Screams in the night

The scene: a darkened bedroom with feeble moonlight filtering blue-grey through the closed shutters. In the double bed are two large, motionless lumps. The peacefully sleeping occupants of the house.

One of the lumps stirs uneasily then half raises its head, revealing tousled blonde hair. This is the wife. She appears to be listening to something. She elbows the lump next to her.

'Wha...?'

'I can hear something.'

'Wharra...?'

'I can hear something moving. Under the bed.'

Her husband sits up, frowning, and listens for a moment but hears nothing, unsurprisingly because he's unlikely to hear anything less than a foraging heffalump. One hand scrabbles on the bedside table to find the emergency mini-torch then he leans over to peer upside-down beneath the bed.

'Can't see anything.' He waves the torch around. 'Probably a lizard. Or a gecko. It'll go away.'

Detectably grumpy from being woken up for the sake of a lizard, husband heads for the bathroom. He has just closed the door when he hears a piercing scream from the bedroom, a prolonged shriek of pure terror. He rushes back, heart thumping, to find his wife clutching her hair.

'It was a mouse! It got tangled!' She's trawling desperately through the locks as though there might be other mice lurking.

'How do you know it was...'

'I saw it!' she cries. 'It ran across the bed and jumped off.'

Husband leaps backwards. He's in bare feet.

Ten minutes later he has found no trace of a mouse under the bed or anywhere else in the bedroom. It must have fled to some safe corner elsewhere. After a fright like that it will probably leave again the way it came in, whatever that was, he tells his wife reassuringly.

In the morning they find fresh mouse droppings on the kitchen worktop.

We recounted this incident to our neighbours Feli and Lali, who laughed uproariously. These are country folk for whom mice are part of life like flies, slugs and politicians. 'If it's still around tomorrow,' Feli said, 'I can lend you a ratonera, a mousetrap.'

The next day we found fresh droppings all around the house. No intention of leaving, then, and keen to get to know its new home. Feli produced his mousetrap, an evil steel device with jagged jaws that could disable a goat. 'Be a bit careful with this,' he warned. 'It's really for rats.'

That evening I placed a cube of cheese on the trigger spike and set the vicious trap very, very cautiously. In the small hours of the morning we were wakened buy a thunderous clunk! as the jaws sprung. I rushed upstairs to find the teeth clamped around nothing at all. Not even the cheese.

This trap was too big, we decided, so we purchased a couple of smaller ones, the classic Tom and Jerry design with a wooden base and a wire loop that snaps shut over the bait. I set both of them with little lumps of cheese and in the morning both had sprung, with the cheese gone but no mouse.

So, a clever little blighter, this one. Over morning coffee in Arturo's cafe we sought opinions about what to try next. Arturo had the answer at once. 'Yellow cheese is no good,' he explained patiently as though to rather slow children. 'No sirve, it won't work. It can just lift it off the spike.' We needed something stickier, like blue cheese, that the mouse would have to tug at.

'Gofio,' suggested his wife Marta from behind the counter. Maize flour. 'A little ball of gofio mixed with honey, that'll do it.' Gomerans have enormous faith in the magical powers of gofio.

One of our fellow customers joined in. 'Mice know all about mousetraps,' he told us. 'They've learned the tricks, you'll never catch it with a mousetrap. The only certain method is a card covered with glue. Put it on the floor with something tasty in the middle - cheese, a piece of apple, gofio with honey, doesn't matter. Mouse walks across the card to reach it, gets stuck fast. Ya está, you've got him.'

Okay, but then we've got a live mouse stuck to a card. What do we do with it?

'Hammer,' chuckled Arturo. 'Bam!'

'Bucket of water,' offered his customer.

'They're vegetarians,' Marta intervened, seeing our expressions. Ah, well, in that case... Heads shook.

'What you could do,' suggested Marta, 'is to put on rubber gloves and pick the mouse off the card with your fingers.'

'You'd leave its feet behind,' said Arturo.

By the time we left the cafe, the favoured solution was an empty paint can with its inner surface coated with oil or grease. Put some bait in the bottom. Mouse jumps in, can't get out again because it's too slippery.

I returned home giving myself a stern talking-to. Look, it's only a mouse. All this fuss, sticky cards, paint cans. Mousetraps must work, they've always worked.

That night I baited the trap with a little ball of honey-flavoured gofio, took a pair of pliers and adjusted the wire trigger to the most extreme sensitivity I dared. A mouse whisker would set it off.

It did. A clean kill.

At the inquest in the morning we viewed the corpse with growing dismay. Guilt. Such a little mouse. And rather sweet, and very pathetic with its legs splayed out and...

Well, enough of that. Feli and Lali consoled us with the observation that if we'd set it free a cat would soon have got it anyway.

Notes for the serious student
A mouse in the house is a rarity - in fact this was the only time, so far. There isn't much to be said about Gomeran mice, which are much like anyone else's, small and greyish or brownish. They can run fast but not always fast enough to escape the local cats, so are most often sighted as chewed remnants deposited outside someone's front door.

Lizards and geckoes are more frequent visitors. Gomeran lizards come in large and small models. The bigger one is the lagarto, about the size of a sausage when fully grown but a dark, murky grey in colour and frankly not very pretty. We've never had one in the house. The lagartija is smaller, attractively striped and thin enough to wriggle under doors. They are also a bit dim, tending to fall off walls and get trapped in post boxes and shower trays, where they will leave behind a thrashing tail when you try to rescue them.

Geckoes are even harder to catch because they have clever little suction-pad paws that can run up the side of a bucket. The Gomeran version - known locally as the pracan, pronounced placan by true Gomerans - is fairly small, quite cute and reassuringly content to pootle about on the ceiling most of the time. However, the babies are as clueless as the lizards and tend to get squashed in closing doorways and shutters, which is perhaps why there are not very many of them.

The barefoot immortals

As we settled ourselves outside a café, four of them were just getting up to leave, gathering together their rucksacks, carrier bags, guitars, two African drums, a sack of juggling clubs and a small rumpled dog on a rope.

The astonishing thing about hippies is that they are clearly immortal. They haven't aged in more than half a century, looking exactly the same now as they did in the 1960s except that the flowers in their hair have mostly withered and gone. Otherwise identical though - the same baggy pants, granny wrappings, long hair left to do its thing and, very often, bare feet.


Bare feet! These are a key component of the whole Back-to-Nature ethos. One of the leading proponents of barefootedness was the teenage singer Sandie Shaw (now a pensioner), whose little pink toes would pace the stage as she sang: 'I walk along the city streets you used to walk along with me...' In bare feet? No wonder he vanished. Who wants a girlfriend whose feet smell of old cigarette ends?

'Are you on your way to Valle Gran Rey?' we asked the departing hippies. Usually they're on their way to VGR because the myth persists that it's a hippie haven, which it really hasn't been for many decades, it's a working port and a tourist resort with smart hotels and apartments, sandy beaches and some excellent restaurants.

'We've just come from there,' one of the girls replied. She looked a bit glum.

'Didn't like it much this time,' added the other girl.

Oh, why?

It had changed, she complained, to nods of agreement from the others. 'Too many police around,' one of the guys contributed, perhaps unwisely, shaking his pony tail. We didn't ask why that might be a problem and anyway they were hurrying to catch the ferry to Tenerife, but one reason could be that they'd had difficulties in trying to set up camp.

There is emerging agreement among the island's town councils that something needs to be done about los hippies. Not that anyone is particularly against hippiedom in itself, Gomerans are tolerant of most kinds of normalities and eccentricities, but the problem is that today's hippies usually arrive with a limited budget that rules out staying in even a cheap pensión for any length of time, so they set up camp on a beach or in a field.

Not only is this illegal, it's also damaging to an island that prides itself on being unspoiled. People come here from all over the world to wander along paths and beaches where all they encounter is the natural environment, and an especially beautiful one at that. A fairy circle of hippies slapping drums, twanging guitars and chucking juggling sticks in the air is not what most visitors are seeking.

And being fair, probably the hippies themselves don't realise that the isolated beach or clearing where they're pitching their hoop tents and lighting camp fires is a designated Lugar de Interés Científico, a Site of Scientific Interest, to be cherished and protected. Much of the island is protected one way or another, not least the World Heritage laurel forest that covers 40 square kilometres.

In recent weeks the Guardia Civil, the national police who get tasked with this kind of thing, have evicted several groups of campers from around the island, in one case a colony of over a hundred individuals living on a remote beach. The Guardia do it gently - no charging with riot shields - they just warn the campers that what they're doing is not permitted and make sure they pack up and go.

It's a shame, but a small island has to choose what kind of haven it wants to be. Unfortunately for the world's everlasting hippies, this seems to be a Europe-wide trend. Being a hippie brings new challenges these days.

A local journalist recently offered a different angle on this phenomenon. The relationship between La Gomera and its hippies is a little deeper than it seems. Back in the sixties, the people who turned up to make a temporary home here (mostly young Germans and English) came with some kind of income, or at least prospects of earning one. They were simply looking for an unconventional lifestyle.

They were all labelled hippies when they arrived but some of them stayed, worked, set up home and renovated old houses. The most significant point, though, is that those early adventurers played a big role in putting La Gomera on the tourist map. In particular, the valley, port and beaches of Valle Gran Rey, which is now one of the island's principal tourist venues. There's a historical debt of gratitude, when viewed this way.

A personal one as well, in fact. It was a hippie who first told us about this island some thirty years ago, a girl on a coach in southern Spain. She spoke of ancient, abandoned cottages in the hills where it was possible to sleep for nothing. Maybe it was, in those distant days, if you could find space on the cottage floor between all the bare feet. Today, forget it, the abandoned cottages are either roofless, occupied by goats or exquisitely renovated as casas rurales, country cottages for visiting ramblers. Wearing boots.

Notes for the serious student
What is a hippie? Wikipedia tells me the word derives from hipster, which was an African American term for one of the in-crowd as we used to say then, people who were right up there with the latest trends. Cool. (That's another word that lives on from the 60s.) The root word, hip, is of uncertain origin.

Also uncertain is whether hippie should be spelt hippy, which fits better with standard English - one hippy, two hippies - but the snag is that hippy as an adjective means, well, lots of hip. Broad in the beam. One of the dafter songs of that era was 'Hippy hippy shake' which required dancers to shake their hips left and right. This was obviously addressed to people with hips and not hippies, who generally don't have hips because they eat only beans, carrots and green leafy vegetables. So I think that's pretty conclusive.

Gestures

I've referred several times in this blog to Spain's wonderful collection of hand and body signals. Everyone in the world uses gestures of some kind but the Spanish system almost merits World Heritage status.

Some of the signals are remarkably useful, some are entertaining, some are open to tragic misinterpretation. So in the interests of international peace and understanding, here are a few of the most important. Pictures would make everything easier but my sketching skills aren't up to it.

Waggling forefinger
Forefinger held vertically at head level, waggling from side to side. One of the most dangerous for risk of misunderstanding because it looks like an admonition: 'How dare you should say such a thing!' or even a warning: 'Any more of that and you'll be in deep trouble!' But it's neither of those, it's completely benign and used only to emphasise negation: 'There's no way I'm going to pay two euros for a tired cabbage!'

Waggling hand
Another one to learn as a priority. Hand extended palm-down, waving up and down like a traffic cop signalling you to stop or, if more urgent in appearance: 'Get down, there's an incoming missile!' But no, it means 'Come over here!'

Deep shrug
Both shoulders raised high as though trying to engulf the head. This is ubiquitous and, reinforced by the facial expression, is easy to interpret: 'Maybe, maybe not, who can tell?' Or more cynically, 'That's the way things are, sadly, but what can you do?'

Deep shrug with hands
An amplification of the deep shrug has both hands raised in front of the shrugging shoulders, palms outwards. The face will feign bewilderment with wide eyes, raised eyebrows and mouth downturned. Sometimes this truly indicates bewilderment, but more often it's deep scepticism: 'That's what they claim, and who am I to question it?'

Mouth zip
Lips closed, finger and thumb drawn from one side to the other as though closing a zip fastener: 'I'm saying nothing'. Typically employed to avoid a public scrap with your spouse who has just said something deliberately provocative.

Open arms
Like the Pope greeting the faithful - arms spread wide, hands held palm-upwards as though waiting to catch a very large balloon. This is a nice one, always friendly: 'Where have you been, cuanto tiempo, haven't seen you for ages.'

Slice of doom
Not a nice one at all. One hand is held at shoulder height, palm upwards and slicing from the wrist as though threatening a mortal blow with a sickle. This is most often seen in parents communicating with children: 'You stop that right now or I'll slaughter you.'

Horizontal hand waggle
Hand at waist height, palm down, fingers pointing forwards, thumb and forefinger slightly protruding and waggling like a small aircraft trying to land in a crosswind. This indicates maybe yes, maybe no: 'Is the sea still warm enough for swimming? Depends what you call warm...'

The benefit balance
Both hands extended in front of body, palm down, alternately rising and falling as though playing with old-fashioned weighing scales. Indicates a question of balance, weighing up costs and benefits – so, a rainy day is good for farmers but disastrous for visitors. If there's a winner there's a loser, the zero-sum choice.

Patting the poodles
Both hands moving up and down together as though slow-motion patting a pair of poodles. This is often exchanged by fellow sufferers queuing at the Post Office, an empathetic encouragement to keep calm, have patience, we're really in no hurry.

Five fingers down
Hand in front of chest, five fingers hanging downwards like weeping willow fronds while moving up and down: 'It's going to rain.'

Five fingers up
Hand in front of chest, five fingers pointing upwards while opening and closing: 'The place was packed, we were crammed in like sardines.'

Togetherness fingers
Hands held palm downwards with the forefingers extended in longitudinal contact. Signifies marriage, family connection, friendship or any other kind of relationship that might place people metaphorically side by side.

Ring finger interrogation
A friendly enquiry – forefinger pointing to a real or imaginary ring on the ring finger, accompanied by a questioning expression: 'Where's your husband / wife / partner?' This often reflects concern that the missing other half is ill at home or has ditched you for somebody richer.

Two-hand roll
Hands with forefinger extended, rolling over each other in front of the body. Normally a long-distance signal to or from a bartender: 'Same again.'

Clash of cymbals
Hands smacked together at a glancing angle like a showy cymbalist at the back of the orchestra. 'That's it, job done! Ya está!'

And, and, and...
There are many more gestures but most are self-explanatory. 'Give me a call,' for example, is a telephone handset comprising a thumb against the ear and forefinger pointing to the mouth. I once witnessed a wonderful variant of this, with a closed fist at the ear and the other hand briskly turning the handle of an Alexander Graham Bell wind-up telephone. Sadly I understood it at once, which places me squarely among the ancients.

Sea change in the village

Four of us squeeze into the taxi - two large ladies, one small and a guy with long legs. We're on our way to a party with free transport there and back. It's a couple of weeks before Christmas and a gloomy dusk has given way to invisible clouds spitting raindrops as though practising for something worse. This perhaps goes some way towards justifying tonight's cataclysmic break with tradition.

Every year the village association holds a Christmas cena-baile, dinner-dance, and every year since its inception this important event has taken place on the plaza, the village square. Naturally. We put out tables and chairs, decorate the plaza with bunting, and the village ladies cook vast tubs of watercress soup, chick pea stew, potatoes, meat and fish while their husbands look after the barbecue, beer and wine. We two foreigners contribute party nibbles on cocktail sticks, which are very popular because everybody needs a ready supply of toothpicks after eating the watercress soup, chick pea stew, potatoes, meat and fish.

This is how things should be. However, last year the Christmas dinner-dance eventually happened near the end of March, postponed successively by inclement weather, illness and competing events. This proved to be a catalyst for change. Tonight, the village dinner-dance is being held in a restaurant.

Sensible, pragmatic, but perhaps a little sad. The comilona - feast, blowout - on the village square has always been so authentically villagey, all of us beavering away to prepare a communal self-indulgence, celebrating who we are and where we are. Tonight we've succumbed to the modern disease of outsourcing.

Pilar and Bernarda are noisily excited in the taxi, Bernarda because she always gets excited by the prospect of fun, having been widowed very many years ago, and Pilar because she has only recently begun to rejoin the world of laughter. Widows generally still wear black, but these days it's acceptable for the solid black to transform gradually through more cheerful patterns to, eventually, a return to colour. Pilar is still in transition, Bernarda long ago burst into bloom again.

In the restaurant our tables have been set in two rows on a covered terrace, which is an excellent start because we're outdoors in the pleasant evening air but sheltered from mean attempts to rain us out. Bottles of wine, water and Fanta are plonked on the tables as soon as we're settled. Conversation begins to hum. Carmela, sitting opposite, comments how nice this is, one big family brought together for the evening. She's speaking philosophically but in fact she's not far from the literal truth, almost everyone is related to almost everyone else in some way.

Half an hour later her husband Eusebio is complaining of hunger. There is still nothing to eat on the table and the mood is beginning to slide towards rebellion. Bernarda hails a passing waitress: 'Can't we have some food?'

This releases an ominous rumble of agreement from around the table: food, we need food! 'When we organise our own dinner,' Bernarda scolds the waitress, 'we put snacks on the table as soon as people arrive! Cheese, bread, mojo, almogrote...'

The waitress hurries off for a consultation with the boss and returns with trays full of cheese, bread, mojo and almogrote. The boss bravely comes over to explain that we'd all arrived half an hour early, and anyway the agreed start time of half-past eight really meant half-past eight for nine. This gets him nowhere and he sensibly retires to oversee preparations for the rest of the meal.

'Is the food good here?' Pilar asks us doubtfully, knowing we've been before. Very good, we assure her, fingers crossed. It is, it's very good, but the known unknown is how our neighbours will react to it. This is one of the more adventurous restaurants in town, capable of serving weird combinations of ingredients in wine bottles cut in half lengthways.

However, a clever restaurateur knows his clients. When the food arrives it's reassuringly recognisable as a village comilona - chick pea stew and watercress soup followed by meat, meat and meat. J spots some cherry tomatoes decorating a plate of ham and rapidly snatches them to safety. Nobody else wants tomatoes. There are also mountainous heaps of papas arrugadas (wrinkled potatoes) and fish and local goat cheese so we're fine.

'I don't think much of this potaje de berros' says Eusebio, across the table. General agreement, it lacks the obligatory corn cob. 'And the garbanzos need more bacon,' contributes Santiago. Of course they do, stewed chick peas are no good without plenty of bacon. Home cooking is always best. And grumbling is fun.

Eventually we get to the postre stage, pudding, and soon afterwards from the terrace door to the restaurant comes some experimental tapping of microphones, a few drumbeats, the twang of guitars, then the salsa band launches the evening's dancing. Tables are cleared, stray cutlery and fallen tomatoes removed from the dance floor and the party begins.

Paco, our diminutive Down's syndrome neighbour, grabs a passing waitress to dance with him. She's Cuban and always happy to wiggle. Pilar and Bernarda dance with each other then with practically every unwary male in the room, including me. By midnight most of the staff are dancing too, cooks, waiters, waitresses and the lady with the mop. It's all wonderfully - what's the word - yes, villagey! And the rain outside can bother nobody. I suspect we are witnessing yet another sea change in the local way of life.


Notes for the serious student
Papas arrugadas are small potatoes boiled in their skins with lots of salt, important enough to justify a whole blog post to themselves (Wrinkled potatoes, 25 May 2017).
Mojo is a sauce based on oil and garlic, without which the papas arrugadas are just wrinkled potatoes.
Almogrote is a spread made with smoked goat cheese, chilli pepper, oil and garlic. It can be mildly or very hot and everyone who makes it claims theirs is the best on the island.
Potaje de berros is watercress soup, a local speciality.
Garbanzos, chick peas, are nearly always served as a stew with meat stock and are the nearest anyone gets to eating vegetables at this kind of comilona. (Where do all the carrots go? 10 February 2016).

Bitter legacy

A trail of wet footprints on the pavement leads to Javier, sitting on a bench to towel himself dry in the sunshine. 'And now,' he announces, springing to his feet, 'I'm going home for a GP! Because it's El Día de Todos los Santos, All Saints' Day. A holiday.'

Javier is one of the regular swimmers, retired but spritely, who plunges in every morning for his half-hour of backstroke even when the sea temperature falls to gasping point, which in La Gomera is about 18º Celsius. In Scandinavia they don't gasp until it's down to 2º, but all suffering is relative.

Holidays are an excuse to celebrate, we agree, but what's a GP?

'A GP?' answers Javier, surprised. 'Well, you know, a gin pink.' He likes trying out his English.

A pink gin, we suggest. Okay, a pink gin, he accepts. PG. Gin with tonic water and a dash of Angostura. 'The Angostura,' asserts Javier, 'is very important. Very warming after a swim. Do you know it?'

We do, yes. Angostura bitters. 'The name,' he continues - no Gomeran is going to be deterred from telling a good story - 'comes from Venezuela, a town on the Orinoco where the river becomes very narrow, which is angosto in Spanish, and the place where it happens is the angostura, you see? So they named the town Angostura.'

'So that's where Angostura bitters come from?'

'Exactly! Angostura is where they first made it. And do you know who introduced me to the gin pink? Sorry, pink gin?'

'Max?' we guess, not all that cleverly.

'Señor Max. Correcto!' We part smiling, to warm up over our respective beverages.

Max had discovered La Gomera many years before we did and he came here regularly every winter, staying in an apartment block run by Javier. Inevitably in this small town we used to encounter Max in the street but by mutual agreement we all wore invisibility cloaks. For our part, we wanted to know Gomerans, not elderly and aristocratic Englishmen, while Max had already cultivated his circle of well-to-do locals whom he invited to cocktails at the Nautical Club or to dinner at one of the smarter restaurants.

However, foreigners anywhere will always end up talking to each other no matter how resolutely they resist. Our relationship with Max gradually evolved over several years to a polite 'good morning' as we passed in the street then a brief pause for a few words of small talk.

Eventually we found ourselves joining him for a drink in the Club or a local bar and even spending an hour or two with him over dinner. This was truly astonishing because we should have loathed each other. From our perspective he was an appalling man, racist, elitist, narrow, bigoted, choose your favourite President Trump descriptor and it would fit Max. But for some reason we got on fine. You had to understand the background he was coming from - a moneyed family of the kind whose sons would be placed into banking, the army or the church, in that order, while the girls were offloaded into good marriages. Max ended up as the Colonel of an Indian regiment.

You couldn't blame him for any of that, and his heart was in the right place. He had a twinkle in his eye and for that I can forgive a lot. We took to teasing each other. 'Reading El País, that Communist rag?' he would roar on a Sunday. El País is a mildly socialist Spanish newspaper with a similar stance to the Guardian in Britain. We shared an interest in books but in those days he was way ahead of us in being able to read a Spanish novel for pleasure rather than for homework. 'Only problem is,' he complained, 'whenever I learn a new word from a novel, I try it out on my Spanish friends and they've never damn-well heard of it!'

This might have had something to do with his accent. His Spanish was impressively fluent but delivered with a wonderfully upper-class English twang. A few words, even in Spanish, were enough to place him among the Surrey mock-Tudor mansions and Sunday afternoon bridge.

He was also very large and very loud. Spotting us in a restaurant one evening he strode in and immediately filled the room. He stood beside our table to bellow a lengthy story about a visitor who'd just broken a leg by falling off a rock - 'silly blighter, geology's completely unsuitable for climbing' - before sweeping out again with a cheery farewell. In the silence that followed his exit, an English diner at the next table whispered 'Is he real?'

Max's favourite tipple was Spanish brandy, which his doctor had warned him not to drink too freely because it thinned the blood and he was already taking an anticoagulant. He solved this dilemma by taking less of the anticoagulant. A day or two before one of his regular check-ups he would reduce his brandy intake and take the proper dose of anticoagulant so everything would look okay in his blood analysis. I'm fairly sure this was both misguided and dangerous, but it worked for Max. He survived his full term. One winter he informed us that he was expecting to die at the age of 86, because that's when everyone in his family died. A couple of years later he died, at the age of 86. We received a letter from his family to tell us he'd gone.

We still miss him. So does Javier, who got on with him just as well as we did. But Max lives on in fond memory and his splendid legacy of the gin pink.


Notes for the serious student
Diligent research reveals that Javier's pre-lunch drink is not a pink gin but a pink gin-and-tonic. The authentic PG comprises only gin and a dash of Angostura bitters which further increases the alcohol as well as the flavour. Traditionally it should be made with Plymouth gin, which is hard to come by these days and impossible in La Gomera, but if you're not too fussy there's a wide choice of other brands.

The town of Angostura in Venezuela is now called Ciudad Bolívar, which is the fault of a Venezuelan aristocrat called Simón Bolívar who played a leading role in throwing the Spaniards out of South America. Even more disappointingly it hasn't produced Angostura bitters since 1875, when the company relocated to Trinidad.

The product itself is reputed to contain some 40 ingredients, none of which includes anything from the angostura tree, not even the bark. So now it's just a brand name based on ancient history, but so are Marmite, Hoover and the House of Windsor.

The maybe island

'Twas a wild and stormy night. The captain gathered his men around him and said, 'Lads, I'm going to tell you a story: 'Twas a wild and stormy night. The captain gathered his men around him…'

On such a night, when seafarers of old would tell stories to calm their fears, an Irish monk called Brendan was facing disaster in the middle of the Atlantic, bobbing in a tiny sailing ship made from ox hides. Accompanying him were seventeen fellow monks, all with hope in their hearts of discovering new heathen lands to convert to the Faith. Or probably by now with hopes of finding any kind of land on which to stretch their legs and catch a few dodos to make a change from stale cheese.

But on this fateful night the monks had fallen silent as the storm grew stronger and giant waves hurled their frail craft into dark canyons that threatened to swallow them. Up in the bows, the lookout held his hand in front of his face to ward off the stinging spray. Suddenly his companions heard him shout above the roar of the wind: 'Land ahoy!'

Rushing forwards they saw a vast, black shape approaching through the gloom. An island! (Cries of 'we're saved', 'thanks be to Providence' and so on.) They managed to steer alongside the island without crashing into it, leaped ashore to a rough, featureless surface and made their ship fast to any protuberances they could find.

By morning the storm was easing and the monks decided to remain on this strangely austere little island for a day or two to recover their strength and make a few repairs to their boat. However, their leader Brendan, a more experienced sailor than the others, soon broke the news that their island was moving. Cruising purposefully through the water, no doubt about it.

The explanation soon became clear. They had landed on a very large whale.

The monks decided to handle this disconcerting development as another manifestation of a benign Providence that was now offering to carry them across the ocean with zero effort.

Their whale proved remarkably tolerant, transporting them for forty days before delivering them safely to a real, solid island.

And what an island! This time, they found themselves in a land that could have been the long-sought Paradise on Earth, a splendiferous place clothed in lush vegetation where birds trilled, cool water gushed from springs and fish of a thousand colours frolicked in the clear waters around its beaches. They stayed on the island for seven years - and who can blame them? - before tearing themselves away to return to rainy Ireland.

In the centuries that followed, as the intrepid voyagers' story was told and retold, the little paradise they had discovered became known as Saint Brendan's island or, in Spanish, the isla de San Borondón. Those who try to extract grains of truth from ancient legends suggest it may have been the island of La Palma in what are now the Canaries. Or Madeira, or the Azores, or even America, nearly a thousand years before Columbus.

Or perhaps, more tantalisingly, it was the elusive eighth island that for many centuries was believed to exist somewhere west of the seven known Canary Islands. An island that sometimes is there, and sometimes is not…

Walk up to the highest point of La Gomera, the peak of Garajonay, and in the right conditions, in the right frame of mind, perhaps you will glimpse a strange formation of clouds on the western horizon, a vague, fluffy pillow of white mist such as might form above a little island. A gentle island clothed in trees, where spring waters flow, birds sing and imagination takes flight into all kinds of fancies.

Notes for the serious student

There are many versions of the legend of Saint Brendan or San Borondón, who set sail from Ireland in the sixth century AD in a small and flimsy vessel with a variable number of companions. He enjoyed a succession of weird adventures, of which landing on a whale is just one. In some versions they managed to celebrate Mass on the whale's back but it abandoned them soon afterwards. I prefer the version in which the whale is more helpful.

There are also many interpretations of the legend. The association of Brendan with the mythical extra Canary Island is one of those muddles that happens with legends, but it's a seductively attractive notion - an island that comes and goes, perhaps rising only to save sailors lost in the mists or wild weather. Sadly, modern satellite and marine survey techniques make it very easy to disprove this kind of thing, and what a shame that is.

However, the name San Borondón lives on in the Canaries as a usefully emotive tag for hotels, restaurants, apartment blocks and a brand of bottled water. Brendan himself, often known as Saint Brendan the Navigator, is the patron saint of whales and dolphins as well as sailors and travellers in general.

There is, of course, a real eighth Canary Island called La Graciosa, which never disappears but is very small and is normally counted with its larger neighbour, Lanzarote.

The engraving of Brendan's whale was digitised by New York Public Library from an early seventeenth century book by Caspar Plautius, abbot of Seitenstetten in Austria. It's not too accurate in respect of whales, nor of Brendan's boat, but it's the best we can do after all this time.

Laura, Oscar and the others

From simple observation, some are brilliantly suited to this job and others less so. To do it properly requires great skill and wisdom.

Here's an example. We're sitting in a local restaurant, watching the chef sending discs of dough spinning into the air with the showmanship of a conjurer producing white rabbits. At the moment he's producing our frutos del mar (sea food) pizza and half the fun is seeing him do it.

Seated at a nearby table is a wizened figure wearing a dilapidated blue blazer and an equally sad blue beret. The pizza already cooling in front of him looks dauntingly big but he is helping it down with an equally daunting glass of red wine. He is probably German, judging from his accent as he placed his order, although it's hard to be sure because he did so in an ancient, quavery whisper.

The young waiter, who is called Oscar and is the shape and size of a wine vat, delivers our pizza and we raise our glasses to greet its arrival. By chance the old man is raising his at the same time and, catching his eye, we toast each other's health: 'Salud!' As he replaces his glass it hits the edge of his plate and tips over, gushing a lake of wine across the table.

There can be nothing worse than this when you're eating alone. With a companion you can have a row about it - clumsy oaf! - to relieve the embarrassment, or join forces to mop it up with paper serviettes, or snap your fingers to summon assistance, thus turning disaster into a demonstration of your coolness and command. But alone you are a little island in a sea of unknown faces, all of them wondering how you'll cope.

The old man leans back in his seat, dismayed, watching the red lake spread across the tablecloth towards his lap. We both half-rise to see what we can do but are outpaced by young Oscar, who has a nifty turn of speed for a wine vat and arrives within seconds to murmur reassuring words to his distressed customer as he clears the table, gathers up the soggy tablecloth and whisks it away to the kitchen. Moments later he returns with a dry tablecloth, restores the old man's pizza and cutlery, pours a replacement glass of wine then smoothly retires as though nothing has happened.

A splendid demonstration of waiterly expertise. If you're going to get exasperated when one of your customers spills wine, forget it, become a bricklayer.

Here's another one. Sipping a morning coffee outside one of the town's many cafés we watch a young mother trying to get her baby back into its pushchair. The infant does not want to go, he's enjoying himself out there surrounded by admirers and is going to give his mum hell if she tries to remove him. By now he has passed the stage of whimpering protest and is heading towards screaming indignation.

Laura the waitress materialises from nowhere like a fairy godmother to seize the bawling baby from his mother's arms. She begins talking to him, not soothingly as I might have tried, not pleadingly or angrily like his flustered mother, but in quick-fire Spanish that leaves him open-mouthed with astonishment as she whisks him around to show him an ice-cream placard, a pop concert poster, a newspaper, a potted plant, a pigeon, a dog and a beer mat, the last of which she gives him to try biting as she plonks him firmly into his pushchair and straps him in. 'Bueno,' good, she tells his mother, 'he's fine now, you can take him home,' and waves cheerily at the stunned baby as he gets wheeled away.

You have to love children to be a camarero or camarera, waiter or waitress, in La Gomera, it's an obligatory qualification. Residents and visitors alike should be prepared for waiters of any gender to grab their offspring and carry them off to show their companions. Babies are delightedly tickled as they get passed around, toddlers are encouraged to explore behind the counter and will be lifted into the air to thump the cash till. When they are delivered safely back to you a few minutes later they will be happily clutching a packet of crisps or a lollipop on the house.

Then there are the skills that come only with training, experience and innate talent. How many ordinary folk could commit to memory an order from a table of six people for wines, beers, coffees, cokes and sandwiches, without falling to pieces as half of them change their minds? While simultaneously being polite to two nearby tables waving their arms to demand the bill, a third requiring more mayonnaise for their hamburgers and a fourth whose tiny treasure has just swiped all the glasses to the ground.

Laura could do that. She has now retired from waitressing after getting married and producing exquisitely well-behaved babies of her own. Oscar is still vat-shaped but has gone independent, running all-night kiosks at dances, which demands the additional quality of being able to stay on his feet from midnight to six in the morning. Both of them a tragic loss to the everyday world of bars and cafés, but fortunately there seems to be a healthy supply of similarly talented newcomers coming along.



Notes for the serious student
There is a local training college, an instituto de formación, where you can learn all you need to know about catering whether your goal is to be a cook, a waiter or a high-flying manager. But many of the skills these excellent people display are acquired simply by living in a café culture, where eating and drinking outside the home are a normal part of everyday life.

There is also the essential point that being a camarero/a is not just something students do to pay for the gigs and pills, it's a respected profession. Some do it for a while then move on to a better paid industry such as fashion or construction, but others stay in the job for life. It's not at all unusual to be served by an elderly waiter or waitress in Spain, as in many other countries, and they do their work with pride and astonishing dexterity. Try weaving your way between closely-packed tables while balancing a tray full of drinks high in the air on the outspread fingers of one hand. Try carrying three loaded plates on each arm and depositing each carefully on the table without tipping octopus salad into someone's lap. These are rare and valuable skills, as Angela Merkel found out in 2012 when a nervous waiter placed in front of her a glass of cold beer while pouring the other five down her back.