CALIMA in TENERIFE

This is a calima. I took this photo this afternoon from the T-Gas station in Las Galletas.
Guaza Mountain in the foreground is only three kilometres away and murky, the one behind is maybe another two kilometres distant. Normally we can see them clear as a bell, and that faintly darker haze is an entire mountain range - buried under a blanket of grey dust blown over from Africa.

  Mount Teide? It's in there somewhere, but the destruction of the delicate surface of the Sahara by trucks and four-wheel drive safaris where previously there used to be only camels means that we get two calimas a month rather than three or four a year. The hospitals fill up with asthma patients, the blanket of dust holds in the heat, and our temperatures soar to 50 degrees Centigrade.

I had to go up the mountain a little way yesterday to the Outpatients building at El Mohon, and looked in vain for the splendid view of our neighbouring island, La Gomera. See that line of cloud over the sea? that's where it is.
 Actually, now I look at this photo more closely, you'll have to take my word for it that there is sea in the background!

FINISHED!

I've got there at last. Two months ago I embarked on yet another rewrite of
A Volcanic Race, the first book I ever wrote, and I have finished it! This is not the final version, of course, but the novel is now in much better shape - leaner and faster-paced.
I wish I could say the same about myself as I pack for two weeks in England, where I shall be trying to keep up with my two grandsons. Yes, I know the weather's bad, but I've been missing my family.

"WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW". This is sound advice, which I have chosen to ignore in A Volcanic Race. 
      I have never been to Africa, the continent on which I based some of my imaginary country. I have read books about it, seen National Geographic documentaries by the score, and made pages of research notes, but the nearest I have been is where I live now - Tenerife, a hundred miles off the west coast of Africa. We get the same searing heat in high summer, and some of the same plants, but the largest wild animal we have in Tenerife is the feral goat. So my imagination is free to roam.
Or so you would think.

The volcanic landscape of my adopted island inspired this novel, but despite my flights of fancy I have a strong streak of common sense which anchors me to logic. I created this imaginary country and its inhabitants, yet once I have taken that “What if?” leap into my fantasy world, within that framework I must remain consistent. It can be extremely annoying when I want a character to do something and my logical demon pops up saying “No – that won’t work.”
           But what can I do? One day my story - and the other books in the series - may reach a bookshop near you, and you'd be bound to notice if I made an error in logic, wouldn't you?

ABROAD

ABROAD. We live abroad. Deliver the phrase as a throw-away line and it sounds exotic, but if you tell people you live in Tenerife they immediately think of stag parties and sangria. It’s true that Reina Sofia AIRPORT is a heaving mass of humanity on Fridays, the usual change-over day for tourists. The coach park is full of suitcases, frayed tempers, and people dragging on their last cigarette before checking in or their first since leaving home.

AND many of them think they’re in Spain. But they’re wrong - a thousand miles wrong.

AFRICA is only 160 miles to the east - the hot, dry wind is full of Saharan dust that makes you cough - and the reason you go home burned a painful bright red is because the sun is African, not Mediterranean.

AMERICA is the next landfall west of the Canary Islands, and when the moon is full the waves have had 3000 miles of ATLANTIC in which to pick up speed – they can be huge.

ANNIVERSARIES. There are three this week I should mention.

It is 10 years since a violent storm hit Tenerife on March 31^st 2002, killing 8 people, sweeping huge containers into the sea in Santa Cruz, and toppling half of our electricity pylons.

The worst AVIATION disaster in history happened in 1977 when two planes collided at the north airport – around 600 perished in the fire when the fuel exploded.

AND 45 years ago, on APRIL 1^st 1967, I got married for the first time.

AG = silver. Read my “Toy poem” about a little silver man.