The thing on the beach

Down at the end of the beach Blasina was poking something with a long stick. Gingerly, as though it might spring up and bite.

We placed the beach towels in our usual spot and prepared for the morning swim. By the time we were organised Blasina had been joined by a couple more people, one of whom had taken charge of the poking stick. Nobody seemed prepared to get too close to whatever it was.

Naturally, I wandered over to see what was going on. As a general rule this is poor survival strategy - if there's something that needs poking with a stick it's best to walk away rather than towards. However, wildlife on this benign little island is mostly of the cuddly or edible kind. There are a few biting flies but nothing you need to fend off with a chair.

From a distance, the thing on the beach looked like a mound of wet, brown liver. Close up, it still looked like a mound of wet, brown liver. Blasina nodded in greeting as I joined the group, now grown to half a dozen onlookers. One of the Council workers weeding the roadside flower beds had arrived with a rake and sickle in hand, but Blasina warded him off. 'Está vivo,' she told him, it's alive.

Another of the regular swimmers, a lady with more courage than caution, took up a large flat pebble and began investigating the pile of liver more closely. She tried to prise it open. It unfolded a little but retracted as soon as the pebble left it alone.

There followed one of those uncomfortable interludes in which everyone waits for someone else to do something. Living creatures do get washed up on the island's beaches occasionally, but it's not a regular occurrence and people usually call the Guardia Civil to come and sort things out. They would contact one of the organisations that specialise in relaunching stranded dolphins or offering comfort to confused baby gulls.

On this occasion, however, nobody seemed inclined to call the Guardia Civil and inform them there was a pile of wet brown liver on the beach.

Distressingly often, what gets washed up if it's lucky, or more probably sinks without fuss to the bottom of the ocean, is a creature that has mistaken a plastic bag for a jellyfish and eaten it. Turtles do that. So do some of the fish. They eat the plastic and it clogs up their innards, slowly killing them.

And despite the best efforts of the Council's cleanup squads it's not uncommon to see an escaped supermarket bag flying out to sea on a gusting northerly wind, a lethal kite waiting to kill a turtle. Which is why I have developed a mild obsession for trying to catch them. 'Look mummy, there's that man who chases plastic bags and crisp packets!'

But I'm not the only one. (John Lennon, Imagine). There are other beach regulars who will try to retrieve any floating plastic bags or bottles they come across, to deposit them safely in a waste bin.

In sharp contrast, I once watched someone's beach umbrella flying seawards on those same northerly winds. It briefly touched down just in front of a lady, a foreign visitor, who was doing her anti-cholesterol march along the shoreline. She avoided the umbrella and marched on, leaving it to tumble into the sea and set off towards Tenerife floating handle-up like a coracle. The owner plunged in and managed to catch it, but the point of this story is, how could anyone...

What? Oh right, the thing on the beach. Another Council worker, older, wiser and probably a weekend fisherman, bent over the glistening lump, unfolded it carefully with a gloved hand, stood up and pronounced: 'It's a choco.' A cuttlefish.

I can recognise a choco when I see it on my dinner plate but it doesn't look anything like that. Perhaps because this one was much bigger than anything a restaurant would serve up, and its tentacles were hidden somewhere underneath, and it had covered itself in brown ink.

In fact it could have been just about any kind of squid because nearly all of them will squirt ink when feeling anxious, in shades ranging from deep black or bluish to the dull brown of this one.

How had it got itself into such a predicament? Chasing something smaller, that cleverly led it into the shallows? Fleeing from something bigger out there in the bay? Or was it, perhaps, unwisely tempted by a plastic-bag jellyfish floating among the breakers?

The Council guys moved in with spades and an empty fertilizer bag. With great care, they manoeuvred the thing onto the bag then transported it back to its home environment, wading knee-deep to gently release it. I didn't see it swim away but neither did it wash up on the beach again, so let's hope it lived happily ever after.

Neighbours

Nobody knows what to say on these terrible occasions. There are established formats of course, but they sound just as inadequate in Spanish as they do in English: my condolences, deepest sympathy... nothing comes close to being sufficient. Today I just said how sorry I was and did the rest by handshakes, hugs and kisses.

Eusebio, who always tries to be philosophical about life's tragedies, commented quietly 'Oh well, one neighbour less, then,' but his eyes were having none of that and he had to look away and blink for a while.

We were there to say goodbye to an elderly lady, one of the villagers, who had reached her nineties in reasonably good shape but then slowly succumbed to arthritis, poor circulation, shortness of breath and the rest of it, all those things that finally wear you away if nothing nastier gets you first.

I was genuinely very sad that she'd left us. We had known each other for a great many years, waved from across the street, chatted now and again when we called in to visit. 'You know, I think of you two as family,' she said not long ago, which is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. I'm not sure whether I had to turn away and blink like Eusebio, but I'm doing it now anyway.

All of which is not to see if I can depress you, it's just to illustrate how important is this thing called a neighbour. They're important anywhere but in a small village on a small island, the title of neighbour has particular significance. I upset one of our fellow villagers many years ago as I was introducing her to some visiting English friends: 'This is Dolores, who's a sister of María, the lady we met earlier who is the grandmother of etc etc...' - introductions can get complicated when everyone is related to everyone else.

This was in English of course, so then I had to explain in Spanish to Dolores: 'I was just telling them that you're the sister of María who is the grandmother of...' but I got no further. Dolores interrupted me with an astonished 'And I'm your neighbour!' Explanation enough in itself, what's all this rabbiting about who's related to whom? The important thing is that we're neighbours.

Lesson learned. Being a vecino, a neighbour, conveys a recognised status. You don't have to live next door or along the street - a vecino is anyone from the same village or area of town. People will greet you in the supermarket with 'Hola, vecino!' Our village association is an Asociación de Vecinos.

Mostly we neighbours all rub along happily and benefit hugely from the companionship. I have to admit here, however, that Gomerans are no more saintly than anyone else and we have our share of clashes and conflicts. Ada who lives on her own has a somewhat prickly relationship with Pilar, another widow of the village. 'She comes round here day after day,' Ada complained the other week, 'asking me for sugar. I always give it to her but do I ever get it back? Nunca jamás! Never ever! And she expects to get a cup of coffee as well. Why should I supply her with sugar and throw in free cups of coffee? Eh?'

'You could knock on her door tomorrow morning and ask for some flour and a free bun.'

Ada didn't find that amusing. 'I'm not going to ask her for anything! But if she thinks she can keep coming round to my house...'

But they get on pretty well really and Pilar still visits. They need each other. I know of a small village in the interior of the island, in a deep valley, where the entire population has drifted away to the towns except for one old lady who refuses to leave home. Her only neighbours are one or two foreigners who have bought old cottages and turn up now and again for a holiday, but half the time she has no neighbours at all. She's thrilled if a goat pops its head around the door.

She should give up and move to our village, bringing a couple of kilos of sugar to make friends with Ada and Pilar.

Illustration: detail from a watercolour by Jackie Page

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.