A mist opportunity

Somewhere along a trail in the forest, all four of us stopped at the same time for no apparent reason. We stood looking at each other amid the dark, lichen-covered trees. It was a very strange moment. So strange that I was later moved to try and capture it in poetry, which fortunately is a rare event:

In the vivid silence

Ancient timbers stir, whispering fearfully of life and death:

This is how our time will end, in mist and shadow.

Softly among the leaves a bird sings reassurance

While fragile sunlight soothes the fallen trees.

Yes, I know, stick to prose. I only resort to poetry when overwhelmed by emotion. I once wrote a love poem on a birthday card for my future wife Janine, not long after we'd first met. It almost brings me to tears now, or laughter: such a painfully young poem! Another was after a visit to the Dachau concentration camp in Bavaria which tapped the other extreme of my emotional range.

On this occasion we were taking two friends on a trip around the island, both keen photographers on their first visit here, who had already spent hours ecstatically crouching for creative perspectives of the stepped agricultural terraces or for colourful closeups of wild flowers, but we felt no visit to La Gomera was complete without at least a short stroll through the Parque Nacional de Garajonay, the island's national park with Unesco World Heritage status. Predominantly ancient laurel forest, it covers 40 square kilometres, more than 10 per cent of the island, so you're almost certain to encounter it but driving through by road is not the same as making your way on foot amid the soaring trunks, the soft sounds and the subtle scents, the feel of the earth and stones beneath your feet.

So what happened in the forest that morning to evoke such a visceral response?

Partly it was because we'd departed from the bright sunshine and clear blue sky of San Sebastián. The lush, damp greenery of the forest was an extraordinary contrast, too fast and too dramatic, a finger-click transport to a different planet.

And forests are so much grander than we are. So solid and timeless, so humbling. So beautiful when in cheerful mood yet so threatening when sombre.

But perhaps above all it was the mist. Light, swirling mist is a frequent characteristic of the park and can be a nuisance on a car trip because it may lurk around any of the hairpins, waiting to engulf you. As you drive to the higher regions of the island (which rises to nearly 1500 metres) you may emerge above the mist, when it will present you with a sea of cotton wool that completely hides the spectacular landscapes beneath.

So yes, it can be inconvenient occasionally. On the other hand the mists are the key reason why La Gomera is rich in water deep down beneath the ground, feeding its many springs. The forest encourages the mists to form and the trees trap moisture to soak into the soil.

Which brings me to the point of this story. La Gomera is about to launch a bold new scheme in its bid for a more sustainable future. We glimpsed its early beginnings during a forest walk a few years ago when we paused to picnic at a residential camp in the heart of the Parque Nacional, near the village of El Cedro. The camp provides accommodation for groups of young people to spend a few days living amid La Naturaleza, Nature, a novel concept many of them will only have heard vague rumours about. Everyone needs to slosh through mud wearing gumboots at least once in their life, and smell fungi on rotting timbers, and watch spiders eating flies.

El Cedro camp also performs a research role in the forest and at that time (perhaps still) it was hosting a trial apparatus for extracting water from the mists. It's such a simple idea that it's hard to believe it works, but it really does. You hang up a large net vertically, place a trough beneath and leave it alone overnight. Mist will condense on the net, trickle down and fill your trough with water.

The technique is well known and has been employed for many decades in South America particularly. They've also been using it to a limited extent here in the Canary Islands where, for example, an enterprise in Tenerife markets bottled water produced from mists drifting up from the sea.

The current proposal in Gomera is to use mist collection to help supply irrigation water in drier areas of the island. The first three installations have a projected cost of around a million euros, so somebody certainly believes in it. This is part of a general effort to shift towards a more enlightened approach to agriculture and energy, with the challenges of climate change in mind, and could serve as a model for other islands of the Canary archipelago.

I feel quite proud. I think I'll add another verse to the poem.

In the vivid silence

Ancient timbers stir, whispering fearfully of life and death

While giant cobwebs seize water from the darkness

To nurture life where once was none.

Umm…

In the form of potatoes, carrots and onions

And possibly bananas and grapes and things.

Needs a little more work.

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

The mist collection project was described in the online newsletter GomeraNoticias of 25 November 2021 and was due for completion towards the end of 2022. Timescales for ambitious and expensive projects tend to slip but they usually get done eventually.

The company producing bottled water from the mists is Agualternativa Ingeniería S.L. based in Santa Cruz, Tenerife. They claim to be the first company in the world to do so, marketing it as a premium product with the label Garoé Mist Water.

And incidentally, the Spanish name for this kind of mist harvesting device is captanieblas or atrapanieblas – something that captures or traps the mists. In English it's called a fog fence. Oh, the beauty of Shakespeare's mother tongue! 

Get back

Doña Guadalupe, normally a quiet but cheerful old lady with a mischievous sense of humour, was distraught. Her weatherbeaten face creased in pain as she told us the news: 'She's been accepted,' she cried despairingly, as though her granddaughter Yami had just been enrolled in the Chicago mafia.

'But that's wonderful! Congratulations! There's a lot of competition for…'

'No, no, it's a tragedy. She'll be off to La Laguna, and that's it. We've lost her.'

La Laguna is the site of the university campus in Tenerife. Guadalupe wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her black widow's dress.

'But you must be proud of her, surely? What's she going to study?'

'Oh, I don't know. Something social.'

Social sciences, perhaps. It didn't really matter what she was studying, the point was that she was leaving La Gomera for a different life on a different island.

'But she'll come back here for the holidays, the fiestas…'

'Sí, sí, claro.' Of course. But Yami would be changed. She wouldn't want to stay. She wouldn't want to work the family farm, have babies, join the family meals at weekends. She would have ambitions, she'd want a career, and there aren't too many career opportunities on a small island. They'd lost her.

What triggered this decades-old memory was reading about the 2021 documentary series Get back about the Beatles. The group had a global hit in 1969 with their song of that title, which has a very simple chorus:

Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged…

The song enigmatically features two characters called Jojo and Loretta, both of whom went away from where they belonged and perhaps they'd do better to go back there.

It all depends, though, doesn't it… Do they know where they really belong? Does anyone?

Not me, that's for sure. I was born into a restless family. My life began in the busy city of Nottingham in the industrial heartland of England but I'd barely learned to crawl before they whisked me away, bye bye Nottingham, all the way to genteel, elderly Bournemouth on the south coast. We left there after a couple of years to fetch up in Teddington near London, then Twickenham near Teddington, then…

We perched for the longest time in Windsor, home also to the Queen. I once wished her 'Good morning, ma'am' while riding a horse in Windsor Great Park. Both of us riding, she and I, so it was a memorable moment but she was already married to the Duke of Edinburgh so as a blind date it was a bummer.

The fact is I should have tried harder to find a partner with her feet planted firmly in the ground but instead I married another rootless wanderer. More by luck than judgement Janine and I finally arrived at the only place that has ever felt like home. If we belong anywhere at all, it's here in La Gomera.

I'm deeply grateful to the island for that, but also deeply envious of the true Gomerans. How wonderful it must be not only to feel you belong here but also to know it's an indisputable fact. An authentic Gomeran has roots reaching all the way down to the Spanish conquest in the mid-1400s, with surnames to prove it. And even further: some have surnames or first names donated by the original indigenous population, the guanches, and on average each Gomeran retains around 40 per cent of guanche DNA in their body's cells, with some as high as 90 per cent. How's that for belonging?

But we need to finish the story about Yami. Wise old Granny was absolutely right, Yami studied well and emerged with a good degree, won a place in the Social Services in Tenerife and stayed there, happily settled with a lifetime partner. She comes back for the holidays and fiestas, of course.

Get back, get back, get back to where you once belonged…

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

The Beatles song

The television series Get back was released on the Disney+ streaming channel in November 2021. It documents the Beatles creating tracks for their album Let it be in 1969 and it seems they had a lot of fun. As part of the album's launch publicity the group played Get back, along with other songs, live and loud on a rooftop in Savile Row which caused indignation among the uppercrust tailors but taxi drivers passing by loved it. Search the song title on YouTube to see the video.

Population of La Gomera

Many granddaughters and grandsons choose to stay here, thank goodness, or the place would soon be empty. In fact the impression is that the island's population is slowly increasing - there are lots of babies and toddlers around - and this is supported by the figures. Wikipedia reckons there were about 18,300 inhabitants in 2001, which by 2020 had risen to over 22,400. Some 9,000 of these live in the capital, San Sebastián. A small part of the increase is due to newcomers settling here including South Americans, who fit in very well, and a few Europeans like us who speak Spanish a lot less convincingly but generally do our best.

Guanches

The island's original inhabitants are mentioned in several earlier stories, notably The tragedy of the broken bowl posted in this blog on 10 July 2018 and published as story 40 in the paperback book Do they still whistle?

The luggage illustration

I snapped this poignant bronze sculpture in the year 2000 on the concourse of Atocha railway station in Madrid.

Don't wet the outside

Disasters can happen in the blink of an eye. Afterwards comes the regret: if only you hadn't glanced away for a moment, jumped into the water, climbed so high, driven so fast…

I've had my share of them, but why did I remember this particular one after so many decades? It came to me while watching the workmen laying paving blocks on the newly reformed plaza in town (see the earlier story Shady business). One of them walked over to a palm tree, picked up a litre bottle of water standing next to it, unscrewed the blue plastic top and took a long swig from the neck.

By then the water must have been unpleasantly warm. There's an easy solution to that problem and it doesn't involve plastic bottles. But first, the disaster.

After we'd bought our little house in La Gomera many years ago there was a lot of building work to be done and we turned up daily to solve or forestall any problems. In a different time and place, in England, I narrowly prevented an enthusiastic workman from knocking a large hole in the wall for a door halfway up the staircase. He was looking at the plans upside down.

This particular morning, in Gomera, we were specifying where we wanted the electrical sockets positioned, which is something you will always get wrong but you have to try. Luis the contractor was marking the locations with a red felt-tipped pen. This sounds easy but it wasn't because the rooms were cluttered with bricks, tools, cement sacks, a wheelbarrow, a cement mixer and, in the front room, Isidro, perched on a scaffolding platform to plaster the ceiling. One of his arms was entirely covered with plaster, which made me wonder if his wife used a hammer and chisel to get his shirts clean. He always turned up looking immaculate in the morning.

Anyway, ducking under Isidro's platform we emerged in front of Mongo who was shovelling sand into the churning drum of the mixer. He stepped back politely to let us pass, tripped over a large ceramic jug just behind him and saved himself only by throwing a hand out to the wall. The ceramic jug could do nothing but tumble over and break. It split in two quite neatly around its plump middle.

Isidro and Luis froze, gazing at the water spilling across the concrete floor. Paco hurried in from another room, nodded and observed quietly, 'That's the porrón'.

Mongo stared forlornly at the two halves lying on the floor then toed away the top half. He picked up what was left of the base. 'We can still use this.'

We'll draw a veil over the comments about that idea but it quickly became obvious that the defunct porrón played an essential role in the operation, supplying cool drinking water in a hot climate. Nobody really blamed Mongo, nobody blamed anybody, it was an accident, but of course we felt guilty for being the primary cause.

'We'll get a new one,' we assured them.

'No, no,' Luis protested, waggling a finger, 'it wasn't your fault.' Then after a moment, 'They sell them in the ferretería in town.'

He was referring to the main source of such equipment in those days, an ironmonger's in the centre of town that could supply you with anything from five brass screws to an industrial power drill, along with a paella pan, kitchen weighing scales, stepladder, ornate flower vase or porrón.

There was a row of those along a high shelf in different sizes and a colour choice of terracotta or pale sand. Certain features were common to all: a bulbous shape, a handle at the top, a nozzle with a large hole for filling the vessel and on the opposite side, a spout with a much smaller hole from which you pour a stream of water into your mouth. The spout looks a bit rude but that just adds to the charm. The design of these things must go back centuries. I bet Columbus had a few of them on his ship when it arrived here in 1492.

We chose one similar to the accident victim. Its price was 960 pesetas, around 6 euros, equivalent to over 10 euros nowadays but still a bargain for something that looked almost hand-crafted, beautiful and timeless. 'Don't wet the outside,' the proprietor warned us.

We took it back to the building site that would one day be our house. Effusive greetings and thanks. 'It needs preparing, though,' Luis said. 'Don't wet the outside.'

'Very important not to wet the outside,' Isidro emphasised.

'Fatal,' emphasised Luis, which doesn't actually mean fatal in Spanish but is definitely something to be avoided.

'What you do,' Paco instructed, 'is to fill it with water - inside, don't wet the outside - and add a glass of anís,' by which he probably meant the aniseed liqueur called Chinchón, after the Spanish town where they make it.

'Or rum,' offered Mongo.

Luis shook his head. 'You don't need anís or rum, just water. Fill it, leave it for a day, empty it, fill it again. When the water stops tasting of clay, basta, enough, it's done, the porrón is ready.'

'It's much better if you add a little anís,' Paco objected. 'Sterilises it.' I absolutely love the Spanish propensity for arguing at length about anything at all. After listening for a minute or two I handed Luis the porrón. 'You do it. Please?'

A couple of days later we saw the porrón tucked away safely in a quiet corner of the building, filled with water and cool to the touch como Dios manda as they say in Spain, as God commands, as things should be.

Which brings me to the main point of this story, which is that the porrón is a simple but clever device that not only holds water but also keeps it cool, yet is inexorably disappearing from the building sites. Everyone buys bottled water instead. I can feel a rant coming on here but I'll save it for the notes, below.

Filled with nostalgia, I decided to see if it would still be possible to buy a porrón in San Sebastián. The old ironmonger's is long gone but there is another wonderful shop that supplies catering equipment to the restaurant trade and anyone else who cares to wander in, such as a nostalgic foreigner. To my delight they could offer a porrón - and not just one dusty remnant from the back of a cupboard but a collection of bright new ones prominently displayed on a low shelf, with a choice of sizes in either sand or terracotta colour.

I see hope on that shelf. Hope for a brighter future when more people realise that water in plastic bottles is a wasteful nonsense if a humble ceramic jug will do a better job and last forever.

Yes, yes, don't say it: until someone trips over it…

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

Surely this is not a porrón but…?

Correct. A ceramic vessel such as this to drink water from is properly called a botijo, while a porrón is a glass vessel with a long, conical spout from which you drink wine.

In Gomera, Tenerife and probably the other Canary Islands the water vessel has come to be called a porrón. Perhaps because the glass porrón would have been uncommon in earlier times - you'd have drunk wine from a wineskin.

How does it work?

The botijo is made from clay and oven fired but not glazed, which means it remains porous. Not so much that all the water drains away, just enough for it to evaporate slowly through the sides, and the evaporation cools the vessel.

Back in the days when milk in the UK was left in bottles on your doorstep, in summer some people would leave a ceramic sleeve for the milkman to slip over each bottle, standing in a bowl of water.

My family also had a little cabinet called an Osokool, made of porous ceramic with a hollow on the top that you kept filled with water. We used it for milk, butter and anything else that might go off in the heat.

Okay, now the rant

I need to talk about water. One of the most extraordinary changes I've witnessed in recent years is that people no longer drink tap water. The water hasn't changed, but people have. A myth has unaccountably grown that tap water here is full of minerals and gives you kidney stones. The truth is that it really isn't 'hard' water, it's relatively soft, and anyway some mineral content is good for the body. People get kidney stones because they don't drink enough of it. It's very common to see an elderly man pop into a bar for a small glass of red wine to quench his thirst.

Along with that myth has grown the general concept that tap water is bad, unclean and smelly, which is also untrue. We keep a jug of it in the fridge and it's absolutely fine. By contrast, water stored in plastic bottles is very likely to absorb noxious chemical additives that leach from the plastic, particularly in a hot climate.

But I'm fighting a lone, losing battle here. Short of some Chernobyl-style catastrophe involving plastic bottles, they're not going to go away. There are now vans that spend every day delivering nothing but bottled water to the supermarkets and cafes.

Anís

To finish on a sweeter note: Chinchón is a very pleasant liqueur, a close cousin of French pastis such as Ricard or Pernod. It comes in sweet or dry varieties but in Gomera I've only seen the sweet one. It's a clear liquid that, like pastis, turns milky white when you add a little ice or water. If you mix it in a ratio of three parts water to one of liqueur it makes a refreshing drink and the ideal vessel from which to swig it is a botijo - or if you're in La Gomera, a porrón - because any water you put in it subsequently will retain a light, refreshing hint of aniseed.

Shady business

The nerve-shredding screech of a disc cutter greeted our arrival at a cafe table. A guy on a stepladder was attacking the white-painted framework of a toldo, a permanent canopy over a nearby group of tables in the main plaza of San Sebastián. The structure was already half dismantled. Strange and intriguing, because it had been erected just a few months ago.

There are local companies who will custom-design and install any kind of canopy from a simple awning over a window to a giant, freestanding structure covering an entire terraza of tables. The one currently being demolished was one of those, a splendid shelter with double-pitched canvas roof and drop-down windscreens of clear plastic on all four sides.

Toldos have been staging a stealthy takeover of the plazas and pedestrian streets in recent years. I'm not sure I like them very much. However, let's try to be fair and dispassionate. Arguments in favour of toldos: they provide reliable protection both from the sun and from wind and rain. Furthermore, they are versatile. If the wind changes, roll up the northerly set of screens and drop down the southerlies. If a downpour starts splashing in all round, drop down all the screens and you've got a cosy marquee.

Arguments against: they're not most people's idea of beautiful, and they rob us of that lovely, higgledy-piggledy collection of cafe tables scattered across a plaza, each with its sun umbrella, that adds such warmth to the empty paving. By herding all the tables into a canvas-covered corral you destroy their carefree charm. If you really want a roof and walls around you, why not sit inside the cafe?

The undeniable reality, however, is that the toldos are popular. While the pale visitors who stumble off cruise ships sprawl in full sunlight with their faces turned blissfully to the sky, people who live in near-permanent sunshine seek shade, and a toldo is today's way to do it.

Which is why it was so surprising to see this relatively new one being torn down. Was it possible the cafe's proprietors had spent the last few weeks gazing doubtfully at their creation and decided it was a mistake? Unlikely. Had they perhaps put it up without prior permission from the town council? Unthinkable. Or was the cafe itself - terrible thought - closing down, its business ruined by the Covid plague?

'No,no,' Isidro assured me, seated at another cafe table nearby. Isidro is a regular and knows everything about everything. 'It's because of the plaza. Las obras, the works.'

Ah, of course! Of course. Watching more closely, the men with the disc cutter were not just hacking the structure to pieces, they were very carefully separating the welded joints then stacking the components out of harm's way. One day it would rise again, somewhere.

The works Isidro referred to were a long-promised project by the town council to reform the main square. It's becoming a bit of a habit - this is the second time in 30 years! In our earliest days here the main square was actually a circle, a delightful cobblestoned area furnished with palm trees, flower beds, benches and a newspaper kiosk. Charmingly simple and rustic. Instantly recognisable as San Sebastián de La Gomera. I keep a photo of it on my phone to upset any locals old enough to remember it.

'The old plaza!' nodded Isidro, smiling wistfully. 'It was pretty. The palm trees are still there, most of them.' He nodded towards the cluster of palms in front of the town council building. It's true, they stand gracefully waving where they always were, planted in the ghost of the vanished circle.

So why did it have to go, that pleasant old plaza? Its chief sin was that traffic circulated around it so when the space was needed for a dance or concert they had to close the roads and divert the cars. It was also too small for a sizeable event. One year when we arrived for our winter sojourn the circle had already gone, replaced by a much larger, conventionally square plaza with traffic tidily routed away to one side. Much less attractive but functionally more effective, undoubtedly.

There was a snag, though, with this new design. The entire surface of the plaza sloped gently down from the seaward end towards the town. Not only did this mean that heavy rainfall flowed from the plaza into the town rather than the sea, it also meant that the seaward end required a series of broad, shallow steps down to the road and beach level. I'd guess that the steps were a deliberate architectural feature to add interest to an otherwise very plain square, but they were not such good news when you were drunk, dancing, wearing high heels or pushing a wheelchair.

Even worse was that the slope also required steps along one side of the plaza, fairly high at the seaward end but diminishing in height as they neared the town. It was unnerving to sit at one of the cafe tables and watch visitors approaching these variable steps, especially at the shallower end where they were close to invisible. You felt like calling out, 'Hey, watch out for the… whoops…!' as they stumbled at the unexpected change of level.

Definitely high time for a rethink of the plaza, then, but as the current layout is painstakingly destroyed I have little idea how it will be reborn. The general idea seems to be send in the mechanical diggers, always a favourite solution, to reduce everything down to a reference level of the seaside roadway. But first you have to remove the surface paving, which consists of very small bricks.

There are an awful lot of them. Watching a couple of workmen in red shirts pulling up the bricks, I found myself wondering how anyone could stay cheerful and motivated on an interminable task like this. There are literally thousands of square metres of them, each brick scarcely more than handsize, all of which have to be individually lifted and stacked on wooden pallets to be transported by a fork-lift truck.

Then at some time in the future all the bricks will all have to be relaid. One at a time, each one carefully aligned and levelled with its fellows. A worker might manage to lay just a few square metres in a day, facing the next morning a vast expanse of empty concrete still to cover, brick by little brick.

There must be a survival technique to cope with this kind of challenge. Discussing yesterday's football might get you through an hour or so. Then what? Anecdotes. Politics. Plan tonight's TV. Count the bricks. Give each a name as you place it: Ernesto, Elena, Enrique, Efigenia… Decide between a doughnut and a chocolate croissant for the mid-morning treat. Plan how to spend your retirement if you ever get there. Breaking News: Workman found curled up behind a pile of bricks on the plaza sobbing 'I can't go on... I can't take another [beep] brick, I really can't... I want my Mum...'

Anyway, the toldos. It's obvious they all have to go while the plaza is reformed, but I'm sure they'll be back. They're too popular to abandon. For me, however, a sun umbrella every time, please.

(Pause for mature consideration.)

Except perhaps when the umbrella is yet another flamboyant advert for Coca Cola. Or when a gusty wind turns it inside out and breaks its spokes. Or knocks it over and spills my beer. Or the sun keeps moving and obliges me to shuffle the table or the umbrella sideways to chase the shade...

Okay, toldos do have their advantages.

A very special breed

Setting off on my bike under a heavily clouded sky with rain forecast to a probability of 97%, I discounted Janine’s warnings with a manly ‘Well if I get wet, I get wet! Not the end of the world’.

Ah, but it can be, very nearly. In the past I’ve had some really miserable times in the rain, not least on cycle-camping holidays in Norfolk. We don’t get much chance to experience rain in La Gomera and one tends to view the risk lightly. This morning’s trip was important, I was heading into town to deliver to a new outlet a few copies of my book ¿Todavía silban?, the Spanish version of Do they still whistle? - which, incidentally, includes a story about the joyful benefits of rain. I hadn’t even delivered the books before the first drops began to patter on my cycle helmet. Within minutes I was engulfed by the first real downpour of the season.

I sheltered under the narrow awning of a bakery along with several other people, all of whom were pretending to be happy. The very worst thing about Gomeran rain, which is just as unpleasant as anyone else’s when it happens, is that you’re not allowed to complain about it. I scuttled into the bakery to buy a couple of loaves just as Jorge was about to emerge. ‘Mucha agua!’ I warned him, lots of water, wiping mini-cascades from my forehead.

‘Es buena!’ he roared, throwing his arms apart and gazing towards the ceiling like one giving thanks for a heavenly bounty. Jorge is unfailingly cheerful and often hands out boiled sweets from his pocket. Of course he was absolutely right, rain is only good, rain is a bounty anywhere (except in Norfolk when you’re camping) and intellectually I joined everyone else in celebrating this early gift of water for the reservoirs. But it could have waited until I got home.

I was also beginning to worry about sixty trail runners currently up in the rain-soaked hills. This is an amazing event. I’ve mentioned trail running before (The boy who wouldn’t eat), a sport for which this island is tailor-made with around 600 kilometres of footpaths, all of them through wonderful scenery in huge variety from gentle plains and ancient forest to expert-only climbs through wild crags. It has taken off in a big way in recent years with marathons and ultra-marathons that attract keen trail runners from all over the world.

But those who were up there today must be a very special breed of human being. They set off from San Sebastián at nine o’clock on Wednesday morning and were required to run a serpentine course around the entire island, a distance of 212 kilometres, to arrive back within 85 hours. On a Gomeran footpath you’re never far from an uphill climb and the ascents in this race totalled 13 kilometres, along with the downhills which can be even more challenging. Challenge was the whole point of course, the event was called the WAA 360º and subtitled The Challenge. WAA is a specialist company selling high-tech clothing and equipment for people who enjoy challenges. WAA stands for What An Adventure.

Not only did participants need to be up to this adventure physically, they also had to find their way along the route unaided, without marshals to guide them at critical decision points. The only help they got was a map on their mobile phone. There were four base camps at intervals around the route for optional food, shelter and rest but it was up to each competitor to devise their own race strategy.

My specific worry was that rain makes those rocky paths much more slippery, especially on the downhill stretches, and is also chilling. In northwest China a few months ago 21 trail runners - one of them a legendary champion - died when rain and high winds overcame them. One was rescued by a shepherd who carried him unconscious into a cave and lit a bonfire to warm him. So I was relieved to learn that an emergency meeting of the Gomeran race organisers had modified the route to avoid the highest, coldest and wettest stretches.

I also learned that, astonishingly, some of the participants had already arrived back in San Sebastián by the time I was sheltering from the drizzle on Friday morning. The first was an Italian whom everyone expected to win, a world champion, and he was photographed as he passed through the triumphal inflatable archway just after one o’clock in the morning, holding his arms aloft with a big smile on his face. One of those slight, wiry people who seem indestructible, he had run around the entire island in 40 hours and 8 minutes, commenting that it had been without doubt the most difficult race of his life. As a Gomeran by adoption I shall interpret that as a compliment.

Chain reaction

Circling the roundabout on my new electric bike (woo!) with Janine close behind on her electric trike (I was always jealous), I glanced at my watch. About 10 o’clock. Fine, we’d reach the beach in good time for a swim before the sun rose too high for comfort. Then I saw the other cyclist.

She was standing forlornly at the side of the road, a middle-aged lady in shorts, her green Dutch-style bike lying on the ground beside her. As we approached I watched her expression change from lost and lonely to dawning hope, a tentative smile. I braked slowly, heart sinking. Look, I’m just a normal human being and if another cyclist is in trouble I really don’t want to be there, I just want to carry on my way. But of course I stopped.

‘Qué pasó?’ What’s happened?

‘You speak English?’ she guessed, with a probably German accent. Not a Gomeran then, but that was obvious, she didn’t look Spanish and anyway Gomeran ladies don’t ride around on green sit-up-and-beg bikes. We quickly established that her chain had come off its front chainring. Good news in that it was a less demanding task than a puncture, not so good news that I would end up with oily fingers.

Also not so good was that her bike - with a low-slung frame designed for women to step daintily across without having to sling a leg over the saddle - had a chainguard, the classic kind that covers the entire top of the chain and wraps around the front of the chainring. Heart sank a little more. I had previous experience of chainguards.

You don’t see many of them on this island, at the moment. Pushbikes, as we used to call them, are in their very early days as a form of transport and are purchased mainly as a sports device. They have feather-light frames, wafer-thin tyres, no mudguards and certainly no chainguards. Slim young people wearing slippery shirts of rainbow colours and tight shorts with padded bottoms bend low over their handlebars, calf muscles swollen as melons, training for impossibly rapid ascents. They make me feel slow, even on my new electric miracle with streamlined battery and bright blue panniers.

But my bike, as I occasionally explain defensively, is not about speed and competition, my bike is my burro, my donkey. A beast of burden. Its capacious panniers are its reason for being in the world, or in my world anyway. Janine’s red tricycle is even truer to this role - cheerful, charming and with large baskets front and rear, it’s possibly the most attractive burro the island has ever seen. Visitors point as it hums past, pause to examine it when it’s parked. One Spanish visitor asked if we’d mind taking a photo of her sitting on it. Never mind your Instagrammers posing one-legged on clifftops, here’s one of me on a red triciclo!

There used to be six authentic, honking donkeys in and around our village just thirty years ago but now there are none. Bikes could at least partially replace them, but they haven’t. Two-wheelers with engines, yes, there are plenty of those, ranging from puttering little mopeds to roaring BMWs costing twenty thousand euros, but very few of them are used as a donkey equivalent. Not in the way that they are, for example, in a town called Durazno we visited in Uruguay where the entire population travelled around on motorbikes, often with two, three or even four passengers on a single machine, an entire family. If everyone in the world did that we’d be a long way towards solving the climate crisis. And the over-population problem as well if they tried to do it in Madrid, Paris or London.

So we’re not quite there yet in Gomera as an all-round cycling community. There is just one dedicated cycle track on the island, in San Sebastián, leading directly from the island’s very first traffic roundabout to the hospital. It’s far more popular with pedestrians than with cyclists. The planners failed to consult with Copenhagen before they built it so there’s a lot wrong from the cyclist’s point of view. A brave attempt, however, and I hope there will be more someday.

But, getting back to the lady with the chain problem: replacing a chain on its front chainring is usually not a difficult procedure. You take a small screwdriver from your travelling toolkit, hook it between the chain and the chainring then wind the pedals backwards while guiding the chain over the sprockets. Done in a moment. With a chainguard, though, you can’t get at the chain where you want to and even if you do, winding the pedals backwards will bring your screwdriver up against a support bracket of the chainguard and the chain will slip away from you. Aaagh!

‘I might have to take off the chainguard,’ I warned the German lady. She nodded sadly, in the manner of a wife agreeing to let a surgeon remove her husband’s leg. ‘I’ll put it back on again afterwards.’ She tried to smile. Anything, anything.

But I’m glad to report a happy ending. I managed to get the chain on without major surgery, fiddling my way around and inside the chainguard using a screwdriver, a tyre lever and several fingers. And although both hands emerged liberally covered in black chain oil, I cleaned them up with the disinfectant gel that has been part of my personal toolkit since the Covid-19 virus knocked us all off our sprockets.

Photo by Didier Ngoie of P&D Art

Helicopters

The three of us paused, looking up at the sky. Scanning around a little anxiously, searching with eyes and ears.

We’d been happily discussing the state of the tide, the temperature of the water and the southerly wind that ripples the sea surface and occasionally wafts in a few jellyfish, but the distant wop-wop-wop of an approaching helicopter is unmistakeable and always disturbing. If you’ve seen the Coppola film Apocalypse now you will surely remember the opening scene in which Captain Willard is slowly awakened from a drunken sleep by the insistent beating of blades on the stifling air of Vietnam. It turns out to be the ceiling fan but still drives him to smash a wall mirror with his bare fist.

In La Gomera we’re better behaved than that, but at the sound of a whirlybird we will usually fall silent and look up. What is it about helicopters? Why are they so menacing? Slow and wingless, crawling impossibly across the skies, they seem to presage disaster, something bad about to happen or already under way.

The helicópteros we see here come in several varieties. Least troubling are the dull green Army ’copters that occasionally head towards the military quarters on the high plain near San Sebastián. I’ve never yet heard one blaring out The ride of the Valkyries like Coppola’s mad general, which would be exciting but probably viewed as bad form these days.

Then there are the sleek blue and white machines of the police, perhaps searching the seas around the islands for migrant boats in difficulties, or for a yacht heading this way from Morocco or South America with a suspect cargo. On a different island altogether, the Italian island of Sardinia where in a youthful adventure we looked after a smart mansion on the Costa Smeralda – playground of the very rich – I was inspected at close range by an Italian police helicopter. It spotted me on the terrace overlooking the sea and whirled over to face me with its tail in the air, unmoving, probably taking photographs with a long lens. I stood my ground defiantly, nothing to hide except the glass of wine I shouldn’t have been drinking while painting madam’s windows.

So police helicopters here bring their own reminiscent frisson, but worse are the smart red machines of GES (Grupo de Emergencias y Salvamento), the Canary Islands emergency and rescue service. They spell trouble not for us but for someone who has got themselves lost on the footpaths, or twisted their ankle or tried to walk too far on a hot day with too little water. These aircraft are based around the various islands but can be summoned by Gomeran land-based rescue teams if someone needs to be lifted out by air. They may also be called upon in a medical emergency to fly a patient from our local hospital to the superb main hospital in Tenerife.

On the morning in question it was a familiar yellow machine that appeared over the headland and whirred across the bay. One of ours, as they used to say in wartime, with relief. It’s stationed here only in the summer months but remains close by all year on one of the other islands, a multi-purpose assistant to the emergency services that can perform search or rescue missions and is also employed to monitor outbreaks of fire.

If the helicopter has a large bucket swinging beneath it, the bucket is for water and a fire has already taken hold, probably in difficult terrain. That happened in La Gomera in 2012, when summer-dried vegetation and warm winds combined to create a fierce blaze that took two weeks to control and resisted complete extinction for three months. Anyone in potential danger was efficiently evacuated to safety and there was no loss of human life, but the fire ended up scorching nearly a fifth of the island’s surface including part of the ancient laurel forest, the Parque Nacional de Garajonay.

On that occasion the helicopter was joined by two others and six hidroaviones, specialised fixed-wing seaplanes capable of scooping water from the sea to dump over the flames. They passed over our house every few minutes to skim across the bay of San Sebastián in a truly astonishing display of skilled piloting. Watching them was both thrilling and terrifying, because the fire was close enough to sprinkle our terrace with ash and at night the hills were outlined by an orange glow in the sky.

So what prompted me to write about this now, so many years later? The yellow helicopter of course, but also the ash that settled overnight on our terrace and blew into the open windows. Not flakes of ash from burning vegetation but dark brown grains like fine sand. They came from the erupting volcano on La Palma, blasted several kilometres into the air to drift across and settle around us, a sobering reminder that this large ball we all live on has a vibrant life of its own.

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Fire remains the main potential risk but that of 2012 resulted in a considerable increase in government-funded resources to watch for any outbreaks and quickly quench them. In summer there are full-time teams employed on firewatch throughout the forest, along with ground and air-based firefighting equipment.

Fortunately we don’t need to worry too much about volcanic disasters as well because La Gomera is one of the older Canary Islands and hasn’t shown any significant activity for the last two million years. Its last major eruption was around four million years ago.