RONDA - a true story in one hundred words.

In Great Britain we drive on the left, so we turn left at a roundabout, not right. This photograph reminded me so strongly of my years spent living abroad that I had to write about it, so here is my own piece of potted history - every word of it is true!

RONDA

We were living in Tenerife when the Cabildo introduced rondas. Many locals had never seen a roundabout, let alone driven round one.

 The first instructions in newspapers were wrong and had to be amended. Leaflets appeared in letterboxes, posters in supermarkets, there were endless discussions in bars.

Then, suddenly they were here.

Wise people stayed off the roads for a while, but others had jobs to get to, or shopping to do, and had no choice. There were countless accidents, many gesticulating arguments, a few deaths.

Years later the local drivers still hadn’t learned that a roundabout wasn’t a parking zone.

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Thanks as ever to Rochelle for hosting Friday Fictioneers, and to C E Ayr for the photo which brought back so many memories. To read other FF stories, click on the frog on https://rochellewisoff.com/

ONLY IN TENERIFE?

Returning for a brief visit to one of my original intentions for this blog, here are a few things that make me shake my head in amusement.

It's a lighthouse, right? Not really.
You could see the sea if you stood on the balcony at the top, perhaps - it's only about 10 kilometres away - but it makes a good location point in a place where street names are a metre long.

Isn't this fun - a knitted snake wrapped around a tree in the main seafront area of Santa Cruz.

It cheered us up on the way to a hospital appointment, which was presumably the intention - to put a smile on people's faces.
It worked for me!

This sign was on the boot of a car parked near our apartment -

?
- the mind boggles.

Some graffiti on the wall of the ruiined bull-ring - "FATTY I LOVE YOU"
- which could refer to any one of the dozens of obese youngsters we see around. It's good to know they're not missing out despite their bad eating habits.

Roundabouts were introduced in Tenerife about ten years ago. They were obviously designed to create handy parking for the shops nearby. This is only a mini roundabout but I've seen the same disregard for common sense in the centre of Los Cristianos!

And finally -
where else would you find melons growing on the beach?

Only in Tenerife -

- unless you know otherwise?

OFFERING TO THE GODS?

There's a roundabout in our village that I pass on my morning walk. It's as pretty as a little garden, but one road connects to the motorway so it's usually too busy to visit.
Then at the beginning of January, for reasons that now escape me, one Sunday morning I invaded the island. Beneath a palm tree lay a pile of fruit.

It hadn't just been dumped - you can see how carefully it was arranged - so I took a photograph, left it there, and walked away, wondering. Was it a child's school project - a study in decomposition? Some local ritual I hadn't heard about?
Or maybe it was an offering to the gods.

I checked every week - Sundays are quiet enough to cross the road - and a month later it was still there.
The weed had grown, the papaya had collapsed in on itself and the bananas were black, but the orange and apple were still fine. They were better preserved than the ones in my fridge. This is Tenerife, so I couldn't put their longevity down to freezing weather!

At the beginning of March the orange still looked whole, though I wouldn't have fancied eating it, but the apple was half rotten.
The oddest thing, though - someone had removed the weed and added a rock to the arrangement, but left the fruit undisturbed.

This week - three and a half months after I first saw it - the fruit has almost returned to nature, but the greatest mystery of all is that, on an island populated by millions of cockroaches, lizards birds and ants, I have not seen one insect anywhere near this offering. 

Perhaps the gods are protecting it.

ROCKS, RUINS & RBL

RUINED buildings have always fascinated me – they leave so much to the imagination. The holes in a castle wall where joists used to be conjure up images of floors and furniture, spiral stairs make me wonder how servants carried trays of food up to their masters. The skeleton of a shed in a French field was so striking that I took several photos and wrote it into a novel.

Until a firm of speculative builders scraped the surface from the former agricultural land around us, I could explore ROUGH-WALLED terraces and imagine the fields filled with potatoes or cabbages. There was a one-room house too – a ROOF-BEAM leaning against one wall and a tangle of herbs that was once a kitchen garden.

Overlooking the nearest banana plantation is a ROW of workers’ cottages, roofs and doors long gone and walls collapsed. Older locals remember when they were occupied by agricultural workers. If someone had bought them before the roofs fell in they could have made a lovely home with a grand view of the sea.

The builder’s ROADS are now as abandoned as those fields were, and are already going back to nature – I wonder what future generations will make of them?

ROUNDABOUTS

Tenerife has only had roundabouts for a few years. Before that, if you wanted to turn left you turned RIGHT, drove ROUND an island, and ended up having to cross traffic from both directions. The roads weren’t wide enough for feeder lanes.

Then the government discovered roundabouts and put them everywhere. Drivers who had lived on the island all their lives didn’t know what they were or how to use them. Each roundabout was soon strewn with glass, the number of cars with bashed-in doors increased, articles appeared in newspapers, and heated arguments RAGED in every café and bar. The Cabildo sent every household a letter explaining, with diagrams, how to drive round a roundabout. It appeared to have been written by someone who had only READ the theory.

And those striped triangular patches on the approach roads – the cross-hatching that indicates “Do not drive on this bit” – are considered a great place to park if you need to visit a nearby shop.

Things have settled down now, but any sensible driver avoids what the Brits call “The Magic Roundabout” in Los Cristianos. It has two lanes, which are always a RECIPE for disaster here - the local drivers regard the inner circle as an overtaking opportunity for those in a hurry. If you take the inside lane to turn left you could be stuck there all day, and if you opt for the outer circle you can practically guarantee that someone will carve you up by shooting across your bows to turn right.

And mini roundabouts? I saw a van yesterday approaching a mini-roundabout in Guaza from the wrong angle. Sensing danger, I waited. White van man overshot his left turn, slammed on his brakes, REVERSED practically onto my bonnet, and shot off up the road he’d been aiming for. You need to keep your wits about you, driving in Tenerife.

ROCKS

I had never really thought about rocks until we came to Tenerife, and was surprised by the different colours, textures and formations. Simply driving along the motorway, where the rock has been chipped away for cuttings, is a mobile lesson in how the layers of lava overlaid each other when the island was formed. There is rock so porous that bees can build hives in it, and rock so hard that a chipped edge is like a knife. There is blue rock and green rock, black and white rock layered like a cake, brown and red, yellow and orange, terracotta and cream.

No wonder my series of fantasy books is called “Living Rock”.

ROYAL BRITISH LEGION

We transferred our membership to the Tenerife branch of the Royal British Legion soon after we arrived. There were about 25 members then and, due to what is euphemistically called “natural wastage” we now number 17 – the youngsters don’t join, which is a shame.

For the past 5 years we have won the Noel Rogers Trophy for the overseas branch that raises the most Poppy Appeal money per member. Last year we got €11,000 and change – around €500 per member – our nearest rivals raised €44. Big is not always better! The photo was taken at Westhaven Bay in Costa del Silencio, where we hold our service, with (L-R) the British Ambassador to Spain, the OH who is Chairman. Paul our Vice-Chairman and Welfare Officer and his wife, and the previous Canary Islands Consul.

We exist mainly to deal with any welfare cases that come our way, which have ranged from the widow of an RAF pilot not being able to afford a new fridge to a young serviceman and his wife severely injured in a car accident and stuck in hospital for months. We also have a Remembrance Service each year, in the open air overlooking the sea, which is attended by about 350 people, some of whom book their annual holiday around that date. One year the crew of a Royal Navy vessel, in Santa Cruz on its way home from the Antarctic, joined us. That was a particularly emotional morning, the young sailors’ voices loud in the hymns and even louder later at the barbecue with karaoke!