David M. Addison
With a song for every occasion, the author embarks on another adventure, this time to La Palma in the Canary Islands.
Having learnt from previous encounters that neighbours are not conducive to good holidays, he elects this time to stay in a remote country cottage. If he imagined this would avoid encountering irritating people and ensure a trouble-free, idyllic, romantic holiday with his long-suffering wife, he was sadly mistaken. His gift for putting his foot in it, as usual, results in a series of tight scrapes, excruciatingly embarrassing for him, but which provides the reader with a vicarious sense of pleasure, not to mention Schadenfreude, appropriately enough, for Germans seem to cross the writer’s path with amazing regularity.
Follow in the author’s footsteps, let him be your guide as he explores every aspect of this island, which, he concludes, is one of the most spectacular he has ever visited, yet one of the least visited in the Canarian archipelago. Along the way, seen from his personal and offbeat perspective, he will undoubtedly inform you, certainly entertain you and hopefully persuade you - you must visit this island before you die.
But before he dies, the author considers some possible solutions before staring eternity in the face…
Born in Banff, once the county town of Banffshire, but now relegated to just another town in Aberdeenshire, this is David M. Addison’s fourth book. Going into similar decline himself, he was offered early retirement from teaching and since then has found a new lease in life by spending his lump sum and pension by travelling. At his wife’s suggestion, he only began writing about his experiences relatively recently, a suggestion she has regretted ever since, since it resulted in her too being reduced in status from married woman to writer’s widow.
He has two married children, three grandchildren and lives in Falkirk.
For further details on the author and his books visit his website: www.davidmaddison.org
The
author would be pleased to hear from readers and would be happy to
answer any queries you may have. Send an e-mail to:
davidaddison@talktalk.net
When the Spaniards came in the 15th century they found a people still living in the Stone Age. They proceeded to “civilise” them by turning tribe against tribe, though apparently more Guanches died from the diseases the Spaniards brought with them, than from conflict either with them, or their own kind.
They didn’t have a written language, as you might expect. It would be bit hard to chisel all your words onto stone, though the Flintstones seemed to manage it as I recall. And just think of the postage when you sent a letter, but they did leave some petroglyphs behind, and that is what makes this cave so special.
The petroglyphs are supposed to be on three boulders that are strewn randomly around the entrance to the cave. I can see none on the first, some faint marks on the second - swirls and whorls like great, prehistoric fingerprints, and on the third, more clearly defined, white lines and circles. Nobody knows what these strange symbols mean and it is doubtful if anyone will ever unlock the mystery as they are just being left to weather and become even more indecipherable. Perhaps they don’t mean anything anyway - perhaps it is just artistic expression, like abstract art - or they just did it for the hell of it, chiselling away to pass the time, while the women, as usual, got on with the work.
It is not just a cave though. There is a nature trail as well, with boards to tell you what you are looking at - except a lot of them are as badly worn as the petroglyphs, or covered in guano. Here we can look down on the intriguingly named Dragon tree, a species peculiar to the Canaries, and to my mind, just plain peculiar, with branches which defy the law of gravity and grow straight up with a topknot of spiked leaves like a punk’s hairdo. I am sure I have seen miniature versions of them in garden centres. The Guanches used its sap, which they called “dragon’s blood” to heal wounds. Interestingly, the sap turns red in contact with air. So how did they know when the bleeding stopped?
Another interesting, but rather other odd thing about these trees is they don’t have rings, so you can’t be sure how old they are. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I think I’ll come back as a Dragon tree. No pining about lost youth: you could pretend to be any age you liked and just stand around sunbathing all day and have a shower (whether you needed it or not) on the whim of the weather. And it would be great to avoid all that stress about the birds and the bees, having to find a partner and reproduce. As long as you remained an upstanding member of the community, you wouldn’t have to do anything - they would come to you.
Here is another indigenous tree – the Canarian pine with its long needles that the Guanches used as a mattress. There are masses of them lying about. They are named needles appropriately enough. They are brittle and sharp and I wouldn’t have thought the ideal bed companion. As the husband said when he discovered that his wife had been sleeping around with his superiors at the office: how could you sleep with those little pricks?
No, doubt about it, I’ll come back as a Dragon tree, if that is all right with you, Brahma. And if it is all the same to you, I’ll skip the promotion for being so perfect this time around (I just can’t help it) and step down a few rungs on the evolutionary ladder.
