Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts
the stars to flight.
And, lo, has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light!

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable – Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’

Cosas de España/Galicia

An article from the estimable Mark Stücklin on the latest rental control developments. Something socialist governments always play with – on the basis of good intentions – before re-learning that that controls are always counterproductive. There are always better ways to address the problem of high prices.

One of the reasons I wouldn’t live in the south of Spain – here and here.

I recently promised to send this video to someone but couldn’t track it down. Now that I have, I can’t recall who it was for. So, if it was you, this is for you . . . But anyone is free to enjoy it, as I’ve done several times.

I absolutely must get one of these Galician things . . .

Portugal

More than 30 years ago, my elder daughter stopped over in Lisbon and later told me that the city was extremely run-down but, with investment, could be magnificent. How correct she was is evidenced by this (gushing) article on the place. I don’t really disagree with the writer but, as with over-touristed Oporto, I was there recently and would not rush back to it, at any time of the year. Not to Sevilla, and the Alhambra. And possibly Málaga, But I’m hoping Valencia next month will be different, for my first visit.

The UK

Immigration: Richard North: The Overton widow is being shifting by the currently extreme idea of ‘remigration’, which brings zero-migration closer to the mainstream, and brings into high focus the prospect of voluntary repatriation and compulsory deportation of immigrants convicted of committing violent and/or sexual offences.

The EU

Immigration: In case you missed it . . . Germany has begun deporting Afghan criminals back to their home country. Similar robust action is taking place in Italy. Sweden, too, I think. Bit of a trend . . . How long before Spain pays Morocco to take Ceuta and Melilla??

The Way of the World

A British columnist says peak woke has yet to be reached, at least in the Anglosphere.

Quote of the Day

I was reminded of this today . . . Only a fool makes predictions. Especially about the future. Attributed to Sam Goldwyn, founder of MGM.

Did you know?

While the stems of the rhubarb plant might be quite tasty, its leaves are poisonous. As I discovered at 15, when working on a pig farm on The Wirral in England.

You Have to Laugh

In the UK, a supermarket is offering a paella sandwich . . .

Finally . .

MY YEAR IN THE SEYCHELLES

• Episode 1: 12 September 2024: Why VSO?
• Episode 2: 13 September 2024: The Leaving of Liverpool
• Episode 3: 14 September 2024: An interlude: The Seychelles back then
• Episode 4: 14 September: Departure, Nairobi and Arrival
• Episode 5: 15 September: Arriving in Mombasa
• Episode 6: 16 September: The YCWA in Mombasa
• Episode 7: 17 September: The flight to Mahé
• Episode 8: 18 September: Our Arrival
• Episode 9: 19 September: Early Days
• Episode 10: My Colleagues and Some Early Adventures
• Episode 11: Mr Warren and Me

Episode 12: Chris Green

Take a narrow strip of land 17 miles long, isolate it from external influences of all kinds, throw in a couple of thousand negroes, Europeans and Asians and mix well over a couple of hundred years. And don’t be surprised if you come up with a few strange, a few peculiar, a few humorous and a few downright eccentric characters. The Seychelles had them all.

In particular they had Chris Green.

Chris worked for the Nuffield Foundation and had been in ‘the Seychelles for years. He gave the impression the islands had been built round him. Well over 6 foot tall and bordering between solidity and obesity, he towered above most of the population. Physically and mentally he was a giant of a man.

Chris and his Chinese wife, Sylvia, lived in Victoria in a large, two-storeyed house called ‘Kit-Kat’. Since he’d devoted his many years in the islands to bettering the social welfare of the Seychellois, Chris was much loved by the poor. Since he’d had little time for the social rounds of English and French expatriates, he was also much maligned by the rich.

Exactly how and when Chris Green first loomed into our volunteer lives is now obscure but I can remember writing home more than once complaining that some odd fellow from the Nuffield Foundation insisted on taking us on conducted tours of the islands’ ‘social centres’. Because of this, my initial feeling towards Chris was one of antipathy and it was only frequent exposure to his character that caused me to alter my opinion.

During the first few weeks of our stay, however, Martin and I grew to dread the approach of his decrepit Hillman van, since it heralded yet another trip across pitted, boulder-strewn cart tracks to some desolate corner of the island, where we’d be shown a small concrete building – the local social centre – which looked remarkably like the other 4 or 5 we’d already seen.

Within a few days of our arrival on Mahé, Chris had insisted on taking us over hill and dale, hour after hour, on the pretext that his daughter, Cecile, on holiday from England, wanted to see some bay or other. The fact that Cecile looked bored out of her mind and the fact that we made it quite obvious we actually were had little or no effect on Chris, who dragged us on regardless.

But we later had every reason to be grateful for the trip. For one thing, if we’d stayed home, we wouldn’t have cracked the oil sump casing on the bettered Austin Pennant that the Seychelles government had given us. Wouldn’t, therefore, have burnt out the bearings in the engine and rendered the car useless. Hence we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to walk the 3 miles to school each morning for 3 months. No wonder we took to avoiding him like the plague.

Once the Public Works Department had consigned our car to the scrap heap, we were forced, on our jungle expeditions, to travel in Chris’s van. On these trips, he’d cheerfully regale us, time after time, with his account of how easy it was to pass the driving test in the Seychelles. Laughing, he would reel off the names of the 10 worst drivers in the islands’ history – all the time blissfully unaware that he himself drove like a blindfolded monkey.

Each visit to the outback become a nightmare, with Martin and me crouched uncomfortably in the back, rattling off prayer after prayer to the patron saint of terrified travellers. For some reason, Chris possessed a pathological aversion to use of the steering wheel and would resign himself to this only when absolutely essential, and always at the very last moment. As some social centres lay on the other side of the island, over perilously narrow mountain roads, we frequently went in fear of our lives. That we survived physically intact is convincing testament to the power of prayer.

Chris, he never tired of telling us, had been in the Seychelles since 1937 and it showed. If one were looking a word to sum up Chris Green, I suppose ‘dynamic’ would be at the very end of the list. He got things done alright but at a slow, ponderous pace that could drive one to distraction.. He had, in this respect, become more Seychellois than the Seychellois. If anything was worth doing, it was worth doing slowly.

It was probably this way of looking at life that irritated us more than any other of Chris’s foibles. And it was not until we had become well accustomed, not to say resigned, to his lack of pace that we could come to like Chris. In the end, we put it down to the internal complaint of which he died shortly after we’d left the islands.

Chris’s house, Kit Kat, was set just a couple of yards back from the main, i.e. the only, road out of Victoria going south. From the verandah, one could gaze out at Victoria harbour and at the little group of islands just beyond. St Anne’s Island: small and cone-shaped, whereon – local rumour had it – there was an anti aircraft gun which had been lost some years back and not yet found; Long Island: long and flat and smothered, like all the others, in a blanket of palm trees; Round Island: small and round; and finally Cerf Island: the home of a one-time leper colony, now used as a prison. Or as alternative accommodation for those breaking Dr McGregor’s quarantine. About which more anon.

Kit Kat was furnished with tables, chairs and cabinets that Chris had lovingly fashioned out of orange boxes and tea chests in the late 1930s. If the chairs weren’t exactly comfortable, they were at least functional. And very attractively painted.

Chris was very proud of his furniture. They had cost him very little and had served him admirably. All, that is, except the large dining room table, which Chris had constructed by placing one large piece of wood over 4 central orange boxes. A simple construction that worked well if all the diners sat along the two longer sides of the tabletop. On certain occasions, however – Christmas for example – numbers would make it necessary for 2 or more people to sit at the top and bottom of the table, i. e. along the shorter sides. This would have the unfortunate effect of highlighting the basic defects in Chris’s design, since if any of the latter group exerted more than average force with his knife or placed his elbows on the table, the opposite end of the table would catapult into the air, showering food and drink on all present.

Kit Kat itself was a typical Seychellois construction. Large, square and ugly, it had 2 rooms and a veranda upstairs, and 3 rooms and a porch downstairs. The number of windows was a minimal. So, regardless of the weather outside, the interior was in perpetual darkness. The ground floor was divided into one large room – stretching from one side of the house to the other – and this served as lounge and dining room. On the front of this room had been tacked one tiny room and the porch. From the porch, 4 or 5 concrete steps led down to the 10 square feet of front garden, where Chris kept his van, and then to the road. On the back of the large room was the narrow kitchen and this also stretches from one side of the house to the other.

The upstairs area, access to which was from the kitchen, was divided into 2 rooms of equal proportion and the covered verandah lay along the front of both of these. One of the rooms served as Chris and Sylvia’s bedroom and the other he used as a study. Here, Chris would sit in semi-darkness plodding methodically away at one of his 5 typewriters. None of these was less than 20 years old and each was in immaculate condition, lovingly cared for over the years. Four of

them stood on a shelf next to the phone, each in its tailored wooden box, and they would only see the light of day, such as it was in that room, when Chris decided to swap the typewriter he’d been using for one of the ones convalescing on the shelf. No-one was allowed to unlock any of the boxes unless Chris was present to point out the merits of old fashioned craftsmanship. As with all good museums, we were allowed to look but never to touch.

Chris prided himself on a collection of several thousand paperbacks and these constituted the sole decoration for his study. On the green, homemade shelves that lined 3 walls of the room, stood books ranging from translations of Livy to Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Chris’s Quaker faith didn’t preclude a catholicity of taste. But I don’t for one minute suppose that Chris had read all or even most of the books which littered the room. He just collected books as some people collect stamps. Old friends visiting the 3eychelles would bring him packages of books which he would prop up on the shelves and promptly forget about. It wasn’t as if his job left him time to read more than one book a year.

As far as I could make out, the Nuffield Foundation employed Chris to improve the social amenities of the poorer Seychellois. This involved planning and building social centres in various parts of Mahé and helping the local villagers to set up and run their own dances, films and other social activities. These were the places that he dragged us to more or less nightly during our first few weeks on Mahé, It would be an understatement to say that Chris was dedicated to his

work. Night and day he would travel, in his battered old van, to some remote part of the island, where he’d join battle with the local priest on the building of a social centre or sit in on a local committee. Once established, he would visit the centres frequently, providing moral support in times of crisis and praise in times of success. And everywhere he went, Sylvia followed with a flask of tea and biscuits. Chris, after all, was not a young and his health was not really up to the

amount of work he put in.

It was to one of the incipient social centres that the majority of our initial trips with Chris took us. At Anse Royale, some 20 miles down the coast road from Victoria, stood a disused lunatic asylum – ‘L’asyle’. Chris proposed to knock down the asylum and build a social centre on the foundations.

Towards the end of 1965, therefore, we travelled to Anse Royale 2 or 3 times a week and smashed the asylum to pieces.

But it was no easy task. The walls, some of them 3 feet thick, were built of coral and granite and all we had by way of demolition tools were sledgehammers and our hands. Fortunately, very little cement had been used in the construction of the building and we developed a modus operandi

whereby each of us stood on top of a wall and knocked it, bit by bit, from under our feet.

This method was not without its risks of course. But the inevitable injury was caused by something entirely different. The cell doors of the asylum were at least 8 feet high, wooden and very, very thick. They were slotted into the floor by means of extensions to the bottom of the door-frame and, in the absence of a crane, they were one hell of a job to get out. The usual method was to knock away the surrounding walls, chip away the floor around the frame extensions and then push the door to the ground. In this way, we’d successfully removed all the doors but one.

This final door resisted our every effort to push it to the ground and we naturally became a trifle frustrated and annoyed. At last, we were within an inch of success and I manoeuvred myself into the position offering the greatest leverage. Just as I was about to tell the others to delay pushing, they did so and the door came crashing down on a huge block of coral. As the dust settled, the reason for my piercing scream became apparent. My foot was between the prostrate door and said block

of coral. I still have the scar on my ankle, later detailed on my passporta.

By some miracle, nothing was broken, but I limped off, badly bruised and cut, to the Anse Royale clinic, where the doctor took the opportunity to jab needles into various parts of my anatomy.

The ride back to Victoria on the back of Martin’s motor cycle was far from comfortable. And, for several weeks after my accident, I chose to risk death in a car accident, rather than subject my injured foot to the vibrations of Martin’s bike. This was a difficult decision, made no easier by my realisation of what nightly trips in the Hillman meant – apart from loose bowels, of course.

Chris had 2 abiding loves and he would indulge both of them while driving – for want of a better word. His major passion was for revealing the truth about personalities, past and present, in the Seychelles. And, in between one lurid story and the next, he’d pander to his second great love – practical demonstrations of his knowledge of opera.

Chris’s fund of personal tit-bits was limitless and, if one could stomach his slow, halting narrative style, one could amass a dossier on every living and dead politician and priest who’d ever practised his trade in the Seychelles. Unfortunately for me, and for the other occupants of the car, Chris could never remember whether he’d related any particular story on a previous occasion and, rather than let any opening pass by, he would treat us to 3, 4 and even 5 hearings of the same morsel of scandal. Murmurings of “Heard it” or “You’ve told us that one, Chris.” were brusquely pushed aside or just ignored. He was a real professional.

It’s hard to decide, in retrospect, whether sitting through the same story several times was worse than sitting through Chris’s rendition of an operatic aria just once. Compared with his singing, his driving was superlative.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d had some conception of volume control but the only only time Chris would come below 80 decibels would be to hurl abuse at some pedestrian who’d had the effrontery to walk on the road. It never seemed to occur to Chris that, since there was no pavements, there was really nowhere else they could walk. Nobody swung through the trees any more.

Chris had a third habit which Martin found even more distressing than the previous two. This one he shared with Paddy Taylor and it was addressing me as Martin and Martin as Colin. For me, it was often more amusing than irritating but for Martin, who went to work with Chris after a 3 month spell in teaching, it was unbearable. On several occasions I called in to Kit Kat after school, to find Martin pacing up and down, doing a very good impression of a gibbering idiot and muttering: “Jesus! If he calls me Colin once more I’ll kill him!”

But life wasn’t always Hell with Chris. You just had to take the bad times with the good and one, in particular, of the latter stands out in my memory.

This occurred not long after Martin had started to work for Chris on a part-time basis, spending a few days a week working for the Nuffield foundation and the rest vegetating behind a desk at the Labour and Welfare Department. One of Martin’s Nuffield tasks was to help Chris in allocating the clothing that Oxfam had kindly sent out for the needy of the Seychelles Islands. This clothing arrived periodically in huge square bundles and, being short of help, Chris had stockpiled the last 3 or 4 deliveries in a large warehouse in the centre of Victoria. From the outside just another ugly building. on the inside, the warehouse was unprecedented chaos.

The Clothing Store, as it was grandiosely called, was not particularly large and nor was it particularly well ventilated. Come to think of it, it wasn’t particularly well lit either. About 40 yards long, 10 yards wide and 30 feet high, it served mainly as a meeting place for the dust particles of Victoria. In all probability, only proximity of the police station, which was next door, had prevented the local populace breaking in and stealing the contents wholesale. But, when we visited it for the first time, nothing had disturbed the dust for months.

Stretching down the 2 sides of the interior, 5 or 6 feet from the wall, was a collection of garments, taken from previous bundles and draped over a piece of string tied between 2 poles at either end of the building. It was as if every jumble sale in England had sent its rejects to Chris Green and he’d hung them up for inspection. Between the clothes lines and the walls lay dozens of bundles, some half unpacked, some merely opened and some untouched. And in the centre of the floor, just visible between the ubiquitous layer of dust, lay odd bundles of very odd clothes.

Working there did nothing for my hayfever.

As you’d expect, I grew to love Chris. Eventually. In particular for a trick he taught me and which allowed me to earn considerable money for the college in which I taught. And which I’ve shown to guests at dinners in my house over the years. But that’s for another episode.

When Chris died in 1966, the Seychelles lost one of its most dedicated workers and one of its greatest personalities. I remember him with huge affection. And wonder where his lovely daughter is now.

My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts, either after reading on line or in my FB group Thoughts from Galicia.

The Usual Links . . .

• You can get my posts by email as soon as they’re published. With the added bonus that they’ll contain the typos I’ll discover later. I believe there’s a box for this at the bottom of each post. If you do this but don’t read the posts, I will delete your subscription. So perhaps don’t bother if you have other reasons for subscribing . . .
• For new readers: If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city there.
• For those thinking of moving to Spain:– This is an extremely comprehensive and accurate guide to the challenge, written by a Brit who lives in both the North and the South and who’s very involved in helping Camino walkers. And this is something on the so-called Beckham Rule, which is beneficial – tax-wise – for folk who want to work here. Finally, some advice on getting a mortgage. And this article ‘debunks claims re wealth and residency taxes’. Probably only relevant if you’re a HNWI. In which case, you’ll surely know what that stands for.