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.

The clandestine emigrants

On Friday 25 November 2016 one of the world's best-known heroes or villains, depending on your standpoint, finally succumbed to the enemy that nobody ever defeats. Fidel Castro was cremated the following day and the island of Cuba entered a nine-day period of mourning. Followed by, we can be sure, a much more prolonged feeling of strangeness, a sensation that the world has changed.

So what has this got to do with La Gomera?

Let's address that question with irritating obliqueness by following Doris and Bill as they make their way down the gangway from their cruise ship, one sunny morning in the port of San Sebastián. They are refugees from a grim Lancashire winter, taking a week's sunshine cruise around the Canary Islands, and this is their day in La Gomera.

Ripe for adventure, or at least for something vaguely interesting, Bill and Doris stroll hand in hand past the neat rows of yachts in the marina. As they approach the town they pass a flower bed where a small metal sculpture lurks apologetically beneath a giant cactus.

Doris pauses to look at it. 'It's a yacht,' Bill tells her and tries to walk on but Doris, who was once a teacher and likes to know about things, has caught a whiff of history. 'It's bigger than a yacht, Bill. It's an old sailing ship.'

Bill grunts and bends down to look at the bronze plaque beneath the ship. 'Telly-macko,' he reads. Shrugging, he takes Doris's hand again and pulls her onwards.

Well, they did better than most - at least they noticed it. But they've just dismissed an extraordinary and highly emblematic event in Gomeran history. This humble sculpture commemorates the sailing of the Telémaco (Tell-AY-mako) in August 1950, the last sailing ship to depart from La Gomera carrying clandestine emigrants across the Atlantic to South America.

Why clandestine? Because in 1950 General Franco, the Generalissimo, was still very much in control of everything that happened in Spain and strongly discouraged emigration, even from islands such as the Canaries which he had allowed to descend into deep poverty and hardship.

The Telémaco passengers had a terrible time on their voyage, but some of them eventually managed to settle in Venezuela. Many other such fly-by-night escapees from the Canary Islands fetched up on the island of Cuba, and many of them stayed there. So there's our first clue to the Castro conundrum.

Meanwhile, Doris and Bill have just happened upon another highly significant monument as they stroll along the seafront. This time it's a large lump of rusted metal perched precariously on a marble-clad plinth. Bill is a little more intrigued here, walks around the monument, peers through the central hole as though it were a telescope or Henry Moore sculpture.

He stands back to squint at it for a moment then announces: 'Propeller!' Correct, got it in one. 'It's the shaft of a ship's propeller. Must've been quite a big boat.'

There is a bronze plaque on the plinth but the embossed text is difficult to read and anyway it's in Spanish, so most visitors never find out what this thing is. Sadly, it's all that is left of the proud Cantabria, a transatlantic steamship whose captain took the bold decision, on the fifth of March 1862, to beach his ship in the harbour of San Sebastián after it suffered mechanical problems and a dangerous leak.

The Cantabria was bound for Cuba with a battalion of Spanish troops. At that time Cuba was still a Spanish colony but showing increasing signs of not wanting not to be, and Spain was reacting with a brutal campaign of suppression.

In short - what these two humble monuments illustrate is the closely interwoven histories of the Americas and the Canary Islands. There are large numbers of Latin Americans today with Canary Island blood in their veins, and in recent years many have returned to the Canaries, ironically, in search of work and a better way of life. It's by no means a flood, nothing to merit a Donald Trump We're gonna build a wall! - but here in La Gomera I know of families from Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina, Chile and Cuba.

Especially Cubans. There are quite a few of those. They fit here perfectly, their culture is much the same, hardworking but friendly and cheerful. I asked a few of them in San Sebastián how they felt about the demise of Fidel Castro, their revolutionary Comandante and head of state for the last half century and more.

Most were neutral - 'He was an old man, death comes to all of us, it won't change anything very much' - but Yani, a waitress in one of our favourite cafés, confessed to feeling triste, sad. Maybe she was sad about Fidel, or maybe the news of his passing reminded her of family, friends and her earlier life in Cuba.

Yani is settled here now, with her own family, but like all our Cubans she goes home now and again for a holiday. Mostly they come back complaining about the heat. There's really nowhere better to live than La Gomera, even if you're Cuban.

Notes for the serious student
The Telémaco was heading for Venezuela, a voyage of nearly 6,000 kilometres. A small cargo schooner, it set sail on the ninth of August 1950 with 170 men and one woman crammed like sardines on the deck and below. They left at night, without permits, without papers, and with nothing but hope to greet them when they arrived. Skippered by a local fisherman who had never before ventured out of sight of land, because the professional pilot who was booked to do the job took one look at the ship and fled.

Not long into the voyage they suffered two great storms, followed by continuing heavy seas that washed overboard most of their provisions, including the water barrels. They were saved from almost certain death from starvation and dehydration by a Spanish oil tanker whose captain gave them water and rice. Four terrible weeks after setting off, they arrived at the island of Martinique where the inhabitants took them in for a few days, revived them with food and kindness and gave them provisions for the rest of their journey.

Six days' more sailing took them to the port of La Guaira in Venezuela, where the authorities immediately sifted out the fourteen voyagers they considered responsible for this adventure, imprisoned them in Caracas for 45 days then sent them back to Tenerife.

Some of the other would-be emigrants chanced their luck by slipping away illegally into the hinterland, where they generally had a hard time, while the rest were eventually given immigration papers and found work of one kind or another in Venezuela.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of this story is that ten days into their voyage, while they were fighting the waves, Franco lifted his ban on emigration. If they'd waited a couple more weeks they could have done it all so much more easily.

The interrogation

Transcript of a merciless interrogation of the author, your humble blogger, after he participated in a harmless event of community bonding.

Cold and Humourless Interrogator: So, already you're on the defensive. 'A harmless event...'

Defensive Blogger: You can't start an interrogation by quoting from the introduction to its transcript. It's illogical.

CHI: (snapping) Don't quibble!

DB: Sorry.

CHI: Did you or did you not take part in a coach trip around the tranquil island of La Gomera with a rowdy party of villagers?

DB: They weren't rowdy, they were perfectly well behaved, just out for a good day's...

CHI: Answer the question! Did you take part?

DB: Yes I did. But they weren't.

CHI: One might wonder why villagers born on the island, who certainly know the place like they know their own kitchen, would wish to spend an entire day being driven around it.

DB: It's a beautiful island! The landscapes change by the year, by the day, by the hour! They change with the weather, the sun and clouds, the state of mind of the beholder! This is an island full of history yet unspoiled by the concrete footprints of commerce. An island where humankind lives largely at peace with the natural world. An island of dreams and magic, where anything...

CHI: Oh for goodness' sake.

DB: What? Well okay, enough said. But it is.

CHI: Let us proceed. The coach stopped on the main road outside the village for you all to climb aboard. Some of your fellow villagers were seen loading two very heavy containers into the luggage bay, with the help of the remarkably indulgent coach driver.

     (Silence)

CHI: Well?

DB: Well what? That wasn't a question.

CHI: Were or were not two heavy containers taken on board?

DB: Yes. I didn't know what they were. Mind you, it didn't take much guessing.

CHI: (ominously) We'll return to those later. First let's address that business in the tunnel. There are several tunnels on the north road, the GM1 towards Hermigua, are there not?

DB: Yes. What's that got to do with...

CHI: And during your trajectory through the longest of those tunnels, in darkness, someone was heard making crude and offensive sucking noises as though lasciviously kissing. Was that you?

DB: No! I think that was just Rubén clowning around. We've got several clowns.

CHI: So you're denying that anything happened.

DB: No I'm not, he made crude and offensive sucking noises.

CHI: (sighs as though in pain) Very well, let's move on. Your first halt was in the town of Agulo, where the coach pulled into a car park at the entrance to the town. Why was that?

DB: Call of nature, some of us are no longer young. There's a café.

CHI: Which you entered. And ordered what?

DB: Coffee. Café con leche, coffee with milk.

CHI: Nothing else? No little extra glass with...

DB: Nothing!

CHI: (disbelievingly) Very well. There was, however, an incident in the queue for the gentlemen's toilet.

DB: Was there?

CHI: You elbowed your way in front of Paco, a small and vulnerable individual who surely deserves consideration and protection.

DB: He thought it was very funny, it cracked him up. I let him go first really. After we'd had a fist fight.

CHI: You surely didn't...!

DB: Oh come on, can't you recognise a joke?

CHI: No.

     (Silence)

CHI: From Agulo you drove to the famous and very popular tourist attraction, the Mirador de Abrante, is that correct?

DB: Yes.

CHI: You drove directly to the Mirador?

DB: Yeah. Well, almost. We stopped first at...

CHI: (triumphantly) Ahah! Precisely. You stopped first outside the Centro de Visitantes at Juego de Bolas.

DB: The Visitor's Centre, yes. It's good, examples of all the native trees and plants, stuff about geology and history, a typical cottage with a gofio mill and things. Loads.

CHI: But none of you went in there. Not one of you.

DB: Well no, we've all been round it lots of times.

CHI: Instead you extracted from the luggage bay of the coach, and then opened, the two mysterious containers. Containing - remind me?

DB: Well, one of them was a thermal coolbox with orange juice and Coca Cola. And bottles of water.

CHI: And?

DB: Okay, a few bottles of wine.

CHI: So at - what, about 11:30 in the morning, these bottles of wine were already being opened? Corks popping while you, personally, thrust forward a plastic beaker to be half-filled with red Rioja?

DB: You're making it sound evil.

CHI: The British Medical Association would be unanimously horrified.

DB: They should come and live in La Gomera, get a life.

CHI: (ignoring this provocation) And the other container?

DB: (defiantly) Cake!

     (Pause while CHI shakes head in sorrow)

DB: (still defiant) Really nice cake, sponge, cooked by one of the local ladies. With orange peel and things.

CHI: (sighing) Let's move on. Your next stop was the Mirador de Abrante, an architectural miracle, a long glass cage projecting seven metres into the air from the very top of a high cliff.

DB: Terrifying.

CHI: Where one of your party was seen at the furthest extreme of the glass cage, balanced on one leg with his arms outstretched and flapping. Was that...

DB: No, it was not me. It was Felipe being a seagull or something. Most people do something daft in there - seeing Agulo hundreds of metres beneath your feet does your head in.

CHI: And of course, there's a café-bar attached to the Mirador...

DB: Yes, safely on terra firma. And no I didn't! Well, only a small one, to recover.

      (The Interrogator, smiling grimly, adds another entry to the notepad on his knee)

CHI: Lunch was taken in the equally famous restaurant Casa Conchita in Arure, noted particularly for its excellent potaje de berros?

DB: Watercress soup. Very traditional.

CHI: And of course there is little doubt that you...

DB: (holding up his hands) Yes, yes and yes. Too much soup, too much tuna with salsa and potatoes, too much red wine served from a magic carafe that kept refilling itself. Actually there was a very funny bit where two of the old blokes pretended to have the shakes while refilling each others' glass. One shaking the carafe, the other shaking the glass, wine dancing around like rum in a cocktail shaker, and they didn't spill a drop. Not a drop. Can you believe that?

CHI: No.

      (A long silence, then the Defensive Blogger rises to his feet)

DB: You are a miserable, bald-headed pile of dry bones and you've got a bogey up your nose. I've had more than enough of you and I'm not going to tell you what happened at Verduñe, so there.

CHI: I already know what happened at Verduñe. And I shall know what happens at your next communal debauchery, the Christmas dinner-dance on the village square.

DB: Yes, and I know - you see, I'm not so stupid! - I know exactly who you are. You're wasting your time, I stopped listening to you decades ago.

Who's that at the door?

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore; while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. 'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door. Only this, and nothing more.'

So begins Edgar Allen Poe's chilling poem, The raven. Late-night tappings on the door are disquieting.

Even more disquieting is a thunderous, flat-handed thumping, resounding in the cool night air like a thunderclap.

For a moment we both remain at the supper table, stunned. As I finally get to my feet I run a mental survey of the possibilities. Jehovah's Witnesses? No, they tippety-tap with squidgy fingertips. Luzma, our near neighbour, with a bag of surplus bananas or mangoes from the farm? No, she does a down-to-earth knuckle rap.

The last time we heard anyone hammer on the door like this it was two officers of the Guardia Civil, Spain's national police force, wanting directions to someone else's house. The Guardia are generally affable people these days, but they haven't shaken off the Franco-era habit of trying to break down your door. Could this be them again, the Guardia? But so late in the evening? Shouldn't they all be in a bar somewhere by now, watching football?

A touch nervously, I open the door. Dark outside. Nobody there. I poke my head out to look around.

A dozen black shapes leap into the light spilling from the door, screaming and waving their arms. They have white faces, black-rimmed eyes and lips the colour of fresh blood. Most are elfin small but a few larger and fiercer ones lurk at the back beneath tall, pointy hats.

Through the death-mask paint I detect familiar faces, the local kids. Now they're all waving little paper shopping bags at me, the kind you get when you buy expensive perfume or a new iPhone, but the bags have been painted in sinister purples and blacks and each bears the scrawled legend Trick or Treat. Written in English.

That was the first time it happened, a good few years ago. Now it's every year, on the thirty-first of October, Halloween. At this stage of the performance - bags waving under my nose, demanding a present - I always suffer a brief but painful internal battle.

Mr Grumpy: This is terrible, this has to be resisted! This has nothing to do with Gomeran folk culture! Nothing to do with the Canary Islands, nothing to do with Spain, nothing to do with Europe!

Mr Nice: Oh come on, they're just kids.

Mr Grumpy (warming up for a rant): If it's anything at all it's American, but I doubt it has much to do with USA folk culture either. It's twenty-first century aggression. Trick or treat, see! Give me a present or I'll make you suffer!

Mr Nice: But look at all the trouble they've gone to, dressing up. And the excitement in their faces. They're enjoying themselves.

The bags are waving closer to my nose and the kids are yelling 'Treek o trait, treek o trait!' at this dim Englishman. Get on with it, give us the treat!

Mr Grumpy (metaphorically waving stick): Extortion with menaces. Robbery!

Mr Nice: You churlish old fossil. You've done it too. Don't you remember the fifth of November, Guy Fawkes night? When you went round knocking on doors and wheeling an old pushchair with a stuffed potato sack sitting in it - 'Penny for the Guy, missus'?

Mr Grumpy: That was entirely different, Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament and deserved to be honoured. This lot are just demanding something for nothing.

One way to avoid this annual ambivalence is to go out for the evening and leave the house in darkness. A very cowardly solution, though, and it doesn't work anyway because they'll wrap several metres of toilet roll around our bikes as a mark of disdain, a symbol of shame: these people are mean!

So we've taken to arming ourselves in advance with handfuls of caramelos, boiled sweets, which - no, no, we don't hurl them at the kids, goodness gracious! - which we drop into their bags, a couple of sweeties each, while pretending to be scared out of our wits and in fear of our lives. It sort of works, some of the ghouls giggle, although I'm sure they'd much rather we dropped a couple of euros into their bags instead.

Intimidation! Threats! Mugging!

Oh, shut up.

Notes for the serious student
Spain has traditionally celebrated Halloween but tricks, treats and boiled sweets are a relatively new arrival.

The last day of October is technically Día de las Brujas, Witches' Day, although nobody seems to call it that nowadays. The first day of November is Día de Todos los Santos, All Saints' Day, which is of course a national holiday. You can't travel far through the Spanish calendar without coming across a national holiday.

The tree that lost its head

You could feel the impact through the soles of your feet. A huge, dull wump! from the general direction of the village square, as though a playful daddy elephant had jumped off the chapel roof.

People tumbled out of their houses to see what had happened. It didn't take long to track it down. One of the two stately palm trees in the plaza, the square, had lost its head. The trunk remained as proud and stately as ever, but its leafy crown lay upside down on the ground, with just a stub of trunk pointing forlornly towards the sky.

The crown of a mature Canary palm is very, very heavy and you really wouldn't want to be walking underneath when it fell. Fortunately, this one was considerate enough to do it early in the morning, when there was little risk of anyone getting hurt.

However, heads falling off palm trees are not a normal feature of the Gomeran way of life. Palms wave gently in the wind all over the island and remain reliably whole and complete, except for the occasional time-expired leaf falling to the ground, which is part of the natural order of things and has never killed anyone. But an entire head falling off - no, this is something entirely different. This is Mother Nature with a problem.

We gathered around the fallen head in a strangely subdued throng. It was like looking at a slaughtered giant, struck down by a devastating blow. Paco, our Down's syndrome neighbour who is always first on the scene, scampered around the plaza warning everyone that the head might fall off the other palm tree too. With a bit of luck, his expression was saying. We edged away, looking up at the second palm.

'It's diseased,' confirmed Saturnina, shaking her head sadly. 'They're both diseased. Nothing you can do about it.' Saturnina sees doom everywhere but unfortunately she's often right. 'This could spread,' she prophesied. 'It's carried by insects. Who's going to stop them? We could lose every palm tree on La Gomera.'

Oh but surely... no, that couldn't be allowed! That was unthinkable. Losing the island's Canary palms would be catastrophic, they're an essential feature of the landscape. They are protected by law - you can't just fell a palm, you need special permission and a very good reason. Such as a terminal disease, of course.

Eusebio was poking around the fallen head with a pocket knife. (The older men here still carry pocket knives - you never know when you might need to peel an orange or whittle a toothpick.) He pointed to a palm frond that had snapped off, exposing its base: 'See the holes? Tunnels made by the gusanos, the maggots.' Like woodworm, then, but even more deadly. Killing a palm tree is an impressive feat for a maggot not much bigger than a grain of Basmati rice. Eventually the maggots turn into beetles which fly off to the next palm tree, the next victim.

So a diseased palm has to be disposed of correctly if Saturnina's doomsday scenario is to be avoided. Someone had already telephoned the Ayuntamiento, the town council, to tell them that one of our palm trees had lost its head. Not long afterwards a couple of men arrived in a pickup truck, equipped with heavy boots, work gloves and a serious chainsaw.

The square had mostly emptied by then, people having drifted away to start their working day, thereby missing the splendid finale of this drama.

Clearing away the fallen head took a while because the two workmen first had to cut off every frond. Then came the felling of the headless tree, which went commendably smoothly. Cut a wedge from one side - carefully judged to set the direction of fall - then cut across from the opposite side, push the trunk and over it goes!

Perhaps they were slightly too pleased with the success of this first operation, perhaps slightly too keen to get the second one done and the mess cleared away. So they just did a repeat run of the first felling. Cut a wedge from one side - carefully judged etc - cut across from the other side, give it a push and over it goes! Over it went, just like the first one. However, the key difference was that this palm still had its head, so it was considerably taller. And strung across the plaza was an electric cable feeding the street lamp in the corner.

Flanders and Swan wrote a song about this kind of thing: '...then he nailed right through a cable, and out went all the lights! Oh, it all makes work for the working man to do...' It's funny in a guilty kind of way, as long as you're not involved and don't have to pay for it. I watched one of the council guys on his mobile phone, gesticulating as people illogically do on their mobile phones, miming the falling of a tree, the snagging of a cable, the crumpling of a lamp post, the dangling of a now-defunct floodlight...

But there's a happy ending. Nobody was hurt except for a touch of wounded pride, and we got a brand new floodlight for the plaza with a high-efficiency bulb and a modern design that reduces light spillage into the night sky. You can still see the Milky Way on a clear night.

And the island still has its beautiful Canary palms populating the hills and the valleys, despite Saturnina's doleful prophecy. Doom came only to the evil maggots, as is right and proper in a happy ending.

Notes for the serious student
There are many potential threats to a palm tree but one of the worst is a beetle smaller than a coffee bean. Officially called diocalandra frumenti but commonly known as the picudo negro, black weevil, it was spotted not long ago climbing around in some of the palm trees in the main town, San Sebastián.

It's easy enough to detect this creature at the beetle stage of its life cycle, but by then it might already have done a lot of damage. The beetles lay tiny eggs among the leaves, the eggs hatch into little maggots and the maggots tunnel their way through the leaf stems, feeding on the plant tissue. In two months or so they're big and fat enough to turn into pupas, from which they emerge a couple of weeks later as new beetles.

Meanwhile the palm leaves are now full of tunnels which disrupt the natural flow of nutrients, and also leave them open to opportunistic infections by other intruders such as fungi.

It's not a pretty story. If the tree is too damaged it has to be felled and burned, but generally it can be saved by spraying to kill the beetles and larvae. The important thing then is to treat all the trees in the vicinity too, to catch any beetles that have already moved house.

Trouble of this kind is always someone else's fault. In this case the beetles were transported by unknown agencies from somewhere in Polynesia, where they habitually dined on coconut palms. We love to receive foreign visitors here in the Canaries, but only on condition they don't eat our palm trees.