Where do all the carrots go?

She waggles the broccoli head towards me like a club. 'So what are you going to do with this?'

'Eat it!'

Facetious response. She is being serious. 'Claro, of course, but how do you cook it?'

'Well...'

'You boil it?'

'No, no... No!' Suddenly the accusation that I might boil broccoli, or anything, seems to demand strenuous denial. I sense an eagerness, an edge of discovery in this searching question from the market stall assistant, habitually a quiet woman who just gets on with the job.

'So what do you do with your broccoli?' she demands, pointing it at my heart.

It's not often I get the chance to expound our method of cooking vegetables - people tend to drift away - so I seize the moment. 'I chop it into small pieces,' I tell her with a chopping motion of the hand (Spanish requires whole-body communication) 'and cook it in a pan with a lid, adding just a very little water. So it steams, really. Then when it's nearly cooked I add a little olive oil.'

She nods approvingly as though I've passed a test. 'So you eat it as a salad.'

Well no, not salad. Or perhaps... yes, thinking about it. What she means is that we eat the broccoli as a food in its own right, not as an ingredient. That's right, I tell her: we eat it as a salad.

She places the broccoli on her weighing scales in satisfied silence. There's a feeling that we've touched on something fundamental here.

I've puzzled for many years over one of the most extraordinary aspects of life on this island. The place is full of fruit and vegetables, they grow them by the truckload, they sell them everywhere. There are four permanent greengrocery stalls in the local market and several more on Saturdays, specialist greengrocery shops in town and fruit-and-veg counters in every little supermarket. People emerge with shopping bags bulging with broccoli, carrots, leeks, green beans, peppers, tomatoes...

But as far as we've been able to establish, they never eat any of it.

Explain, please. Okay. Take a typical fiesta here in our village (see the story dated 6 October 2015) which largely revolves around eating and drinking. There is a conveyor belt of food that begins around midday and lasts all afternoon. First up is a rich stew of garbanzos, chick peas, in meat stock. Next come plates of fried pork, eaten with bread or just with more fried pork. Then chunks of goat cheese to be eaten with home-baked bread before the next course which is bacalao, salt cod, accompanied by potatoes boiled in their skins, Canary style, and served with the mandatory oil-and-garlic sauce called mojo.

No vegetables yet, you'll notice, unless you include potatoes. Now comes the prize dish of the day, fried goat meat eaten in French style with your fingers, off the bone. A palate-cleansing salad would go down well after that... but you won't get one unless you bring your own.

Then we're into the puddings, cakes and ice lollies.

Long ago we learned what to expect at these banquets and we prepare by cramming down salad and fresh fruit in advance to lessen the craving. In fact we have a reputation as lettuce-eaters. The other day, after a splendid fish dish in a local restaurant, the proprietor Jacinta said she’d told the cook to give us plenty of salad garnish because she knew we’d eat it. We left only the fishbones. This is almost unique behaviour, everyone else sends their plate back with the salad garnish untouched.

Yet the vegetable farmers and greengrocers here are thriving! They drive all-terrain vehicles with chromium-plated cow fenders and GPS navigation, they build palaces with orange-tiled roofs. They are selling all the fruit and vegetables they can pile up on their counters.

So where on earth is it all going?

Theory 1: The restaurants take it all

This is easily knocked down. You will never be served carrots, broccoli or any other vegetable with your fish or meat here, not even as an optional extra. It’s true that any restaurant will prepare you a wonderful mixed salad, a visual and gustatory delight, but it’s salad rather than vegetables and mostly the foreign visitors who order them. No, this can’t account for it.

Theory 2: The locals eat vegetables at home although not in restaurants

No, they don’t eat them at home either, we’ve been to lots of family meals and we have never glimpsed a dish of carrots. If there’s a salad it has been created especially for us. They do eat oranges.

Theory 3: It’s the resident foreigners who buy it all

Well yes, we foreigners buy fruit and veg of course, but there aren’t all that many of us. Simple observation at the market stalls shows Gomerans hugely outnumber foreigners.

Theory 4: It all goes into soups and stews

This is slightly more convincing. Soups and stews are very much part of the local cuisine - but can they possibly eat enough soup and stew to account for such quantities?

Theory 5: People take health-giving baths in vegetable soup, like Cleopatra bathing in milk

Don’t be silly.

Theory 6: They indulge in midnight vegetable orgies, crunching carrots furtively by candlelight in the kitchen

Nope, that’s us.

I give up, it’s beyond me. Perhaps the goats get it all, the ancient secret of Gomera's wonderful cheeses.

The Romería

Cleverly dodging through a side street to avoid the gathering swarms of spectators, we continued walking into town on a street parallel to the procession but deserted.

Almost. Coming towards us was a pushcart decorated with flowers, fruit and biscuits and draped with brightly striped cloth to hide the sides of a supermarket trolley.

Lorenzo paused to greet us, reaching into his trolley. 'A little wine?'

He and the couple walking with him wore traditional Gomeran costumes and had guitars slung across their backs. We spent a pleasant few minutes sipping red wine from plastic mugs and toasting each others' health, Saint Sebastian, the whole splendid concept of fiestas and, in particular, today's Romería.

'But,' Lorenzo said suddenly, 'you're missing the procession! It's already started.' He thumbed towards a distant murmur of drums.

'So are you,' I pointed out.

Lorenzo nodded. 'Claro! Of course. I'm far too old to push a cart that far. We're going to wait at Silvio's then join in later.'

Silvio's is a bar. This is the healthy realism of the true Gomeran. A romería is conceptually a very serious occasion, but the trick is not to treat it so seriously that you spoil the fun. In essence it's a pilgrimage in procession to a holy shrine, and for maximum spiritual benefit it should involve a pitiless uphill trek along ancient pathways in torrential rain. The Gomeran version traverses wide, traffic-free streets in gentle winter sunshine.

But to be fair, completing the course can take anything up to three hours when you're strumming and dancing the whole way.

We arrived at the town square just before the procession, which was led by a group of young folk dancers energetically leaping and twirling to show how it's done. The steps are more complicated than they appear and tourists who try to join in risk looking like the dancing hippos in Disney's Fantasia.

Close on the bouncing heels of the dancers came their accompanying musicians, armed only with the tambor - a smallish drum - and Gomeran castanets, which are called chacaras and are a lot beefier than the prissy Sevillian variety. They were beating out a primitive rhythm accompanied by a weird, chanting song that is so viscerally Gomeran it sends shivers down my back. You can tell it goes back a long, long way, perhaps as far as the guanches, the Berbers of North Africa who were the first to set up home here.

Next up was a row of beautiful young ladies parading elegantly in traditional dress. The girl with the red banner was the Romera Mayor, symbolic leader of the celebrations, while her companions were Romeras de Honor who hadn't won the contest the other night but looked just as gorgeous anyway.

Their job was to continue looking beautiful and to smile for the spectators, the official photographer and their Aunty Margarita.

And then we were into the romería proper, an endless succession of musicians and dancers, still on their feet and twirling after their protracted journey into town.

Somewhere in the middle of all this we spotted Luzma, a neighbour, parading behind a small cart decorated like Lorenzo's with flowers and fruit. Perched on top of the cart was a chihuahua the size of a hamster wearing a flared skirt and cheeky straw hat.

Luzma beckoned us over. 'Have a dulce!' These are Luzma's festive speciality, sweet nibbles made from gofio*, almonds, honey and lemon, and I can't resist them. 'Have another!'

Further back along the street was a seething logjam where, if you peered above the bobbing heads, you might glimpse the dignified figure of San Sebastián perched silently on his pedestal. This was the focus of the pilgrimage and its entire justification, the spot where every musical group paused to play a song in homage to the town's patron saint while their dancers danced and the TV crew tirelessly filmed them.

San Sebastián deserves special attention in another story, but he was surely enjoying this brief release into daylight from his claustrophobic niche in a windowless chapel. And he should be pleased that, despite his painful history, he is now able to inspire such innocent pleasure for so many people.

In the town square the procession spread like a river at its delta, swirling around dozens of tables hygienically covered with white paper. The town council, astonishingly, contributes giant pans of freshly-cooked paella to this annual event, along with free wine, beer or fizzy.

Cynics might ask why the council should pay for paella and booze when the schoolkids need more books, and what about the potholes in the roads etc etc. But for me it's only wonderful that a local authority should pitch its three penn'orth into a day of such warmth, colour and good cheer.

* Gofio: toasted maize or other cereals finely ground into flour - see the story dated 15 November 2015

Here come the Kings!

We spot them first by the dust cloud, as in those old Westerns where the bad guys in black hats are distant specks raising the desert sand with galloping hooves.

'There they are!' yells Paco with his sharp eyes. 'Los Reyes!'

Los Reyes Magos! The Three Kings are on their way to visit our village! Far from being bad guys the Kings are a once-a-year miracle. As any child below the age of doubt will tell you, long ago the Kings took weird-sounding gifts to the infant Jesus but now they bring prezzies for the rest of us.

Being North African in origin they normally trot around on camels but this afternoon, perhaps through time constraints or a shortage of camels, they arrive at our village perched in the back of dust-stained Army Land Rovers, by way of the dry riverbed for dramatic effect.

Paco, who is happily locked in permanent childhood and tends to lead the pack on such occasions, scampers towards the first Land Rover as it comes to a halt.

The King rises to his feet, an imposing figure in colourful robes with a white beard the size of a gooseberry bush and a spiky golden crown. This could be Gaspar or Melchor but not Baltasar because he's the one with dark skin and a Moroccan turban.

Paco doesn't care which King he's got, he knows that the sack this King is reaching into contains - golosinas! Sweeties! Handfuls of them! The Reyes Magos throw them to the kids with reckless abandon.

Baltasar beckons J towards his Land Rover and lobs a few sweets towards her, traditional hospitality for the foreigner.

They drive off through the village scattering yet more golosinas behind them, chased by a posse of squabbling children. A typical scene on the fifth of January when Los Reyes Magos finally turn up after sleepless nights of anticipation by the kids.

That same evening the Kings enter the main square in town, usually more elegantly on camels (imported from neighbouring Tenerife), and after due ceremony are led to the stage where they seat themselves in royal splendour on golden thrones to receive supplicants in person. The tiny ones they take on their knees, the better to hear their secretive whispers. (They wouldn't be allowed to do that in Britain any more, which is terribly sad.)

Imagine the scene tomorrow morning, the sixth of January, as little Laura (for instance) wakes at four o'clock with a sudden thrill of excitement. She switches on her bedside light and eagerly examines the plate on which she left three chocolates to help the Kings get through their busy night. Have they taken them? They have, they've all gone!

And the shoe over there by the door, into which she stuffed a bunch of nice fresh weeds for the camels. The shoe's empty, they've eaten their food!

The Kings have been! And there, beside the bed, are her presents!

What a wonderful job they've got, these three ancient Kings who bring so much excitement and pleasure.

Unfortunately there's a newcomer invading their territory these days. Papá Noel - Father Christmas or Santa Claus - has enthusiastic backing from the barons of commerce who would dearly love children to receive presents on Christmas Day as well as Three Kings.

Parents are much less enthusiastic. Little Laura probably found only a token packet of sweets hanging from the tree on Christmas Day, although some weaker souls are beginning to succumb to the pressures. It's increasingly common on Christmas morning to see children wobbling around on new scooters or rollerblades.

My best hope that the Kings will survive this unwelcome competition is that nobody really knows what to do with Papá Noel. He doesn't have a role to play here. Mostly he just hangs about in shop doorways trying to look useful. Sometimes he climbs up walls on little ladders to relieve the boredom.

And looking on the bright side, he brings with him the novel concept of snow, an unknown phenomenon on this subtropical island but it looks very pretty in the shop windows. And it leads to delightful anomalies such as this year's seasonal icons dotted around the town, three Arabian camels accompanied by an endearing snowman with a carrot nose.

Feliz Reyes, and let's hope that in some distant day the real world will also manage such happy harmony.


Postscript: a letter to the Kings
I couldn't resist adding this. The magic of Los Reyes starts a couple of days before their arrival when Los Pajes Reales, the Royal Pages, visit the island to receive children's letters specifying what presents they would like and why they deserve them.

The Pages look like Arabian versions of Buttons in a pantomime and I bet they have fun reading the letters. (Don't tell the kids though.) This is one of them, translated:

Dear Kings
My name is L.... and I live in San Sebastian, La Gomera. Last year my behaviour was average. But as I think you are good I would like to ask you for HAPPINESS for all the children of the world.
For me I would like a bicycle, some roller skates and a story book.
A kiss and a hug for all three of you.

The water man

Writing about the deluge (9 December 2015) reminded me of a strange incident from a few years ago.

Late one afternoon someone hammered on our back door, a flat-palmed thudding like a four-in-the-morning drugs raid. This is normal - nobody tippety-taps in the Canaries, if you knock on a door it's because you wish to be heard.

I opened to find a plump, pink-cheeked individual encased in a slightly rumpled grey suit and with a black leather portfolio under his arm. He didn't look like an evangelist, not polished or smiley enough, and anyway they come in pairs. He looked like the Man from the Council.

'I'm here about the water, el agua,' he tells me. 'You know about the problems with the water?'

'What problems?'

'The quality! You haven't noticed? With the drought, you know, no rain, the water quality's very poor. Can I talk to you about it?'

I invite him in, a little concerned and rather more puzzled. It's true the rain is a little late this year but the island practically floats on fresh spring water, it's never a problem. However, here's this official telling me something's amiss so of course we need to know more.

I show him into the kitchen, which is where we keep the kind of water you might worry about. 'We haven't noticed anything wrong,' I tell him, turning on the cold tap. Water runs smoothly, normal colour, no bobbly bits, doesn't smell funny...

J has arrived to see what's going on. 'He says there's a problem with the water.'

'What problem?'

The Council man has deposited his black leather portfolio on the kitchen table. 'I'll show you, if you can spare five minutes?'

He requests a glass tumbler, which he fills with water from the tap. Then he pulls from a bulging pocket of his jacket a little black box. It has four metal prongs on one side and an electrical cable sprouting from the end, terminating in a plug. The plug is chipped and the cable insulation has been repaired with insulating tape. You'd think the Council would equip its water engineers rather better. Doubts are forming.

He places his little box on top of the glass tumbler with two prongs dangling in the water, then plugs the cable into a mains socket. Within a few seconds little streams of bubbles being rising to the surface from each prong. 'You see?' he says, indicating the bubbles.

Well yes, you'd expect bubbles. 'That's normal,' I tell him. 'Electrolysis.' Basic science – electrocute water and its molecules ping apart into their constituent hydrogen and oxygen. Which are gases, so they bubble.

I attempt to explain this in Spanish to our demonstrator, who agrees smoothly but cuts me short, holding up a hand: 'Wait a few moments!'

A green scum begins to spread across the surface of the water. He turns towards me, smiling grimly. 'Now. You see?'

After a moment's thought I suggest politely that the green scum is probably copper oxide from one of the electrodes. But he's now on the alert for this kind of nonsense and holds up his hand again. 'Give me some bottled water and I'll show you the difference!'

I'd love to do that, I tell him, but we have no bottled water. 'You drink only tap water?' he cries incredulously.

Of course we do. It's fine, the tap water is excellent, sourced from the island's springs, properly treated and monitored - why buy bottles?

The man who, I am quite sure by now, is not from the Council shakes his head. 'I wouldn't drink that stuff, myself. Not from the tap.' He dries his little box on a paper handkerchief, wraps the cable around it and slips it back into his pocket.

'So now what?' I invite him cordially. By now I'm really curious to know.

'Ahora qué?' he repeats, smiling. 'That's very Spanish.'

'Thank you.'

He sits himself confidently at the kitchen table, as a man who has the answers. From his portfolio he extracts a two-page leaflet about his company's domestic water purifier.

It's quite small, he assures us, would easily fit under our sink. Takes just a couple of hours to install then no more problems with dodgy water and murky scum! He produces an application form for us to fill in.

I break it to him not very gently that we don't want a water purifier. There is no way I'm going to spend a thousand euros or whatever it is on a complicated piece of plumbing we don't need. He gives up without a struggle, puts away his leaflet and application form and leaves, looking miffed or perhaps just tired.

After he's gone I ponder a little more about his gadget. Four prongs, electrodes. You only need two for electrolysis. Three were bright and shiny, I remember, while the fourth was dull and greenish, probably copper or a copper alloy.

Here's how it runs. You use the copper prong for your demonstration with tap water because it produces a nasty-looking scum. Then if the householder is a normal member of the modern world and can supply you with bottled water, you use the other pair of prongs, neither of which contains copper, so they produce only nice clean bubbles.

Your victim is thus convinced that tap water is poisonous while bottled water is good – but even better would be the superlative water from one of these magic purifiers, which will save you having to buy bottles!

The more I thought about this, the more appalled I was. This wasn't just salesmanship, it was evil. And if I was mistaken, how else would you explain those four electrodes?

As far as I'm aware nobody in this village bought a water purifier, they're all sensible folk who recognise knavery when they see it. And I'm sure he didn't come from this island, he'd been sent here on a test mission, a sacrificial goat to see how the locals reacted.

A few more calls like the one to our house and he probably crept home to weep for a while then look for a job delivering beer.


Health warning: please don't try 'electrocuting' water!
It's extremely dangerous without the right equipment.

After the deluge

As we arrived at the beach Blasina was rising from the waves like Botticelli's Venus, although decently clad in a big black bathing suit.

She looked unhappy. Walking towards us across the sand she waved grumpily towards the water. 'Look at it!'

A founder member of the Floating Heads discussion group (story dated 8 September 2015), Blasina likes her ocean to be as it should be, and today it just wasn't.

So what was the problem? Well, to explain that we need to go back a couple of days. To an evening when, sitting quietly reading at home, J suddenly looked towards the window. 'Hear that?'

I'm not good at faint noises these days, but yes, with a little imagination...

We flung open a window. Rain! And not just a fairy sprinkling, this was the real thing. Within a few minutes it had turned into the kind of downpour that fills the air like a demented fog, plummeting and pummelling, rattling on the rooftops and bouncing from the streets.

Other windows were lit in other houses, glimpsed through the waterfall, each with a shadowy figure peering out into the night.

Why anybody would want to stand at the window and watch rain falling may be hard to understand if you live in Birmingham, Düsseldorf or Omsk. Here on this island, however, rain is rare, and there have been occasional years with none at all, which is disastrous.

But now we were having our first downpour, reassuringly early in the winter. And after the initial frantic demonstration of intent it settled into a steady thrumming on our flat roof like a crowd of baby gnomes trying to stamp on each others' toes. They continued for most of the night but by daylight they had grown tired and trickled off home to bed, leaving only an expectant silence suffusing the air.

The big question now was whether... opening the doors to our terrace... yes, there it was! In the distance, the unmistakeable clatter of stones upon stones. This was significant.

We ventured out into the street and down the hill. So did everyone else. Down to the dry riverbed, which was now gloriously alive with hurtling water and tumbling rocks.

Kids dared each other to put a foot into the raging torrent and were summoned back under threat of being thrown in. Somebody with a new 4x4 whooshed through at speed, sending spectacular wings of water flying sideways and demonstrating the wisdom of his 30,000 euros investment.

Watching this rare novelty of running water, our neighbour Lali wore the ecstatic I-can-hardly-believe-it expression of someone who's just won a year's supply of groceries. 'Estamos muy contentos, muy contentos!' she laughed, 'We're really happy...'

The gift of rain on this island, if you wish to be poetic, brings life to the land and food to the children. It greens the hills and sprinkles bright colours across the springtime meadows.

More prosaically, rain means the difference between irrigating your potatoes for free or having to pay for water from the tap. If the reservoirs are full, anyone with a farm or smallholding, a finca, can use the water to irrigate their crops.

There used to be a clever system of little canals snaking along the hillsides, distributing water from the inland lakes throughout the countryside. To irrigate your banana plantation you would simply remove the stone that blocked a gap in the canal wall, allowing the water to cascade through into your field. Then, using a spade, you would guide the water along channels in the soil to reach the far corners.

It's mostly done by pipes and valves nowadays, which is a lot less fun.

But to get back to the story - a night of rain like this can go a long way towards filling the reservoirs, but as Lali and many others cautioned, 'We still need more...!' What we needed now was a few days or preferably nights of gentle drizzle in order to replenish the aquifers - the vast stores of water that underlie the island and keep its wells topped up and fresh. La Gomera is rich in water, unusually for the Canaries, and for that we have to thank the winter rain that soaks deep into its foundations. Much of it is captured in the island's central forest, the Parque de Garajonay.

In San Sebastián that morning the streets were shining wet in the early sunlight. A few shops had suffered minor flooding, but nobody minded too much and there was a party atmosphere of celebration. There's a well-recognised signal for 'rain' - you position your hand with all five digits pointing downwards and shake it up and down while shouting mucha agua! - lots of water! - followed by a broad smile to show you're not complaining.

Tourists were wandering around with that happily dazed after-the-storm look of the holidaymaker rescued from calamity. In short, all was contentment and good cheer, except down at the beach where Blasina was still grousing as she rinsed off under the shower. 'Filthy,' she snorted. She was talking about the sea. 'Thick as rancho canario.'

Mmm, sort of. Rancho canario belongs to that class of soups known as 'hearty' that you can throw anything into. You wouldn't want to eat what was churning around in the sea this morning, though. All that water surging along the dry riverbed had dislodged a year's worth of dust, dead foliage, bamboo canes, plastic bottles, aluminium cans and supermarket bags, transporting them all to the sea where they swirled around the bay for a while before being dumped on the beach. The sparkling water had turned pink and the normally pristine sands looked like the set of a post-apocalypse movie.

That's life for you, there's a black cloud beneath every silver lining. This one was soon dispersed, though. The town council sent in a couple of beach clean-up teams with rakes, while the sea performed its own twice-daily cleansing with fresh water from the Atlantic. Within a few days everything was again as bright as a baby's bathtub, and Blasina was her usual sunny self.

We could still do with a drop more rain, though.

What's that on your nose?

Part 1: The bubble

Arturo was the first.

Seating ourselves at a shaded table outside his café-bar, we waited quietly, knowing what would come next.

Arturo came out to take our order. 'The usual?' He paused, staring at my nose with the hesitant half-smile of a man torn between politeness, curiosity and suspicion that he's about to get his leg pulled. 'What's that?' Pointing at my nose.

'It's a spot,' I told Arturo. Beyond that I could tell him nothing.

It had begun as such a tiny thing, appearing out of nowhere, out of nothing, like the cosmic Big Bang. A tiny pimple on the upper bridge of my nose, placed with geometric exactitude midway between the eyes. Nothing much happened for a week or two while the newborn pimple sat there deciding what to do, then one day it began to expand enthusiastically.

In the story of the Big Bang this phase is known as 'inflation', a fudge that nobody understands but purports to explain why we now have a Universe to live in. After the inflation of my pimple what I had was a pink circle spreading across my nose and beginning to swell like one of those slow, malevolent bubbles in a volcanic mud pool.

Arturo peered more closely at my bubble. 'There's a kind of scab on top.' Yes.

'And it looks like there's blood inside.' Yes indeed.

He retreated, trying not to look repulsed. 'You ought to see a doctor with that.'

I had already made an appointment for the next morning. Meanwhile I covered the bubble with a sticking plaster which reduced the repulsion but not the comments, since it clearly hid something big and nasty.

My doctor at the local health centre, well practised in avoiding alarm for his patients, flinched only briefly when I showed him the excrescence but sent me straight to the dermatologist at the local hospital with a big label Urgent around my neck and instructions to beat down the door if nobody answered. (I'm exaggerating a little.)


Part 2: The treatment


There are some doctors who inspire instant relief - at last I'm in good hands! - and others who inspire dread that they're hiding something from you. My dermatologist belongs to the first group, an extremely competent lady in whom I have the utmost faith. She examined the growth on my nose with her high-tech illuminated magnifying glass, through which it must have looked magnificently horrid.

She straightened up and nodded. 'It's not malignant.'

'It's not malignant?'

'It's not malignant.' She must be well accustomed to having to say that twice. 'But it does need dealing with.'

Yes, good, great. An ointment, a pill, an antibiotic? 'We'll do it now,' she decides. 'Agreed?' Right, fine.

The best thing to do, she explains, is to burn it out.

Burn it out? I picture a little blowlamp hovering between my eyes. But I have complete faith in this lady. If she wants to burn it out, let her burn.

'Over to the couch there, and lie down.'

'Right.' Complete confidence. J is watching from the guest chair and looking as perplexed and nervous as I'm trying not to look.

'You don't have a pacemaker, do you?' asks the dermatologist. Why would that matter? But I don't. Could probably do with one just at this moment. She switches on one of those mysterious electronic machines they have in hospitals then administers a quick jab of anaesthetic at the top of my nose.

A minute or two later she's waving in front of me a little rod trailing a curly cable back to the machine. The rod turns out to be an electronic red-hot poker. She taps the bridge of my nose with it, tentatively at first, perhaps to see how I react, then with more determination. Tap, hold, withdraw... tap again, hold...

This doesn't hurt, it really doesn't, but the billowing smoke and barbecue smell are alarming. And the cotton swabs, handed to her in quantities by her assistant to mop up whatever’s flowing from my nose bubble. How deep does this thing go?


Part 3: The aftermath


It's best to leave the cauterized wound open to the air, it seems, to heal more quickly. Within moments this revamped adornment to my nose catches the eye of Bernardo, a fellow villager. He is seated in the waiting area, accompanying his mum (nobody ever visits a doctor alone). 'Hey, that was a good shot! Right between the eyes. You must have really annoyed her.'

Such remarks will be repeated throughout the next week. Shop assistants, bartenders, friends, taxi drivers (especially taxi drivers). My barbecued nose spot has become a blood-black hollow, perfectly circular, clearly the entry wound of a high-velocity bullet. I've seldom produced such hilarity with so little effort.


Part 4: Epilogue


Eventually the black scab fell off and now there's just a little scar. But the question remains - what provoked this evil eruption?

Well, it was certainly the sun, and it's suspicious that the spot nestled precisely below the bridge of my old plastic sunglasses. Could the curved lower surface of the bridge have acted as a concave mirror, treacherously focusing the ultraviolet into a hotspot?

Who knows. I'm not going to experiment. Maybe it was just the usual cause of most such problems these days, la edad, age. And the remaining scar, a little white patch, could come in useful one day, as Arturo pointed out. 'When it's time to put you down they'll have something to aim at.'

But meanwhile: 'Another little glass of wine?' Oh okay, Arturo, go on then.

Gofio

One morning many years ago, on our way out of the village, we paused beside a cloud of blue smoke billowing from the patch of land on the street corner. At the centre of the cloud was Dolores, perched on a rusty kitchen stool before an upturned dustbin lid. The lid was balanced on two brick columns and beneath it was an unruly fire of logs, twigs and leaves.

Peering through the smoke, all I could see in the dustbin lid was what looked like dark sand from a Gomeran beach. Now, why would anyone...?

From the stone shed behind Dolores a cockerel greeted our arrival with a subdued cock-a-gloogle-gloo while its harem of hens clucked excitedly around it. A clutch of turkeys gobble-gobbled next door and at the far end, two goats looked on from their tin outhouse in goatly disdain, chewing. A compact little tribe of fellow travellers on a leisurely passage to the dinner table.

We bid Dolores good morning and asked politely why she was heating sand in a dustbin lid. She beckoned us into the enclosure to look more closely. Ahah! Right. Mixed in with the sand were grains of maize, also known as corn. The sand was there to surround the maize with an even heat so it didn't scorch. Clever!

'You're roasting the maize,' I ventured, 'to make gofio?'

Dolores nodded - got it on one. Not too difficult because if you live in La Gomera you know about gofio. Gofio is what for centuries has enabled little Gomerans to grow big and strong, Gomeran women to bear fifteen children without blinking and Gomeran goatherds to leap across hillsides using long poles. Gofio thickens your breakfast milk and your lunchtime soup, gofio dumplings sustain you in the fields, honey-sweetened gofio balls are a treat for the kids and toothless grandpa.

Once the maize grains were well roasted, Dolores would sift them from the hot sand and take them up the hill to the gofio mill, where for a small fee they would be finely ground into flour. Very finely ground. On my first introduction to gofio I made the near-fatal mistake of sniffing it. I've since wondered if a lungful of gofio could spontaneously explode, as powder aerosols sometimes do, but the effect is in any case similar. Don't ever sniff gofio.

At a New Year's day family gathering to which we'd been invited, a particularly enthusiastic advocate demonstrated how to make gofio dumplings in the authentic manner. The first requirement is a rabbit. There are many rabbits in the Gomeran hills and Luis had obtained one, or rather its skin which is the key component for this purpose.

You sew the skin up again (nicely cleaned of course) to make a long bag, open at one end. If you ignore the dangly legs it now looks fairly innocuously like a Scottish sporran.

Into this bag you pour your gofio, being careful not to sniff, along with water or perhaps goat's milk for a richer dumpling. Close the end of the bag and tie it tightly with string then - here's the skilful bit - start rolling it like a big heavy sausage across your knees, backwards and forwards, applying pressure with the palms of your hands as in deep massage. You will be subjected to rude jokes while you're doing this, as Luis was, but ignore them and keep massaging.

After the proper length of treatment you can untie the rabbit bag and peel it away from what is now a large roll of slightly squidgy gofio dumpling. Slice it into bite-sized discs as required.

Nobody does this in real life any more, of course. They just mash up the mixture with a wooden spoon or, more probably, bung it into an electric dough mixer, but the end result is much the same and just as healthy.

Gofio forms part of a beautifully integrated system of self-sufficiency. You grow the maize on your family finca or smallholding. Being tall, the maize plants shelter other crops such as beans and potatoes from the strong winds which are a known feature of Gomeran weather.

Having consumed the maize cobs, either sliced up in soup or turned into gofio, you donate the rest of the plant to the goats or the pig. In return the goats give you milk and, in due course, meat, and the pig gives you ham, bacon and blood sausages as well as a friendly honk every morning when you go to feed it, except for the last time.

The goat milk - a litre or more every day - you can drink fresh from the udder or turn into cheese, to eat with your slices of gofio dumpling. Gomeran goat cheese is wonderful, tasty but mild, not at all goaty like the French stuff.

Meanwhile, back at the smallholding, your potatoes are coming along nicely in fertile volcanic soil enriched by nitrogen from the beans growing between them and by manure from your goats and pig. The beans will later form the basis of a nourishing soup called rancho canario into which you sprinkle your gofio...

It's not as satisfyingly circular as that nowadays with our frozen foods, takeaway pizzas and spit-roasted chicken, and there are fewer goats and pigs around than before, but you will be hard pressed to find a family without its own finca and somebody still making good use of it.

Dolores doesn't grow maize herself now because her joints have let her down, but her sons do. And gofio, although now produced mainly by companies rather than individuals, you will find on the shelves of every supermarket. Buy it, eat it and grow strong!