November 15-21, 2025
SATURDAY 15 First impressions of Los Cancajos is that it will be even more lovely when all the building work is finished.
📌 I have secretly named one of our fellow hotel guests “Uncle Fester“, to the disapproval of my wife, even though she could not come up with a better name for him.
SUNDAY 16 I dreamt last night that King Charles and Queen Camilla strolled casually, arm in arm, into Casa Pipo, the bar/restaurant we were in for a drink. The grovelling owner welcomed them warmly, but everyone else paid no attention whatsoever. King Charles was tiny, as I remember it.
📌 The wi-fi at our hotel pool is fairly good, so I have decided that on this holiday I will revisit the albums of my youth. Today I’m listening to 10cc. Funny thing is that when I first knew this music 50 years ago, 12-inch vinyl was the format and records inevitably got scratched and prone to jumps (they all belonged to my sister, so I didn’t care). That is not the case with Spotify streaming, so the original plan to spend two weeks walking down memory lane using my ears as feet is not as foolproof as I imagined it would be when I first hatched it. What you do get instead with Spotify is, in this case, an understanding of the huge number of instrumental layers 10cc built their boring muso-music from.
MONDAY 17 In today’s holiday exercise in foraging my deep past I am shocked to learn that I still know every word of The Moody Blues’ 1972 album Seventh Sojourn. This is another of my sister’s vinyl 12-inch albums I listened to incessantly as a teenager. One verse from the song Lost In A Lost World was especially memorable
Some of them are living an illusion
Bounded by the darkness of their minds
In their eyes, it’s nation against nation against nation
With racial pride, sad hearts they hide
Thinking only of themselves
They shun the light (Shun the light)
They think they’re right (Think they’re right)
Living in their empty shells
I never really got into poetry as a youth, mainly because I had my sister’s album collection to deliver all the poetry any young man could ever need. Brief flirtations at school with the works of Ted Hughes, RS Thomas and Wilfred Owen were soon supplanted by the wordplay of Lennon/McCartney, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Even her stash of Motown Chartbusters albums delivered the goods.
📌 Revisiting Santa Cruz de La Palma.
But the climax of the day came later, back in our hotel lounge hearing a “typical” Spanish rendition of Tie A Yellow Ribbon from a dubious character called Joaquin Quintero.
“Stay on the bus, forget about us“…
TUESDAY 18
📌 Today’s nominated memory-lane musical artist is Paul Simon. The Paul Simon Songbook, his very first album before Simon & Garfunkel, is a source of dispute in my family. My sister claims that the 12-inch vinyl version I think of as my own, actually belongs to her. I say she is lying about that, refuse to meet her hectoring requests for repatriation and cling on stubbornly to my claim of ownership.
The album is notable for other reasons. Many of it songs were to feature later on various Simon & Garfunkel albums (tracks include The Sound Of Silence, A Most Peculiar Man, Kathy’s Song), but a few others hint at Paul Simon’s early immersion in the folk protest song (notably He Was My Brother, A Church Is Burning, The Side Of A Hill) – songs he has rarely ever performed since.
It is a pity when musicians, especially rich and privileged ones such as Paul Simon, choose to play down/disown the purity of these early works and the sentiments and messages they carried at the time. It’s as if their elevated status inflicts some sort of creative constipation.
WEDNESDAY 19 I’m counting the days before Keir Starmer’s chief of staff Morgan McSweeney falls on his sword. That’s probably the only way the PM can pull off a proper government “reset”, presuming he actually knows what he wants to reset, which might not be the case.
📌 Fatigued by news of Keir Starmer’s failings and the imminent implosion of AI, I found something a whole lot more interesting…
Scientists have discovered how parasitic ants use chemical warfare to engineer matricidal coups.
📌 We got the bus into town, then another one to the south of the island, which looked quite dull, so we came straight back to Santa Cruz.
📌 One of the big shocks that came from today’s memory-lane holiday music listening project is that Joe Jackson is British and not American. I think I only ever bought his album I’m The Man because of its cover design and the fact that it had the single It’s Different For Girls. Come to think of it, I might not even have bought it. I probably borrowed it from my mate Dave and taped it, like I did with a lot of albums back then. Dave had a job, I didn’t.
THURSDAY 20 It looks like the number-crunchers at the ONS (Office for National Statistics) have been screwing up on data collection and that net migration to the UK is actually falling rather than rising, as is popularly imagined.
📌 Michelle sent me a photo of my ceramic pendant collection after a first firing in the kiln. I never imagined any of them would survive. I will glaze them when we get back next week.
📌 We spent the day exploring by bus the precipitous uplands of the northeast of the island, where all the exposed volcanic rock outcrops remind you that La Palma, in common with all the other Canary islands, is in fact an ancient tectonic pustule.
📌 My wife is appalled by the holidaymakers at hotel buffet dining sessions who cram together random foodstuffs (pasta, fish, roast meat, cheese, potatoes, etc) onto a single plate.
📌 In case it rained continuously while we were on holiday, my wife downloaded several TV mini-series. The first, Trespasses, based on the novel by Louise Kennedy, we have finished already, and as an inter-faith love story consumed by the Troubles in Belfast, it touches in many ways that defy explanation. The second mini-series, House of Guinness we’ve watched only the first episode and it already looks like Peaky Blinders meets Succession. My wife fell asleep (too much wine) half way through Episode 1, so we had to watch it again. Then we started Episode 2 and she fell asleep during that, too (too much wine again), so we now have to watch that again.
FRIDAY 21
📌 My wife is cruelly disdainful of my imitation of the phrase “Pròxima parada: Centro Cancajos” (next stop, central Cancajos) uttered by the woman on the bus’s speaker system.
📌 The deterioration of my hips means serious walking is a thing of the past. But the spirit of adventure remains, and La Palma’s buses are surprisingly nimble (courtesy of fearless drivers) on the many hairpin bends that litter this beautifully craggy landscape. Today we did a pretty comprehensive exploration of the top of the island: first West to Los Llanos, then North to Puntagorda, over East to Barlovento, then back South to Santa Cruz.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
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Billy's Scrapbook 