The start of a new year takes me far away from the concerns of my day to day life and has me sitting under a palm tree staring up at clear blue skies with the looming magnificence of an ancient volcano on the horizon. For the last two years January has brought freezing conditions and a nagging insecurity as I have been left jobless and in-between homes, this year I am more sure of myself and my prospects than ever before, maybe I will change jobs, maybe I will move house but it will be on my terms and with more barging chips than I have ever had to bring to the table. I am optimistic for the future, but then again when you are sitting at the side of a pool in the sun with nothing but free time on your hands optimism is easy.
When transporting yourself to a foreign country it always highlights the foibles, insecurities and downright rudeness of your own culture. The British seem to have invaded all the popular tourist destinations with their needs or maybe it’s just the perception of our needs that has spawned a culture all of its own. The picture postcard Brit abroad that needs their British papers and couldn’t possibly learn to eat foreign ketchup for two weeks. I have quite a different view of eating than most of the British population but the general attitude towards food always astounds and disgusts me in equal measure. No wonder our cuisine is so easily shrugged aside as bland and disinteresting as we accept and somehow crave a sort of identikit menu that none surprisingly pops up wherever they think they can make a buck of our gullible tummies. Somehow Lasagne and chips appears on menus in café’s and bars across the tourist ridden Spanish coasts as if this is a dish that has any identity at all, let alone a palatable one. So stubborn is the average traveller they will not step out of their comfort zone and so long have we been the primary consumer of the Spanish sun that somehow they have dulled down there rich culinary history to give us something we think we might want. I don’t want to see the union jack when I have taken a flight away and I certainly don’t want to see it across the front of restaurant and in supermarkets. There are great products available that have seasonality and localness at their very heart and I don’t want to have to look for these between the fry ups and the bloody toasted sandwiches. British food is a deep and rich history that belongs very much on our cold wet island so when I am here on this volcanic hideaway I want to be drowned in fresh fish, soaked in the juicy fresh fruit and as far away from bangers and mash as I can be.
The situation is only highlighted more and the shame seasoning sprinkled more liberally when we have chance to have some Tenerifian food experiences. At the only ‘Michelin’ recommended restaurant on the island we have food totally in keeping with the season and the spirit of the island everything belongs on the plate and fits together perfectly this food would look wrong on an English plate but here it sings of the bay that we are sitting in and the sun kissed January that we are enjoying, King prawns with coconut pannacotta, scallops with green melon and crispy Iberico ham and Lobster claw on potato salad with blood orange has me staring at the plate in awe and smacking my lips for more. The fish is all that the bay has to offer serving what they have available which is so fresh and inviting, Hake with capers and lemon with mash and croutons is wonderfully sharp and has the mushy mouthful feel that the fish does best – this place is small but perfectly formed and has stuck to what it does best to be a real gem and seems to care very much about its reputation even when most of its guests will be visitors to the island.
To continue the food based rant we headed slightly away from the main tourist drag to the larger Supermarket where the actual Tenerifian people do their shopping and the array of products and quality has all the English supermarket ranges looking like badly stocked corner shops. As TV chefs get more and more airtime on the UK channels and their names become synonymous with brands it still doesn’t seem to expand the range of products available on the shelves so scared they are of pushing the boat in a new direction and risk something g not selling, and if they do trial a new product it is priced out of most peoples budget to try and cover the cost of the risk and leaves people always taking the safer option and the supermarket thinking that we never really wanted it in the first place. This average Spanish Mercado stocked Veal, Pig Trotters, marrowbones ,whole Rabbit, boned out chicken’s and a wonderful array of ham’s that were affordable and enticing. Huge piles of prawns ached to be eaten at a quarter of the price of at home and sat along the local fish and every crustacean and being that swam of these shores, I saw one customer ask to inspect the gills of a large fish they were about to buy – these shoppers know what to look for and expect the best. The Vegetable selection was limited but limited in the way it should be by the products that were in season and at their most natural, the tomatoes were not perfect in shape or colour but the discerning hands of busy experienced shoppers selected the ones perfect for their table. Maybe you think I’m banging at a drum that obviously is close to my heart but I think food is one of the best routes into the core of a culture, our rituals of sharing and celebrating to our attitude of day to day enjoyment of life can all be seen around the table and in the kitchen. Do we want to be seen as an apathetic culture who microwaves an Indian Meal that came with no thought straight from large sack aimed directly at the lazy minded shopper, who sees the food we put in our mouths as fuel to carry us to the next day in the drudgery of our neon existence. We are forgetting the skills to prepare the dishes that make our nation’s food identity great and we are not spending the time to make these dishes and pass on the knowledge to the next generation .We can’t simply blame the Supermarkets for pandering to our lazy desires and giving us all we think we want in neat little boxes that stack higher on their shelves. We have to take the time to reclaim our food identity and show our love of life on our dinner tables.
The Spanish identity shows out of the car window as well as on the food shelves as most of the walls seem unfinished and there is a mass of pipes and cables littering the side of most streets. I Think there is a general unfinished look to most Spanish towns and even cities as if half way through building the builders thought of a much better idea and got busy building that but the process continues on and on leaving a wave of half complete structures yearning to be completed. I know I am a terrible snob but I need a certain order to things a certain uniformity and completeness that makes me feel quite as foreign and uptight as I actually am. I am all for the laid back and relaxed approach but I yearn for completion. The Apartment blocks, villa’s and hotel room seem to seep down the mountains as once the lava did that formed the very island as if we are forming our own crust on top of the ancient layers of rock, cascading between the mountains and valleys finding every route every nook and expanding wherever it can. Seeing so many people always fills my mind with the terrible thoughts of our overpopulation, too many stories as we are buried under the tides of other people’s lives and I struggle with the notion that we may never do anything original. What are they all up too and more to the point what are they all having for tea.
Travel past the cinder blocks and the rubble far from the high rises of the tourist havens and the two lane highways soon turn into one lane roads skating further up the mountain, you glide past banana plantations hidden from the direct sun by large net tents as the road cuts across ravines and through cracks in the mountain. The road gets smaller and the small towns you pass perch more and more precariously on the edges of rocks, as if the smallest nudge would send the whole hamlet into the distant sea below. The Spaniards sit outside dim lit bars at plastic tables smoking finger length cigars all looking to the untrained foreign eye like shady nefarious murder’s discussing their latest capers , when in reality they are more than likely deliberating Football scores or telling tales of a wall they recently half completed. The road snakes ever onwards and the rented cars of the tense tourists groan in third gear or snarl in second up the perpetual road, turning at obtuse angles around invisible bends with perilous drops on either side of the narrow ragged tarmac . The long suffering locals follow achingly behind waiting for the few opportunities for straight stretches to overtake and show no fear, their patience only tempered in the knowledge that without these borrowed automobiles lumbering timidly up the track the apartment blocks below would lay empty and their island home would grind to a halt. A small side turn in a small mountain town and the road gets even smaller and its turns get even steeper as man battles geography and gravity at every turn, snaking and sneaking towards an invisible summit. Eye’s strain to see round corners hoping that no other traveller is rolling down the path we are pushing our small engine to navigate as we rely on perpetual motion and straining brake cables to hold us to this death defying causeway. When we finally arrive unscathed at the summit we are treated with a view of history and majesty a look into the greatness of the earth and its enormous vastness as the cliffs drop down towards the ocean and the cracks in the rock show an ancient geology that speaks to us about the foundation of the world. To stand on top of these vast spaces we can feel like conquering heroes like true masters of the universe but to look down and to try and comprehend the creation and existence of so much we are left small and alone, the flux of the small and the big plays around my head and I am happier than I have been in some time.
A few days later and we once again set off to stress our engine and test my steering ability from what still seems like the wrong side of the road and the wrong side of the car as we press onwards and upwards towards the beast that created this island.
Traipsing up the side of a vista that we have been gazing at from our veranda for the time we have been here soon changes your perspective on those small dots of rocks strewn on the skyline, they gain texture, gravity and size as the come into view that you had not imagined from so far below. Boulders seem to have poised themselves astride rocks gloaming over the edges of the road relentlessly threatening to plummet and crush you like an inconsequential modern dot on this ancient landscape. As ears pop and the air thins you enter a forest and the colour of the land changes as if in an instant, a carpet of green needles sits under these trees that reach to the skies with their mighty trunks and lumbering timber limbs. You’re hidden from the island now under a canopy of pine with only the volcano piercing the journey in the near distant. You breach the summit of the mountain ridge and enter a strange and alien world that juts and jars across a crater fifteen kilometres in diameter with the crumbled edges of mountains lining its walls. Perspectives keep on changing as small boulders in the distant become huge rock statues as you approach and become dwarfed by their magnitude. Time, weather and the great pressures that created this landscape have sculpted the rock into towers and stacks and the strata of the rock shows the advancement of time and the creation of the earth in its colours and hue’s. Minerals and elements left in the rock leave the surface occasionally green that adds to the alien atmosphere, although I have obviously never been to the moon but it is easy to assume that this is the terrain you would encounter there, and with this landscape having been used in various films to represent the surface of other planets a bit of film history is added to our curious supposing’s and you are left imagining a weightlessness and the possibility of a new species lurking behind every rock. The ‘Planet Of The Apes’ feeling is continued as packs of Italian tourists lumber onto the rocks bleating and chest beating for attention but step away from the madding crowds and you are left in the silent isolation of a place on this earth that has its own gravitas its own awe and is nothing like anywhere else, it’s the haven of the large small conundrum and has me sedate in my happy place, fighting back the urges to clamber the rocks and just sit in the contemplation of this great world and my place in it.
I will not go into every detail of my holiday because these hallowed pages are not for my life to play out in text, it is for my musings and for me to point out annoyances and irritations, but let it be said that I start 2012 with not only the new Netbook that I am typing away at now but with the drive to find more time to write and share and to soak in the great and the good of the world and let words be my catharsis so that I can be the person I want to be and not soaked in rage. So I will be back soon with more sage words of wise and witty whines but more importantly with the first batch of new albums for 2012, the bar has been set pretty high for the first album of the year to end up being top 10 material so I will pick carefully and enjoy thoroughly.
And one final point……..
Scrabmaster
