Life and limb

Responding to a plaintive call, I found Janine seated on the floor with legs curled daintily under her like a ballet dancer in repose.

'You fell.'

She nodded. With her damaged sense of balance it needs only a small error for gravity to take over.

'I'm alright,' she assured me.

'Okay, well let's…'

'But I can't get up because my arm hurts when I move it.'

Ah.

With resourceful use of a footstool as a first stage we managed to get her upright and sitting in a chair. I found in the first aid box a triangular cotton sling (no idea where it came from) printed with diagrams of support for a wide choice of injured limbs, but none of them explained what to do if the corners of the triangle wouldn't reach the patient's chin. Try before you buy.

A rapid search through the rag bag yielded an old cotton shirt kept for oiling the bike chain but not yet torn into pieces. I wrapped it around her elbow and tied the shirt's arms behind her neck. Then with the help of a solicitous taxi driver we made our way to the hospital Urgencias unit, a commendably succinct name for the English Accident and Emergency. The taxi driver summoned a wheelchair.

The only problem I've got with these wonderful places is that you have to watch someone you love being wheeled away through a doorway that swings shut behind them, leaving you with nothing to do and nowhere to go except into the waiting room, where other disconsolate souls wait in silent anxiety for good news or bad. I briefly exchanged disaster reports with a couple of them.

After an hour, the kindly receptionist told me my wife was fine but still needed to be examined by the specialist in heavy falls, the traumatólogo - another splendidly evocative Spanish term.

Finally Janine was wheeled back to me again with her arm strapped into a complex sling of stout padded ribbons like a harness for restraining dangerous prisoners: there, just try and get out of that! She was clutching my old shirt which she'd saved from being chucked into a bin.

Radiography had confirmed a fracture of the upper arm, but not a catastrophic one, and the specialist considered it might repair itself without an operation. Worth a try.

Across a huge area of her upper body had crept a stain the colour of a ripe aubergine, but nobody seemed too bothered about that. Contusion caused by the physical shock. Right.

During the next few days we learned to live with three arms instead of four. The first and worst challenge was working out how to change her shirt.

'I don't think we can do it without taking off the sling,' I said. Topology, the science of loops and knots. However, I've watched in admiration on the beach as one of the regular swimmers pulls on his swimming trunks then magically removes his underpants from underneath, so…

No. A five-minute tangle of shirt and sling was enough to convince. I photographed the device from every angle then unlaced it. We got it back on again afterwards, a heartening triumph.

A few days later a repeat visit to the hospital - not to Urgencias this time but a pre-arranged consultation with the traumatólogo - brought bad news. There was now a small desplazamiento of the fracture, a misalignment. It's amazing how a friendly chap in a white coat can inform you that your upper arm is in two pieces yet sound so unperturbed.

'We can operate,' he offered, 'or if you don't want that, we can try a plaster.'

We opted for the plaster. Gathering a small team of helpers he had Janine wheeled into an operating room where they arranged her comfortably in a chair then unlaced the hi-tech sling and chucked it in a heap on the table, from which I removed it, folded it neatly and stashed it away in my pocket. You never know.

One of the helper nurses, a young man in pale blue overalls and latex gloves, was mixing water and white powder in a large plastic bowl.

'More,' specified the doctor. The nurse poured in more powder.

'More.'

His assistant hesitated. 'This will be a big plaster,' said the specialist.

Arranging Janine's forearm in front of her chest, he wrapped the entire limb in a layer of soft padding then began binding it with lengths of bandage dripping with white paste. What had started as a slim, frail limb grew beefier. Around the elbow it was soon the size of a prize-winning marrow and the assistant charged with holding it in place was turning pink. 'The weight,' explained the doctor, 'is important. It needs to pull on the fracture.'

The final touch was a loop like a long soft sausage around her neck to support the forearm, then it was back home to see what nature could achieve.

Our appointment at the hospital a few days later brought, this time, good news. The X-ray plate showed an upper arm now in a single straight line. 'La plaquita, perfecta!' enthused one of the nurses, plaquita being a little placa, the X-ray plate. It's actually a very big X-ray plate but the -ita clarifies that it's being friendly and helpful.

For a day or two the patient with her now marrow-sized arm nursed it quietly at home but when eventually we took a taxi into town, the strangest discovery was that people don't take broken arms seriously.

Sympathy you get, yes: 'It's broken? Oohh…' but then a joke, usually about me beating her up. Friend Miguel, a habitual joker, tried to rub it better over the plaster. Patience is advised: 'Poco a poco,' little by little, a handy phrase you can apply to almost anything. And another of those: 'La vida!' Life.

Yes, life. It seems to break almost everyone's arm sooner or later. I'm not sure whether that's comforting or alarming because I've never broken one of mine yet, although I did break a leg at the age of six so perhaps that lets me off the hook.

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

First, the triangular cotton sling I tried and failed to employ. It's based on a specification by Friedrich von Esmarch, a nineteenth century expert in battlefield first aid. Perhaps people were smaller in those days.

The English equivalent of our traumatólogo is an orthopaedist, a term which derives through French from the Greek orthos meaning straight or correct and paed- which relates to children. That seems a bit tenuous to me, although children do tend to break things I suppose, including themselves.

When as a six-year-old my leg encountered the front bumper of a Post Office van - entirely my fault - I spent the next 11 weeks and two days in hospital, mostly horizontal with one leg stretched by a cord and pulley system. It's technically known as traction. I can't remember how they prevented me from being dragged bodily to the foot of the bed, perhaps there was a retaining rope somewhere. I do remember very clearly that an older boy in the adjacent bed had a walking stick with which he kept hooking away my teddy bear, which was called Wumpy.

The reason I'm recounting this moving story is that currently my wife is getting all the sympathy and I'd like some too. 

A queen and a sardine

Already audible in the distance is an insistent drumming: diddle-diddle, diddle-diddle - PAM PAM PAM!

In an adjacent street a man is hurrying in the opposite direction from everyone else, looking slightly anxious. Fairly tall, fairly slim, fairly old but still upright, he is trying not to be noticed. This isn't going to work because he is a familiar figure in these streets, easily detected by his white Edwardian sideburns and the Australian-style wide-brimmed hat glued to his head.

Several people are kind enough to warn him he's in the wrong street, the procession is approaching along the broader pedestrian thoroughfare. He assures them he's aware of that but has something else to do first.

This is true but evasive. Finally an English friend passing by, a lady of forthright opinions, unafraid to question the questionable, pauses and demands to know why he's going the wrong way. Caught with no hope of escape, he has to admit it: his urgent mission at the moment is to go the wrong way deliberately. He is trying to get away from La Gran Cabalgata del Carnaval, the carnival cavalcade, highlight of the year for many Gomerans.

Specifically, he's trying to get away from the drums which lead the procession. A Gomeran drum, tambor, is not big - scarcely wider than this strange fellow's hat, in fact - but it can make a man-sized noise in the hands of a young lad. It's mostly boys who do this, boys are genetically programmed to love drums.

At least a dozen of these drums walloped enthusiastically are at this moment creating the diddle-diddle rhythm in concert with a similarly sized group clacking chacaras, the weighty Gomeran version of a flamenco castanet. Interspersed at regular intervals is the PAM PAM PAM of a seriously large drum banged from both sides.

'It hurts my ears,' our hero explains pathetically. Although hard of hearing, he suffers from the strange paradox that he is over-sensitive to loud noise.

'So why,' pursues the forthright friend, 'do you come into town at all when you know there's the carnival procession? Why not just stay at home?'

Fair question. The thing is, the drummers will be followed by a troupe of dancers twirling prettily and then the carriage bearing La Reina del Carnaval, the Carnival Queen. He needs to watch that go by because the daughter of a Gomeran friend has the honour this year of being chosen as - well, not actually the Queen herself, but one of the two Damas de Honor, the Queen's Ladies in Waiting.

From a safe distance he watches the drummers reach the Plaza de Las Americas, the town's main square, still banging away. Finally they stop and begin to disperse into the crowd. He runs back along the street and reaches the plaza just in time to find the Queen's carriage already halted and the Queen being helped down, closely followed by her costume. That needs explaining: the Queen is still decently if skimpily clothed but her costume is a self-supporting, soaring piece of architecture created from feathers, wire, glittery cloth, beads and extraordinary imagination. These things are works of art.

Once safely at ground level the Queen is returned to the middle of her feathers and strapped in for the photographs. Meanwhile, he sees the two Damas still up there on the carriage but preparing to follow their Queen back to earth. They are both ridiculously beautiful and one of them is waving at him. Sara, his friend's daughter! He waves back cheerily, relieved to have arrived in time.

He rejoins his wife at the place where he'd abandoned her and they wander off to see the rest of the procession. Fundamentally it's a series of travelling parties, with most of the carriages recognisable from previous years although redecorated to suit this year's carnival theme. All are noisy and some are very noisy with front-mounted boomboxes, but they're a little less daunting than the drums.

And perhaps not quite as noisy, either, as the Sardine will be in a few days' time.

Carnaval ends (notionally) with a weird event called El Entierro de La Sardina, the Burial of the Sardine. Our sideburned Englishman has attended it many times in the past because it's great fun and also pleasingly irreverent. A mock funeral, it begins with a slow, solemn procession through the streets, led by a small cohort of drummers beating a slow marching pace ahead of a funeral carriage on which lies a sardine the size of Moby Dick. Made of painted paper on a wire frame, it usually boasts scarlet Marilyn Monroe lips and sexy eyelashes.

Accompanying the corpse is an archbishop in fine flowing robes, wielding a chamber pot into which he dips a pastry brush to flick holy water over the watching crowd. He may occasionally fortify himself from a packet of holy cheese-and-onion crisps and a glass of blessed whisky, supplied by his fawning acolytes. Behind and around him are the mourners, hordes of wailing women in slinky black dresses, most of whom are actually young men. Young men are genetically programmed to enjoy shrieking hysterically.

The cortège finally arrives at the beach where the deceased sardine is burned rather than buried despite the event's name. In true Spanish fashion, this sad ceremony is followed by a communal feast of grilled sardines.

Also in true Spanish fashion, although this event definitively marks the end of Carnaval nobody can bear to stop and there will be another procession and dance at the weekend. If I were the Sardine I'd be a bit miffed about that, but of course it doesn't get chance to find out.

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

Carnaval goes back a long way, being another of the many pagan celebrations cleverly assimilated by Christianity and especially by the Catholic religion, which welcomes any excuse for a party. It's obviously linked - along with the Easter celebration of rebirth - to ancient festivities marking the end of winter and arrival of spring in the northern hemisphere.

In the Christian calendar Carnaval offers a chance to feast and dance shortly before the 40 days of austerity known as Lent, itself a precursor to Easter. The most important day during the celebrations, which typically extend over a week or more, is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday. In Britain it's better known as Pancake Day and in other countries as Mardi Gras, which is French for 'greasy Tuesday' because - but no, let's not get diverted. In Gomera and Spain as a whole it's martes de Carnaval, Carnival Tuesday, so there's no confusion here about what it's for.

The Entierro de la Sardina symbolises the end of the carnival shenanigans and gluttony, a clear enough metaphor. But why the sardine? Why not a mullet or tuna? A pig, goat or turkey?

As usual there are conflicting theories but the one I find most convincing puts the blame squarely on Carlos III of Spain. He was a big fan of tradition and after coming to the throne in 1759 he insisted the people of Madrid should fast and take things seriously during Lent but, as encouragement, he indulged them in an orgy of eating and drinking in the run-up. He even arranged a splendid fiesta for the final day, at which everyone would feast for free on sardines, a rare luxury in Madrid. Unfortunately by the time the fish had travelled from the coast across mountain, valley and plain to reach Madrid they had all gone rotten, so they buried them and dined on free meat instead.

A story like this was never going to be forgotten quickly and the final feast became an annual event with the sardine as its symbolic martyr. From Madrid it spread to the rest of Spain, the Americas and much of Europe. In Britain we ended up with pancakes and lemon juice.

If I were you

At around 11:15 at night, as Bill is finally slipping into dreamland after eating too much supper, he is jerked back to life by a gasp from his wife.

'I've got it!'

'Eh? Whatsamatter?'

'I've just realised why he kept telling me the time.'

'Doris…'

'Sorry.'

Bill mutters something grumpily, turns over and falls asleep. Doris smiles in quiet triumph, turns over and lies awake for another half hour. She has made a big breakthrough.

She and her husband are staying in La Gomera for three weeks, renting an apartment, and two friends have just arrived for a week's winter sunshine break in a hotel. Doris's problem began earlier in the day with a strange conversation while she and Bill were down at the port to meet their friends from the ferry. As they waited near the dock, Doris decided to check where the luggage van would park when it came off the ship, for passengers to retrieve their suitcases and rucksacks.

She approached a member of the Armas ferry dock crew and addressed him in her fledgling Spanish: 'Buenos días!'

'Buenos días, señora.'

'Cuando llega el barco…' When the ship arrives…

'A las nueve y media, señora.' Nine thirty. He smiled affably and began to turn away.

Doris hurriedly tried again. 'No, no… cuando llega, dónde…'

'Nueve y media,' he repeated a touch more briskly, holding up nine fingers then crossing one of them.

Doris gave up, perplexed. The ferry sailed into the harbour shortly after nine thirty, their two friends descended the gangway waving cheerfully, reclaimed their luggage from the van and all was well. Except that Doris's failure of communication niggled at the back of her mind. As a retired teacher, she liked to understand things.

At breakfast the next day in their apartment she reveals her breakthrough to an entranced husband.

'I know why he thought I was asking what time the ferry would arrive.'

'Yeah?' Bill reaches for the jam. 'Good stuff this. What is it? Label says albarry, albarrycock? Or albarrycoke is it?'

'Al-barry-cock-ay. Apricot. I know what I got wrong. I should have used the subjunctive. I should have said cuando llegue el barco. It means literally, when the ship may arrive.'

'You'd hope there's not much doubt about that. Hijacked by pirates I suppose, could be. Or hits an iceberg.' Bill sniggers. Doris punches him across the table, not too hard. She's very pleased with herself.

'Sub what, was it?' Bill enquires, unwisely.

'Junctive.' She has now realised, she explains to her husband, that subjunctive verbs are very important in Spanish. People use them all the time. In English they've almost disappeared.

'If I were you, is about the only common one I can think of,' she tells him. 'Were'.

'Posh. If I was you, is what most folk say. Ninety-nine percent of the British population, guaranteed.'

'Not if they've been taught properly at school, Bill.'

Bill blows a raspberry. Doris sighs. But there's an entire chapter in her Teach-Yourself-Spanish book about subjunctives in the present, past and future tenses.

'I'd skip that one, frankly,' Bill advises. 'Were I you.'

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

Apologies if you know this already, but here it is anyway: the subjunctive mood is used for occasions when you're talking of what may be rather than what is. In English it barely exists any more, lingering only in that other-world version of English, reportese. For example: I advised that he consult a solicitor.

In real life most people would say I advised him to consult a solicitor, or perhaps …that he should consult a solicitor.

Not so in Spanish, unfortunately. You hear the subjunctive all the time once you're tuned in. The first one I recognised (eventually) came from an elderly lady we frequently passed on our way into town, who always greeted us with ¡Que lo pasen bien!, literally 'that you may pass it well', equivalent to 'have a good time'. I'm sure the elderly lady had never heard of the subjunctive, she just did it.

And on Bill's other concern: the word for apricot is albaricoque. Some people prefer peach jam, melocotón, or strawberry, fresa, or even orange, naranja, which of course is a special jam called marmalade but all jams are called mermelada in Spanish, another little breakthrough you have to make. 

The threat

After the excitement of Christmas and New Year we were into the brief lull before the even bigger excitement of Three Kings Day on January the sixth. Children of all ages were still on the loose in town, unconstrained by the disciplines of school.

'Okay, one go on each machine. Just one, alright?'

This was a young father caving in to the demands of his son, a dauntingly lively toddler of around three years old who was already fully capable of dominating any situation and winning any argument.

The toddler - let's call him Adán - had only recently been dragged away from trying to break every see-saw and wobbly pony in the small playground near the beach and had now, unfortunately, spotted the adult exercise machines close by.

These big, solid contraptions are not painted in bright nursery colours, they don't have smiley faces, they don't look like baby dinosaurs or fairy castles, yet they irresistibly attract children of all ages and particularly the tinies who are least able to do anything useful with them. There's a lesson here for designers of children's playgrounds: offer them totally unsuitable machinery in plain colours that they have no hope of operating and they will home in like bees to an orchid.

Adán leapt on one of the little rotating discs where you perch and twist to try and persuade your creaking spine to unstick its vertebrae. He was pretty good at that but quickly got bored and scampered over to the leg swinger that you stand on with both feet to swing from side to side.

That didn't move at all for the featherweight toddler so he galloped over to the skiing machine. Even adults have difficulty with this one, which involves arm and leg coordination, and the diminutive Adán couldn't do much more than stamp his feet up and down on one of the pedals.

Over to the bicep exerciser, then, where you sit down, reach overhead to grab two handles then pull, cleverly raising yourself off the ground. Visitors love this, they take pictures of each other suspended in mid-air because it's actually quite easy but makes you look strong, healthy and having a fun time on holiday. Adán sat on the seat while father pulled the handles, raising and lowering him to squeals of delight then complaint: higher, faster!

'Time to go,' said his father, depositing him on the ground.

Adán ran back to the spine twister. Father ordered him to get off it. Adán jumped on to the skiing machine.

'Adán, we agreed, just one go on each. Come along now.'

The toddler had another try at getting the leg swinger to swing.

'Right,' said his dad. Pulling a mobile phone out of his pocket he tapped the screen a few times, put it to his ear and said 'Good morning, is that the office of the Three Kings? I'm afraid I have some bad news about the behaviour of Adán H-------. At the moment he's not behaving well at all.'

Adán ran over to grab his father's leg. 'No, don't tell them that!'

'In fact he's behaving very badly. I've asked him to get off some exercise machines and come home with me but...'

'No!' screamed the toddler, jumping up to try and grab the phone. 'Don't tell them that, papi! I'll come.'

Father looked down at him. 'You'll come right now Adán? Mmm. I think maybe he's decided to be good after all,' he told the phone. 'I'll report back to you later.'

In Spain the Three Kings, Los Reyes Magos, deliver presents overnight to children, but only if they've been well behaved. There are opposed opinions about whether parents should use them as a threat. Child psychologists think it's cheating and will breed mistrust when the kids find out what's going on. Parents of young children think it's brilliant because it works.

Watching Adán I think I'm on his dad's side in this case: a simple solution that avoided having to cart him off under one arm like a bag of potatoes, which would be undignified and very noisy. We saw Adán a couple of days later racing around on one of those dinky little strider bikes, so the Three Kings must have judged that he'd mended his ways in the nick of time.

Steps as well!

One morning recently, just after breakfast, a guy in a yellow mechanical digger armed with a vicious spike set about shattering the surface of our street. Noisy, dusty and highly significant.

We need to go back three decades to understand the importance of this attack.

Among all the exciting memories from our early years here, one of the most vivid is a near-death experience as I skidded at high speed down a steep, dusty slope while supporting the rear end of a very heavy wooden sideboard.

At the front end was the owner of the furniture shop where we'd just bought the sideboard, a stocky Gomeran well accustomed to lugging heavy furniture around steep slopes. My Spanish at that time needed thought, concentration and preferably a dictionary so all I could do was scream 'Whoa...!' as though to a bolting horse. He must have detected the panic because he paused long enough for me to remember the word despacio, slow, por favor.

Our elderly neighbour Feli watched in amusement. A little later, when things had calmed down, he commented 'Soon it'll be easier. They're going to pave the streets,' adding hand gestures to aid understanding as he'd already learned to do.

Paving stones! This was big news. The village, although not far from the island's capital San Sebastián, was decidedly rural. Most of the villagers kept animals of some kind - chickens, turkeys, goats, pigs, sometimes all of those - and there were six donkeys lodged around the place who would occasionally converse in demented hootings.

'Paving and steps,' Feli amplified.

Steps as well! Gosh. Paved streets and steps would lift the settlement to a different plane altogether. We would transform from rural backwater to urban satellite. That was beginning to happen already - many of the younger inhabitants worked in the town - but it simply didn't look the part. Townies looked down on the village as a farmyard, dismissing the villagers as bumpkins who would squint at visitors suspiciously from half-closed doors. They weren't and they didn't, but people enjoy being rude about others.

It's true the villagers had been a little wary at first, a little shy, but very friendly when they got to know us. In fact they were proud that foreigners would choose to live in their village - we were not the first, there was already a house occupied by outsiders. The only thing they didn't understand was why foreigners moving to Gomera liked old houses and would spend time and money on restoration when they could just knock them down and build smart new ones.

We waited impatiently for skilled artisans with leather patches on their knees to turn up and lay our new paving slab by slab in clever patterns. 'They might not do that,' Feli warned, managing expectations.

He was right, they arrived with wheelbarrows, a concrete mixer and a modern system for creating paving slabs without the slabs. Pouring a thick layer of concrete over a reinforcing mesh, they sprinkled the wet surface with a coloured cement powder then embossed it with a random slab effect by treading on patterned rubber mats.

At first I felt cheated. Streets in town were awarded proper paving stones. It looked attractive though and I grew to like it. And it was very practical, no poorly-laid slabs to wobble or break underfoot, no cracks for weeds to sprout.

Best of all, I discovered from the cement sacks that this clever system was supplied by a firm called Bomanite based in Leighton Buzzard in the UK. Feli was delighted to hear that too, although he couldn't manage to say Leighton Buzzard.

Feli is long gone now, these three decades later, which is sad. So are most of the animals in the village, which is also a little sad, but Gomera has largely moved on from subsistence farming. And now we've lost the faithful old paving too, freshly torn up by a monster road drill. There was nothing wrong with it, good as new, but it had to be sacrificed in order to lay new water pipes throughout the village, seriously large tubes of high-tech plastic linked by chunky metal joints and valves, replacing the spindly old iron pipes that leaked as much water as they delivered.

Once installed, the pipework was buried beneath the same system of embossed concrete as before but in a cheerfully brighter colour and with inspection covers for access to the valves. There's even a bright red cover at the end of every street labelled Bomberos, firefighters, with a high-capacity connector beneath for fire hoses.

Feli would have loved it all I'm sure, even though the cement sacks tell me that this time they came from Córdoba in mainland Spain instead of Leighton Buzzard. Only a minor disappointment.

The third chair

Two middle-aged women stood uncertainly in the outdoor terraza of the restaurant, each pointing to different tables. They finally selected one in the corner next to us but then changed their minds, something wrong with it, headed towards another, changed their minds again and returned to the corner table but called a waiter to turn it diagonally and add a third chair. I've no idea why but they were right, it looked better.

When they'd settled, I commented lightly 'Ahora todo perfecto!', everything's perfect now, which established that we were Spanish-speaking foreigners and probably to be avoided. The two women smiled politely and nodded as they picked up their menu cards.

I was wondering about that third chair. If it were meant for another female companion, this could be a girlie night out and likely to become raucous, although at least they wouldn't be shouting about football. The waiter brought them both an elegant glass of beer.

A minute or two later the missing third element arrived in the form of a husband. He approved the ladies' choice of table, nodded affably towards us, sat down then leaned over towards me and said 'Usted uno, yo dos!', you one, me two, smiling broadly and pointing at the women.

I should, of course, have made some cutting remark along the lines of 'Goodness gracious, you expect me to laugh at a grotesquely macho comment such as that, which has absolutely no place in modern society and least of all in Spain where women are treated with the greatest respect and… etc etc,' but I didn't, I pulled a stricken face and said 'Oh, that's not fair at all, I'm off right now to find another.' No point in spoiling someone else's evening. The women probably exchanged eye-rolls but I didn't notice because the new arrival was already engaging us in conversation, clearly out to enjoy himself, and he needed an audience.

He asked where we were from. England originally but now La Gomera, we told him, at which his wife clapped her hands delightedly. She was also from Gomera! We spent a minute or two discussing this happy coincidence in more detail until hubby interrupted to say he wasn't from Gomera, he was from La Palma. I assured him that being from La Palma was almost as good as being from Gomera.

But in fact, he continued, he had spent most of his life in Venezuela. Oh, right. It's difficult to enthuse about Venezuela these days. He didn't try to defend it, running a finger across his throat to illustrate the quality of life there, and we all agreed that it was much better here in the Canaries, whichever island you choose.

He felt this needed a toast and raised a glass of what I suspect was a very expensive red wine that the waitress had just poured for him. 'Le invito!' he offered, have one on me, but unfortunately I already had a full glass of the house red. We all clinked glasses anyway: 'Salud!'

This little incident took place on a brief visit to Santa Cruz in Tenerife, but it illustrates three important features of Canarian life. One, eating out is much more common among ordinary folk here than in Britain, partly because it's cheaper but also because, like all the Spanish, Canary Islanders are brought up to view communal eating as normal and everyday, whether it's breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Feature number two, there are Gomerans everywhere if you look for them. Number three, there are Venezuelans everywhere as well.

Numbers two and three are directly attributable to a mass exodus of restless young Canarians during the mid-1900s, seeking a better way of life than subsistence agriculture. The Canary Islands were largely neglected by Spanish governments on the mainland, especially during the 36 years of General Franco's dictatorship from 1939 to 1975. Many Gomerans tried their luck in the much larger island of Tenerife, while many others headed across the Atlantic to Venezuela.

There is still a steady drift of young people across the 30 kilometre channel that separates Gomera from Tenerife, simply because there are more job opportunities there. We've found Gomerans working as taxi drivers, waiters, shop assistants and hotel receptionists, while others we know have left for posts in the social services, civil administration, finance and all the other things people do.

I don't know of any who have emigrated to Venezuela lately, however. The flow is now in the opposite direction. Several of our more elderly neighbours had brothers or sisters in Venezuela who decided years ago to cut their losses and come back home. There are also Venezuelan immigrants here from the indigenous population. Many already had family links with the Canaries and in any case they speak Spanish. There is a particularly strong feeling of kinship with Venezuela but we also know Gomeran residents from Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia and, especially, from Cuba. There are lots of those, even more than Venezuelans. Cuba lies over 6,000 kilometres across the Atlantic but there are still many close family ties.

There is even - I happen to know - a Canary Islands association in Havana, the Asociación Canaria de Cuba. We were told about it during a visit to Cuba a few years ago and called in, of course, to say hello one afternoon. It has its own clubhouse complete with cafe and bar, in which we found a good sprinkling of members sitting around chatting or playing dominoes. We were greeted by a small, plump, bald and utterly delightful president who served us beer then spent the next half hour chatting. Canary Islanders are reliably sociable wherever you come across them.

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

I touched on the topic of emigration from the Canaries in a story a few years ago, The clandestine emigrants, December 2016.

The current population of Gomera is predominantly the result of a violent immigration, the Spanish conquest of around 1450, when many of the original guanche natives died. The numbers of inhabitants slowly increased after that, with a census in 1787 recording nearly 7,000 while a century later there were just over 15,000. During the 30 years from 1900 to 1930 the population climbed steeply to 26,000 and reached a peak of 30,747 in 1960, supported largely by fruit exports to the other islands and mainland Spain.

From that high point, emigration to Tenerife and South America (especially Venezuela) brought a decline and by 1990 there were scarcely 15,000 inhabitants. When we two arrived not long after that you could sense the decline by the large numbers of abandoned houses both in the towns and in the countryside.

However, since then agricultural exports have picked up again, tourism has taken off, emigration has slowed to nothing more than a normal healthy trickle and young couples continue producing babies, although typically just one or two rather than the 10 or more of their grandparents. The island's population is now around 21,500 of which some 9,000 live in San Sebastián. In England that would count as more of a village than a town, but here it's our island capital and holds its head high.

For the figures quoted here I'm indebted to an article by Pablo Jerez Sabater in the online magazine Canarias Ahora dated 7 January 2015.

Whatever floats your boat

 On the asphalt of the beach road in San Sebastián there is a long diagonal scar which I try to avoid on my bike because it's deep enough for an uncomfortable jolt. It was caused by a big yellow bulldozer during a complex operation to cast and transport gigantic concrete blocks with which to lengthen the jetty on the opposite side of the bay.

They were extending the jetty in order to allow longer cruise ships to moor. Cruisers had been growing steadily longer and taller for years and this was the second extension of the jetty since we first arrived over thirty years ago.

The most astonishing aspect is that some of those longer cruise ships are short ones that have been lengthened by cutting them down the middle, heaving the two halves apart and inserting a new section. Unbelievably, the new section is constructed in advance complete with decks, cabins, windows and services, then simply slotted into place. Weld up all the joints, move in with the paint pots and in no time at all you've got a longer ship. But how can they manufacture an entirely new section of a huge ship so very precisely? How can they avoid little changes in level at the deck joints that you could trip over in your flip-flops?

By contrast, the reason it's done is very easy to understand. Longer cruise ships carry more passengers, reducing costs for the cruise company. A cruise can now be as attractively cheap as a boring old package holiday hotel in Crete, Goa or Torremolinos.

There's a downside to that, though. Some people book a cruise who really shouldn't, and it seems to be a particular hazard for the Brits. A package hotel abroad can be comfortably British in ambience, and so indeed can a cruise ship, but the snag is that the ship will dump you daily onshore where things may be disturbingly foreign. San Sebastián is as friendly a place as any you'll find but it doesn't do the Full English Breakfast or Fish 'n Chips or an Irish pub with pints of Guinness. And the bars and cafes are run not by British expats but by Spanish-speaking Gomerans or Latin Americans with minimal understanding of English. If communication hitches and cultural oddities make you nervous it might be better to stay on board the ship, sipping a rum and coke by the swimming pool.

We met a couple a few years ago who should have stayed on board. Both looked anxious and a little desperate. Recognising us as something other than Gomeran, the husband accosted us at our cafe table: 'How do you get out of this place?'

Bus, taxi, walk, hire a bike - there are lots of ways to leave San Sebastián, we told him. What exactly…

'Isn't there some nice little resort near here? Somewhere you can get a decent cup of tea?'

Santiago on the south coast you could loosely describe as a nice little resort, although with perhaps worryingly large numbers of locals wandering around, but the early bus had left long ago and the next would be an hour's wait. They could take a taxi, we told them, but that would be a half-hour trip and a fair pocketful of euros. Not sure about the cup of tea either. We watched them heading back towards the ship.

It's a sad fact that some people really shouldn't go on holiday at all. Recently another couple were safely seated at a cafe table with a colourful jug of sangría in front of the wife, hubby with a mug of beer, blue sky overhead, but both looking a little tense. I asked if they were enjoying their cruise. He wasn't, she was, apart from having a glum husband. 'I can't get him out of that chair. Won't go and look at the tower in the park, doesn't want to see the church or Columbus's house, just wants to sit here knocking back pints of lager.'

Hubby's face darkened to a deeper purple. 'I never wanted to come on a blinking cruise in the first place, it was her idea. I can't wait to get home, to be honest.'

Perhaps he'd just got traveller's tummy. Most of the cruceristas enjoy themselves in San Sebastián, it gets top marks in post-cruise surveys, and as the cruise ships grow longer and more of them arrive - several a week at peak season - the bars and cafes have learned to cope better. Nowadays any waiter or waitress will understand 'pint of lager', 'white wine', 'white coffee' or 'sangría' pronounced the English way, as well as the equivalents in German.

George from Manchester had the right attitude. He asked permission to sit at our table, as there wasn't anywhere else, and introduced himself cheerfully. 'Enjoying your cruise?' I asked him, the standard opener.

'I am, I am,' George said. 'Doing me best, anyway. I'm on me own now.' His wife had died a couple of years ago. We listened to his story, advised him where to go and what to see, treated him to his beer and eventually waved him on his way. Brave of him, I thought. But perhaps he'd meet a similarly plucky lady on board his cruise ship and start a whole new phase of life. Careful of the joints in the corridors though, we should have warned him.

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Lengthening a ship is called stretching, which makes it sound easy, and in fact it's not a new technique at all but goes back to the late 19th century. At first it was done to create space in existing ships for a new type of steam engine that was more efficient but also much larger.

I touched on the topic of cruise ships in a previous story, Judgement of nations (22 June 2017), but what triggered this fuller account was a film from Uruguay about a crew member on a cruise ship who happens upon a mysterious doorway that leads to an apartment in Montevideo. Yes, I know, but it's magic realism and supposed to be symbolic. (Window boy would also like to have a submarine, directed by Alex Piperno, 2020.)

That reminded me that we are now into October and the cruise season is almost upon us. It continues throughout the winter until around Easter.

A large proportion of the passengers who come ashore will order a jug of sangría, which is properly pronounced san-GREE-a, not SAN-greeya. It comprises red wine, chopped fruit, lemonade or sparkling water and usually a spirit such as rum or brandy. The word in Spanish also means 'bloodletting', but it's probably better not to know that.