Old habits die hard in La Gomera, thankfully

THIS morning, in our village, 3km from the sea, on the terraced slopes of the Valle Gran Rey on the island of La Gomera in the Canary Islands, cocks crowded, blackbirds piped, and the fish van passed up the valley leaving skirls of sentimental Canarian music in its wake.

“Hay pescado, hay moreno, hay sardinas!”, the fishmonger’s voice chanted above the echoes bouncing off the steep cliffs half a kilometre apart on the valley sides. He parked above the village. What was initially an unpaved dirt track and then a tarred byroad is now a fine two-lane highway, with barriers over the life-threatening ‘drops’.

Ours was the first car to drive down the new road on the day it was opened sometime in the mid 1980s; it was also the first car in the valley to get a parking ticket. I should have kept the ticket as a historical artefact evidencing a step in the progress of the valley into modern times and modern regulations which, like the drink-drive laws in Ireland, still elicit a mixed response.