Hearing voices

I'm sitting in a chamber the size of a 1950s red telephone box, totally enclosed and with only a small window in front of me. Like those terrible coffins with a glass panel through which you can view the face.

Every wall of this box is covered with big pointy teeth of black foam. It reminds me of a chamber I once examined in the deep, dark basement of a Spanish Inquisition museum in Ronda, Andalucía, which was lined with steel spikes and equipped with a rear wall that could be inched slowly inwards.

'You okay in there?' Sergio calls cheerily in Spanish, through my headphones. I nod, clear my throat and speak carefully into the little microphone sprouting like a celery stick from just below the window: 'Todo bien, everything's fine.' He nods. Contact established. The palms of my hands are growing clammy already, which is completely ridiculous. I try to imagine that I'm in the Orgasmotron machine from the film Barbarella, which starred a young and mostly naked Jane Fonda, but this doesn't help much.

'We'll start with the beeps,' Sergio tells me. Beep in Spanish is spelled bip but pronounced beep, a nice thought to focus on. Sergio delivers a series of bips into my headphones, at different frequencies and diminishing volumes, and I just have to raise my hand every time I hear one. From this the computerised magic arrayed around him will produce a graphical representation of my auditory deficiencies.

The test doesn't take long and is not at all stressful. Sergio opens the door of the Inquisition chamber. 'All okay?'

'All okay.' I look up at him hopefully - is that it?

'Now we must do the pain tests,' Sergio announces.

'The what?'

'The pain tests. We need to see what level of sound you find painful,' he explains, clasping his hands to his ears with an anguished expression. Okay, got that.

The pain tests go fairly smoothly, a series of increasingly strident bips until I clasp my hands to my ears with an anguished expression.

Sergio opens the door. 'Está bien, that's good.' I prepare to leave the chamber but he gently pushes me back onto the chair. 'Now,' he says, 'the word test.'

'The what?'

'Words.' Sergio had already mentioned the word test, at a preliminary interview, but I'd pretended to myself that it wasn't going to happen. 'This test,' he now explains again, 'is the most important of all. With your new audífonos, hearing aids, we could amplify the sound as much as we like but you still wouldn't be able to understand speech any better without this test. You wouldn't hear, for example, the difference between perros and berros.'

Dogs and watercress. Well, that's no good then is it, with the money these things are going to cost me. Clearly I have to submit to the word test. I experience a slight sinking within, as though my innards know something that I don't about word tests.

'So what do I have to do?'

Easy peasy, Sergio assures me. The computer will speak a series of words into my headphones, and I just have to repeat them into the microphone. Whatever I hear, just say it.

He shuts the chamber door. There is a large latch that goes clunk when he closes it, I can hear that perfectly. Then we do a trial run with Sergio playing the role of computer. 'Mesa,' his voice recites in my headphones.

'Mesa,' I repeat. Table.

Sergio nods. 'Silla.' Yup, got that too, silla, chair. Perhaps this is going to be all right.

Now, Sergio tells me, the words will come from the computer. Righto. A noise starts up in the headphones, the noise that is euphemistically called white noise in the world of audiology but unlike the pleasant nothingness that is white light, white noise is an obtrusive, hissy crackling that sounds threateningly electric.

Dimly through this audio sandstorm I hear a brief wiffle-waffle, a snippet of something that may or may not be speech. Nothing I can possibly identify as mesa or silla or perros or berros. I shake my head at Sergio, who is watching me through the glass pane. He nods, signals 'we'll try again' with his hands - the Spanish have an endless supply of useful hand signals - and I hear a subtly different wiffle-waffle in the headphones. Nope, sorry.

Sergio opens the chamber door. 'Is the problem your hearing, do you think,' he asks me in Spanish, 'or is it the language?'

'I believe it's a little of both,' I admit. An English brain is attuned to identifying English words even when they're little more than a wiffle-waffle. A second language can never get built in quite so completely, it hasn't lived with you from babyhood.

Sergio releases me from the chamber and I emerge feeling a bit of a failure. Sergio is very kind and sympathetic. 'A German lady had the same trouble last week,' he assured me. My experience confirms what he and his colleagues already suspected - they will have to ask the system supplier to provide them with word lists in English and German.

After two or three weeks the supplier still hadn't come up with the new word lists. 'If we ordered a completely new system they'd be quick enough to send it!' Sergio observed cynically. This is the cruel world as it is exists outside La Gomera.

However, rather than wait any longer, Sergio and the team invented their own solution.

I entered the Inquisition chamber once more to try this new approach. Sergio had printed out the Spanish word list and spoke it himself, through the computer and my headphones but enunciated nice and clearly, with no hissing or other obfuscations, just me and Sergio. A few clever adjustments of the sound envelope on his screen and suddenly I was hearing perros not as berros but as perros. Thumbs up, big smiles all round.

The hearing aids followed soon afterwards. Sergio told us the story of an elderly farmer who had been dragged into the shop by his grandchildren, protesting all the way - he didn't need audífonos, he was fine as he was, and for that kind of money he could buy a car! They held him down long enough to do the tests and when they eventually fitted him with his new hearing aids, he wept. 'He wept,' Sergio repeated, indicating grandfatherly tears pouring down cheeks.

And in case you ask - no, I didn't weep when he fitted my audífonos, but I did feel that somebody had opened a window on to a new and brighter soundscape.


Epilogue
'How much did they cost you?' asked Arturo, proprietor of a favourite café, in his down-to-earth way - if you want to know something, you ask. When I told him he staggered backwards with hand to mouth in gobsmacked astonishment. I'd never seen anyone do that in real life.

'Tanto?' So much?

'Tanto. But that's for the whole system with remote control and all, special telephone and things. And all the consultations and adjustments.'

'Yes, but, but...tanto...' When he'd recovered a little I helped him to put this into perspective, as I had already done for myself. You can easily spend this kind of money and more on a good holiday. Or a rubbish secondhand car. What we're talking about here is quality of life, worth having at any price.

'La calidad de vida,' Arturo agreed. Of course. Without quality of life, where are you? Definitely. Then he shot back indoors to astonish his wife Marta.

Notes for the serious student
Why are hearing aids so appallingly expensive? I mean, ridiculously. A new pair of reading glasses costs no more than a few euros from the Chinese bazaar, a couple of hundred if you want fancy ones from an optician. If you've got faulty hearing instead of faulty eyesight you're in for ten or twenty times more.

A brief search on the internet produced a variety of excuses.

1 They're a medical device and anything medical is expensive.

2 They're very tiny and anything tiny and electronic is expensive.

3 They're customised to each patient and need a lot of preparatory tests and ongoing support from trained professionals, preferably with guts and initiative like Sergio.

4 There are only a handful of manufacturers and they all invest huge amounts in research to produce the latest technological miracle. A new and more effective anti-whistle system puts you ahead of the competition, especially for clients who do a lot of close hugging.

5 The manufacturers also have to spend money on advertisements featuring handsome grey-haired models who are now able to laugh joyfully with their grandchildren, provided they haven't just chucked grandad's hearing aid into the sea.

6 They're really not so expensive, you know, if you consider the whole-life cost. Twelve hours a day, 365 days a year, five years (let's say) lifetime before you upgrade to the latest anti-whistle technology - why, that's no more than a few cents per hour!

7 Look, do you want one or not?

Judgement of nations

Doris and Bill are becoming anxious. 'There's nothing, Doris. We're getting nowhere.'

But Doris is shading her eyes with one hand and seems to have spotted something. 'Over there, Bill. Quick! Go and grab it!'

This is the trouble when you pour off a cruise ship along with fifteen hundred other people and, at around eleven in the morning, everyone wants a drink.

There are plenty of cafés in San Sebastián, more than enough to support the locals and a normal quota of visitors, but the cruisers are a challenge. It's like one of those Guinness Book of Records attempts, how many drunken students can you cram upside down in a Nissan Micra - there are always going to be a few stragglers left disconsolately outside.

But Bill is now sprinting towards the vacancy Doris has detected and looks set to reach it ahead of another guy galloping from the other direction. Breathless, he leans on the table to address the two people already sitting there. 'Are these other two chairs free? Mind if me and the wife...?'

Irene and Ted wave amicably - 'Sit yourselves down!' - and soon the four of them are chatting like old friends. We watch them covertly from our own table, whose spare seats have already been snatched away. Meanwhile, Arturo is happily skipping around the outdoor terraza delivering jugs of sangría and plates of ham rolls.

Arturo and his wife Marta approve of the cruise ships. Especially the British ones. It seems your typical British cruise passenger is generally inclined to linger in the town rather than haring off around the island. They enjoy just pootling about the streets, wandering around historical sites and the park, maybe venturing briefly into a museum or gallery but above all, sitting in the sunshine sipping from a sparkling glass of something cool.

'And the best thing about the British,' Arturo explained on a quieter morning, 'is that they mix, they make friends. They sit around in little groups at my tables, they buy each other drinks. They're well behaved, they drink but they don't get drunk, they're polite - always plees, thenkyu - and they spend their money here, in the town.'

This is wonderful stuff if you're accustomed to headlines about football fans throwing paving slabs at each other in Paris or Bucharest. Somebody likes our British visitors! For Arturo and Marta, they're the best!

So how about the other nationalities, how do they rate those? Arturo already has this well worked out. 'Los alemanes are okay too, the Germans. Perhaps not so good at joining up with others, getting together in little groups. And when they do they can be a bit noisier.' He does the Spanish horizontal hand-wobble that means so-so. 'But yes, generally they're fine, los alemanes. The main problem is that most of them want to see the island, they take themselves off in coaches or taxis.'

We've heard this from the taxi drivers too, who therefore much prefer German cruise ships to British. This is a little wounding - have we Brits lost all sense of adventure? Where are the fearless explorers of yesteryear? But perhaps it's more a matter of the cruise category they choose. The British cruise ships that call here mostly cater for the senior sector of the market. Walking sticks obligatory, Zimmer frames preferred. That's exaggerating of course. Well, slightly. What it boils down to is that these are the contentedly retired who just want to float around some calm seas for a week being fed, watered and entertained, with occasional stopovers to buy postcards of palm trees.

By contrast, the German cruisers typically carry a younger and sportier clientele. Some of the ships come pre-loaded with surfboards and little yachts for their customers to skim around the bay, and with knobbly-tired bikes for the even tougher ones to wind their way up the zigzag roads then whizz down again with the wind whistling through their helmets.

So that's the Brits and the Germans pigeon-holed, and these two nationalities account for the vast majority of cruise passengers. We get a sprinkling of others from Holland, France and Scandinavia for example, and occasionally a bijou high-luxury cruiser will bring in a handful of Americans, but these are too small a sample for Arturo to make a balanced judgement. (We once had a visit from that floating American city, The World, whose passengers managed to look wildly rich while clad only in jeans and summer shirts.)

Arturo is perfectly happy to judge the Russians, though. Russian in this context can be taken to include almost anyone living east of Vienna. These tend to arrive not so much on cruise ships but on ferry day trips from Tenerife, and Arturo is not so keen on them, as a species. 'They take over the place,' he complains, arms indicating swarms of beefy Russians sprawled around his café. 'They behave as though they've bought it.' This is probably because they have indeed bought an awful lot of everything everywhere, although not so far in La Gomera. Disclaimer: I'm quoting just one café proprietor's opinion here, and he's no doubt hopelessly biased and unfair.

Just out of academic interest, though - who would Arturo place at the bottom of his list of favourites?

He doesn't hesitate. 'Los españoles,' he confirms, the Spanish. 'Sin duda alguna,' without any doubt, he adds, as his wife Marta nods from behind the counter. Specifically, Arturo clarifies, 'los peninsulares,' those from the Spanish peninsular, the mainland.

Oh dear. We rather like the Spanish. What have they done wrong? 'Well, you've seen them!' Arturo says. Yes, we have.

'They push into my café like a herd of goats and yell for service across the bar, all at the same time, as though I've got twenty coffee machines.' Yes, they do.

'They complain there's too much milk in the coffee or not enough, it's too hot or it's too cold, they want extra straws for little Berto's orange juice...' They do, they do.

'They move the tables around and block up the entire terraza and expect me to fly through the air to reach them.' Oh, it's all true. No Spaniard will hesitate to move café tables around to accommodate grandma, five kids and three sets of aunts and uncles.

'And half of them come in just to use the toilets, then walk out again without buying anything.' By now Arturo is flushed with indignation.

Yes, but the point is - the point is - well, the Spanish who come here feel at home. This is their country. This is their way of life, more or less, although Canary Islanders are marginally less noisy. When you live in Madrid or Barcelona you get used to yelling.

And this Hispanic furore never lasts very long. They turn up in coachloads, take a guided walk around the town, are released to create a brief bedlam in Arturo's café or one of the others, then they all scramble back into their coach for a trip around the island. And suddenly the place seems terribly quiet.

I don't mind our Spanish visitors from the Peninsular, they're disruptive but fun. And the truth is that they leave Arturo's cash till nicely filled up, so he's not really complaining either.


Notes for the serious student
The cruise season lasts from around mid-September to the following Easter. There are several cruise ships that call in regularly with about 1500 or so passengers, and occasionally larger ones of over 3000 now that the jetty has been lengthened to accommodate them. In San Sebastián's neat little port, these give the impression that someone has towed in a six-block hotel complex from Tenerife.

Doris and Bill who feature in this story also appeared in an earlier one, The clandestine emigrants, 21 December 2016.

Wrinkled potatoes

Writing about the elderly but entirely beautiful Lucinda (30 April) got me thinking about potatoes. She and the famous papas arrugadas of the Canary Islands share the precious gift of wrinkles.

More on that in just a moment, but first a little trumpeting: did you know that when the potato first travelled to Europe from the Americas, well over 450 years ago, it called in first at the Canary Islands? Oh yes. With the returning Spanish conquistadores. So we've got lots of experience with these things.

To be brutally honest, I'm not a big fan of potatoes. (Sharp intake of breath from passing Gomerans.) And in general, Gomerans choose their potatoes to yield bountiful crops rather than to tickle the taste buds. They tend to be the bog-standard, boring varieties familiar to any gardener or supermarket shopper in Britain.

I once thought I'd discovered a new and exciting import from Peru, a sack of potatoes in the market labelled QUINEGUA. They looked like very ordinary spuds, though… and after silently mouthing this intriguing name in Spanish - 'keen-EGG-wah' - I realised it was just how Spaniards get their tongues around 'King Edward'. Sigh…

However, I'm in dangerous territory here, admitting to less than ecstatic adoration of the potato. In La Gomera, the potato is sacred. No meal is complete without its potatoes in some form or other. And to be perfectly fair, there is an exotic and slightly more flavourful variety called the papa negra, black potato, and its close cousin the papa bonita, pretty potato, both of which look like something spat out by a volcano. They are also astonishingly expensive, so most people most of the time go for the boring old quinegua.

You can do a lot to liven up a boring potato, of course - just ask the French. But to start at base level, the easiest and unkindest method used in La Gomera is simply to peel, cut into pieces and boil. This is desperately unfair to the potato. Who could love a lump of steaming white stuff that tastes of water? Potatoes humiliated in this way are known as papas guisadas and are edible only if you drench them with the wonderfully simple sauce known as mojo (see Notes, below).

You will also encounter papas fritas of course, literally fried potatoes but this always means chips if you're British or French fries if you're American. There's nothing much to be said about papas fritas except that they usually turn out well if properly prepared in a restaurant kitchen but are often of the pre-cooked and frozen variety. This is not La Gomera's fault, it's a global malaise.

Better by far, though, are the papas arrugadas. Wrinkled potatoes. Foreigners go mad about them. Ask any departing visitor how their holiday has been and sooner or later they'll tell you how much they love the papas arrugadas (also known on restaurant menus as Canary potatoes). If wrinkled potatoes were all that this extraordinary island had to offer, people would still make return visits year after year.

They are very simple but slightly shocking to prepare. Choose some smallish potatoes - egg sized at most, preferably less - and wash them gently but do not peel or otherwise harm them. Think babies. Place them in a saucepan with just enough water to cover, then start heating it. Now add handfuls of salt.

No, not teaspoons or tablespoons - handfuls. Just to be sure that I'm not misleading anyone here, I asked one of the local taxi drivers, who knows about such things, how much salt he would add to a pan of potatoes. Handfuls, he confirmed. Something like a quarter kilo, 250 grams. You can use cheap cooking salt, coarse crystals rather than the prissy powders of table salt, because it will all dissolve. (In earlier days they would have used seawater, but that's nothing like salty enough to do a proper job.)

Boil for about ten to fifteen minutes, just enough but not too much or the potatoes will turn to fluff, then tip away the salty water. Agitate the pan a little as the remaining moisture evaporates and each potato will grow a splendid white coating of crystallised salt, sparkling like fairy dust. They should also look wrinkly-skinned, although older potatoes do this better than younger ones, just like people.

That's it. Papas arrugadas. Surprisingly they don't taste salty inside, but the salt water draws out moisture from within the potato and thus concentrates the flavour. Foreigners usually peel off the salty skin but Gomerans never do, they eat the whole thing.

Generously spoon mojo over the potatoes on your plate - see my recipe below - and there you have a potato dish that can proudly hold its head up among the world's finest, with none of the snobby pretention of pommes julienne or duchesse. Even I like papas arrugadas, so they gotta be good.

Notes for the serious student

Papas
In this part of Spain and some others, and in much of Latin America, the Spanish for potato is papa. This is also the Spanish for Pope. Just to confuse things further, if you add an accent - papá - and pronounce it pa-PAH, it means daddy. I'm sure there must be some common link in all this.

In other places the potato is the patata, but here that means sweet potato which of course is a bigger, even uglier root and full of sugar, so not to be encouraged.

Salt
Potatoes covered in salt must be bad for the blood pressure, surely? Well, maybe not so much in a warm climate like this, where you lose salt through perspiration. This might be a myth though, so perhaps don't eat too many papas arrugadas without peeling them. It's quite hard to stop eating them once you've started, like Jaffa cakes and Hobnobs.

Mojo
The sauce mojo (with the j pronounced like the ch in Scottish loch) comes in two basic varieties. Both start with olive oil and garlic but for mojo verde, green mojo, you add fresh coriander, mashing it with the garlic in a pestle and mortar. For mojo rojo, red mojo, instead you add sweet red pepper and a touch of cumin. It's also usual to add some red chilli pepper as well, which converts your mojo rojo into mojo picante meaning hot or spicy. Usually not eye-wateringly, but test with caution before ladling it onto your potatoes.

To these basic recipes people (and commercial brands) may add embellishments such as breadcrumbs to add bulk, water to form an emulsion, lemon or vinegar to add sharpness and various herbs or spices to add complication, but the more you add the further you move from the traditional, homespun Gomeran mojo.

Potato history
The world's potatoes seem to have originated in Chile and Peru, modern varieties being developed from both sources. They arrived in the Canaries with the conquistadores somewhere in the 1560s and from here travelled northwards to Spain, the rest of Europe and Britain. Kings and generals loved them because they were ideal for feeding marauding armies.

Doña Lucinda's fingernails

Crossing the church square she caught the eye like a tropical bird wafted in by the wind. We intercepted her and, giggling with girlish excitement, she told us she was getting ready to go on a trip!

Already well into her eighties, I would guess, Doña Lucinda was my all-time model for the art of growing old gracefully. Her face had never seen a pot of anti-wrinkle cream in its life and her entire history was written there, engraved in cracks and canyons by some heavy-handed gnome. But she was beautiful. Deepest of all were the smile lines. She would break into a sunshine smile at the least provocation, in fact she rarely stopped.

We first got to know her on occasional evenings in one of San Sebastián's oldest restaurants, where she would sit at the bar sipping delicately from a wine glass while deciding what to order for supper. It was she, I'm sure (although this was many years ago) who opened the conversation, wanting to know who we were, where we were from, why we were here, what we did for a living. She was interested in everybody and everything.

In contrast to our casual clothing (what do you mean, scruffy?!) she was always dressed impeccably. Weirdly, but impeccably. With artistic vision, bohemian perhaps - not the granny rags of the hippies who sometimes pass this way but more an adventurous dignity. A colourful, swirling dress, cascading necklaces, jangly bracelets and dangly earrings that danced when she laughed. She shone rainbows into the shadows.

During our first conversation with her, perched as bright as a cockatoo on a bar stool with her silver hair gathered into a cheeky topknot, she explained that she was lodging here in San Sebastián on doctor's orders, in a small hotel.

Her home town was Hermigua, further to the north, where she lived alone (but with an interesting history, I suspect) in an old farmhouse down among the banana trees in the valley. Although splendidly cool in summer, her house tended to dampness in the winter and as the days grew shorter Doña Lucinda would grow wheezier.

'So my doctor sends me away to San Sebastián!' she chuckled, as though she'd been banished for chronic naughtiness. 'It's drier here, and warmer.' Just as in earlier days, wealthy TB sufferers in Europe would be despatched to the crisper airs of Switzerland.

The restaurant's owner was also from Hermigua and Lucinda saw the place as a refugee's home from home. The young barman and waiter, Jaime, had no links with Hermigua but quickly succumbed to the old lady's irresistible cuteness and treated her with enormous kindness. 'Just a little plate of potaje de berros, watercress soup,' she would instruct him. 'And some bread, not much, I'm not very hungry.' He would guide her to a table in the corner and deliver a plate of soup not too hot and not too cold, together with a ready-sliced bread roll.

So, we were already old friends with Doña Lucinda by the time we met her that morning in the church square. 'I've signed up for the trip to Mallorca!' she told us. 'With the group. I've never been to Mallorca before. I'm so looking forward to it. Look, I've already had my uñitas done, my fingernails!' She showed us her fingers tipped with vivid crimson, expertly applied in a local salon. Fingernails are uñas but, as always in Spanish, the -itas adds warmth - these little fingernails were something special, these were holiday fingernails!

The holiday was a free two-week excursion to Mallorca provided by the island council for Gomera's senior citizens. These were people, reasoned the councillors, who had worked all their lives, often in great hardship, and now deserved an occasional treat. (The council still organises annual holidays for pensioners but, times being as they are, at subsidised cost rather than free.)

We admired Lucinda's sparkling uñitas, wished her a wonderful holiday and kissed her goodbye.

A few weeks later we found her seated at the restaurant bar once again, sipping white wine while deliberating on her supper. How had the holiday gone?

'I had a wonderful time!' she laughed. 'They cared for me very well, really very well indeed.'

'Cared for you?

'In the hotel. I got a terrible gripe, 'flu, on the second day and spent the rest of the time in bed.'

'Oh, no. That's not fair.' This is the kind of ridiculous injustice that so often hits those who least deserve it. I mean, why don't things like that happen to...

But no, enough. Doña Lucinda herself was far above such whimpering. She waved a hand as though wafting away a fly. 'It's not fair but it's life,' she said. 'Anyway I had a trip in an aeroplane, and I had a ride around town in a horse-drawn carriage the first day, before I got ill. That was fun! I had a lot of fun.' She giggled her infectious giggle. 'You should go to Mallorca one day,' she advised. 'They're lovely people, the mallorquines.'

 I'm quite sure they are, but then everyone's lovely when you're Doña Lucinda.


Notes for the serious student
Why was this delightful old lady known universally by the honorific doña? Most people of her age are addressed simply by their first name or, if you wish to show respect, as señora. There are various ways she could have earned her upgrading to doña (see The three dons, 24 May 2016) but in Lucinda's case, none of them really fitted. Simply, there was no question of her being anything else but doña. She was far too charming and full of character, full of life, to join the humdrum masses of señoras.

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.

A little delight

There was a time when home movies were shot on Super-8 film no wider than a bootlace, whirring through smart little wind-up cameras. The movies they produced were pleasantly grainy and over-coloured, which would lend an ideal air of antiquity to the scene I need to paint here.

Imagine that, through such a gentle time-lens, we observe two small white cottages standing close together on a small farm, a finca. The cottages are paintbook-simple, just low white boxes with a window and a door, but they are charmingly framed by palm trees and fruit bushes, with vines trailing on overhead wires and tiny birds flitting prettily among the leaves.

From the door of the cottage on the left emerges a man of around forty-something wearing denim shorts, a lumberjack shirt and a straw hat. He pauses for a moment then sidles casually in the direction of the neighbouring house, glancing towards it now and again and craning his neck as though trying to catch a glimpse of something through the window.

He goes back indoors again. Birds continue flitting prettily. The movie camera's microphone picks up the sound of male laughter from the house on the right, together with some clinkings and bangings.

A few minutes later a younger man emerges from this second house, strolls confidently towards the house on the left and calls out something. The straw-hat guy pops out from his doorway again and looks enquiringly at the newcomer, who repeats what he said before. Straw hat shakes his head and shrugs apologetically - he doesn't understand.

Let's freeze the film at this embarrassing moment to analyse what is going wrong. The fellow under the straw hat is a younger version of me. The word that is failing to communicate itself is copita, which means a little glass. If the visitor had said copa, a glass, I might have got it, but of course he couldn't do that because to invite someone for a drink requires the extra depth and friendliness of the -ita ending.

Una copita? Fancy a little drink, share a few minutes of friendly exchange, toast each other's health?

I learned this lesson very quickly and this simple little diminutive is now my favourite feature of the Spanish language. You encounter it everywhere, -ita or -ito.

Sometimes it's merely descriptive - so a bocado is a bite to eat while a bocadito is an itsy-bitsy bite to eat. But usually it's much more. Very often it implies fondness for someone or something. Juan is just a guy called Juan. Juanito is your valued friend, your husband or brother, someone close. He doesn't have to be small to merit the -ito, there are many large Juanitos with middle-age paunches. In fact it's much better when they're big because the -ito is so endearingly off-target.

Equally off-target was our elderly neighbour, a charming lady now sadly departed (see Neighbours, 27 February 2016), who used to refer to us as los pollitos which means 'the little chickens'. And no, I have no idea why, but I think it's delightful.

Very often an -ito or -ita softens and smoothes, takes the sting out of a word. You order a cup of café con leche, coffee with milk, and when it's time to pay you're asked for un eurito which sounds so much friendlier that a clinical euro. Just a little euro...

I remember once commenting to a waiter that there didn't seem to be many customers around today and he shrugged and said it was la horita, the little hour - in other words, it was early and they'd turn up later.

On a good swimming day the sea isn't just clara, clear - it's clarita, clarita! Beautifully clear! And the surface is tranquilito, the temperature is frescita when you first plunge in, a little fresh, but soon feels calentita, warm, and altogether it's a día bonito, a lovely day!

At which happy point I'd better restart my Super-8 time machine to round things off for you. We see the straw-hatted guy being rescued by his much more gifted wife, who emerges from the house to greet the stranger and interpret that they're being invited for a little drink. The three of them potter across to the house next door and disappear inside. An hour later can be heard jolly laughter and the cheerful clatter of plates and cutlery.

If the camera peeks nosily through a window it will show the two of us sitting around a table with four local lads, one of whom is supposedly acting as caretaker for his uncle's house. This was our first week and we hadn't known about this useful arrangement.

And clearly enough, through the pointillist mist of this ancient moving image, we see the table dotted not only with bottles of wine but also, in the correct Spanish manner, with little dishes of tapas in the form of green and black olives, baby squids and fresh anchovies. One of the young men now runs his own bar-restaurant in town.

And there the film runs out, but hasta luegito! Until the next time - the little next time, soonish!


Notes for the serious student
There is another form of diminutive that irrevocably changes the word - so for example, un palo is a stick while un palillo is a toothpick. Un plato is a plate, un platillo is a saucer. While this device is clearly useful it's merely functional and lacks the magic I describe above.

And by the way, Super 8mm cine film is being revived. Introduced by Kodak in 1965, it continued to be the main amateur movie format for the following decade and beyond, until digital video began to take over. I now read that early in 2016 Kodak introduced a brand new Super-8 movie camera that uses the same film format as all those years ago. The world is getting so much better at nostalgia, it's quite heartening.

Winds of change

The wind! The wind. When the wind changes, it changes everything.

These are the Fortunate Islands, Las Islas Afortunadas, where weather doesn't really happen. Not in the sense that it happens in, say, Oklahoma in the spring, when tornadoes hurl cars and cattle across the rooftops. Or in November's East of England, when freezing fog muffles the cries of shivering cats trying to find their cat flap, or summertime Aberdeen where, if ever the rain stops, people dance with joy in the streets to the wailing of soggy bagpipes.

No, we don't get any of that, but we do get a bit of wind. Mostly this takes the form of the gentle vientos alisios, or just alisios for short - the trade winds that blow from the north and, in more picturesque times, used to propel the empire-building sailing ships from Europe down the coast of West Africa and across the Atlantic (see Columbus and the countess, 13 September 2016).

We like the alisios. They represent normality. In fact, the entire town of San Sebastián and its way of life are designed around them.

Oh, but surely...? No, no, it's true. To see this you only have to look at what's been going on for the last three weeks in which - and this is extraordinary - the winds have been blowing exclusively from the south. A southerly wind is expected occasionally, especially in winter, but only for a day or two. Three weeks of it is sheer thuggery.

Down on the beach this morning, Cirilo staggered from the water after his daily swim, complaining. Not about the temperature of the water - it's coolish now but perfectly bearable - but about the stones. 'This maldito wind sends them up higher. You can't walk into the water without hurting your feet.' The beaches of San Sebastián work brilliantly for the normal northerly winds, they are sheltered by the town and indeed by the entire island, but when the wind swings round to the south it sweeps in directly over the water, blowing spray into your face as you swim and raising big rolling waves that push those damned pebbles further up towards the tideline.

And worse, the southerly winds also have free passage into the streets behind the beach, where they whistle around the café tables, rumpling the hair and blowing the tops off our cheese-and-salad rolls. The more exposed of the bars and cafés have transparent screens they can roll out to shelter us from the winds - but from the alisios, not from these treacherous southern blows! The screens are all in the wrong places!

And the southern winds have an even meaner trick to play, which is to lift talcum-fine dust from the Sahara desert and puff it across the water to our Islas Afortunadas. This is the hated calima. It looks like mist but is insidiously different. Not moist, as mist should be, but dry and warm, which feels wrong. And when you look along the valleys, the hills no longer fade into delicate shades of green and blue but into sombre yellows and browns, ruining the photos of visiting tourists. 'Something wrong with this camera, Doris, the colours have come out funny.'

The calima gets into your lungs too. It doesn't hurt them, it's only dust, but it can irritate if your lungs aren't too good anyway. 'Where's Víctor today?' we would ask our former neighbour, Isabel, in our early days here. 'Ah, he never comes out when there's calima. Stays indoors until it goes away.' Víctor's lungs were ruined from heavy smoking when he was younger, and now the African dust would tickle and twitch inside them, making him cough.

Something subtler happens, too, when this ethereal blanket settles over the island. It puts people off-colour in undefinable ways. It makes them nervous, uncomfortable. The world seems too quiet, as though something is about to happen, like rain or thunder or missiles from North Korea. People become less chirpy and cheerful, more inclined to moan, about the calima, Real Madrid, the state of their knee joints or their useless son-in-law. You catch them peering up at the sky, hoping to see a glimpse of blue. Gulls hardly bother to screech because the sound gets swallowed into the haze.

Sometimes this unwelcome visitor leaves with a bang when the wind swings round again on an Atlantic weather front and unleashes the threatened rain and thunder, which is wonderful: 'This'll clear the air for us!' And fill up the reservoirs and swell the growing potatoes and maize and bananas.

This time it didn't do that, it just went away. We woke up to a clear blue sky and the familiar waterfall of clouds pouring over the distant hilltops, an unmistakeable signal that the alisios were back on duty. Cycling to the supermarket for some morning shopping I was greeted by cheery smiles on every face: 'Mucho más fresco hoy!', much fresher today! All so much pleasantly fresher - the air, the sky, the hills, our neighbours, me, the world - with the sullen blanket lifted and our friendly northern winds wafting clean air across the sky. We like the alisios.

Notes for the serious student
The vientos alisios, the trade winds, happen because the Earth spins, which causes currents of air to flow in vast loops around the northern and southern hemispheres. And that's enough of that because it can get complicated, but a key point is that the alisios flow strongly in summer but tend to slacken in winter, sometimes allowing gusts from the south to ruin our swimming, or dust from Africa to drift across and ruin the views.

And where does that word alisios come from? After extensive research I can reveal that nobody seems to know. It's probably something to do with the Latin halitus which means breath - the Spanish word hálito also means breath but can mean a gentle breeze. On the other hand, the English 'halitosis' means smelly breath, so let's just forget I started this.