened, its predecessor, on a hill closer to the centre of town, remained empty while everyone searched for a way to reuse it. The problem was that its antiquated design was more suited to a Guantanamo-style penal centre than anything socially acceptable and finally it was demolished. Some day a senior citizen's residence and day centre will arise from the rubble.