Damien Enright: Small boys have their way with pesky plants 

Visitors to the Canaries will be very familiar with the tunera or “plate” cactus

Small boys everywhere feel it's their duty to punish 'weeds'. In Ireland, they thrash nettles. This boy, in La Gomera, is trashing cactus and the cochineal beetles on it. A century ago, his father would have given him the stick!

On Sunday morning, looking out the bedroom window before the sun struck the fields, I saw an elderly man and his wife harvesting avocados from the trees.

Beyond them, a schoolboy was energetically attacking a stand of cactus with a stick, There was a time when his grandfather might well have taken a stick to the boy. The cactus was once the basic food for an industry that brought wealth to these, then isolated, Canary islands.