IT'S difficult enough trying to make small talk at a party with people you’ve never met before in Britain but when faced with a party where the majority of guests are Canarian, Spanish or Peruvian and the conversation is almost entirely in Spanish it’s incredibly difficult to come across as anything other than a half wit who’s had a personality by-pass.

But those are the sort of social challenges you face when you live outside of any ex-pat bubble in the north of Tenerife and it’s what Jack and I had to face on Saturday night.

We’d been invited by our neighbours to attend a sort of memorial evening of music, food and friends to mark the anniversary of their mum’s death a year ago this month. We’d known about the evening for a couple of weeks and I think I intended to look up a few bits of vocabulary before we went to give me a head start on the conversation attempts but the peaches got in the way.

This year the peach tree at the bottom of the garden has yielded a bumper crop of big, juicy, sweet peaches and they’d reached harvesting perfection on Wednesday. So we’d spent the whole of Friday and Saturday, peeling, chopping, boiling, sterilizing jars and finally bottling 10lbs of peach jam and 10lbs of peach chutney. Pathetic though it may sound, we were exhausted and when the last lid finally went on the chutney at 5 pm on Saturday afternoon, instead of studying the dictionary for useful conversational aids, I headed for a siesta and Jack got out the PlayStation.

At 7.30 pm we strolled across the lawn and the long shadows of the evening sun to the patio of the beautiful restored hacienda of our neighbour where about 50 guests were already gathered. We just about had time to say hello to the only four people we knew and grab a bottle of beer when people began to sit down on chairs dotted around the patio, the stone seats and the wooden verandah that fronts the house.

There was a tearful introduction to the evening from one of our hostesses and then a reading in Spanish of Henry Scott Holland’s poem “Death is nothing at all” before a string quartet seated below the bougainvillea arbour struck up Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’. It was all very poignant and beautiful and then suddenly, out of nowhere, Mismo came trotting into the garden. Mismo (pronounced Mee-mo), is the smallest, cutest dog you have ever seen who looks as though he’s been knitted. He jumped onto the platform where the musicians were playing and started running in between their feet, his tail wagging at a rate of knots. The musicians began to giggle, the guests joined in and the atmosphere lifted from mourning to party.

When the music was over, delicious Peruvian and Canarian food was all laid out in the wooden beamed dining room and everyone filled their plates and went back onto the candlelit patio to eat. Jack and I managed to have snippets of conversations about pigeon shooting, the menagerie of dogs and cats that roam the garden, the splendid full moon which shone down on the proceedings and the progress of Tenerife football team who are on the brink of promotion to La Liga. Pleased with ourselves we relaxed and enjoyed the magic of the surroundings and the impromptu entertainment that had struck up since the food was finished.

Someone had brought a guitar along and had begun to strum some traditional Spanish tunes. Then one of the Peruvian women started singing and everyone began to join in the chorus and hand clap the rhythms. Loud applause at the end of every song kept the woman on her feet for a dozen numbers including the ‘Canarias’ anthem which we hear at every fiesta we go to on the island, Guantanamera and a final rousing chorus of ‘Adelante Tenerife!’ – the local equivalent of ‘Come on you Reds!’

We finally left at about half past midnight, armed with leftover food, to stroll back across the lawn in the moonlight.

Lunch today; fluffy boiled potatoes, tangy ceviche and homemade peach chutney followed by lemon tart. Life is good.

Andrea Montgomery – Author Going Native in Tenerife and Real Tenerife Island Drives . Photos by Jack Montgomery at http://www.flickr.com/photos/snapjacs

  • Click on the 'Related link' on the right for Andrea's previous blogs