Please activate JavaScript!
Please install Adobe Flash Player, click here for download
ePaper created 2014-06-22, 15:43:25 | version 1.31.00
20 News, Views & Sunshine TheCanaryNews.com El Periódico Inglés de Gran Canaria Summer 2014 Coming to this lovely island, is one of the best decisions many expats make. In fact the decision to leave one’s country of birth and become an immigrant to a foreign land can be both daunting and rewarding, giving you and your family great insight into people of other cultures and a sense of understanding for the diversity that makes places like this unique. Of course we all run in to small problems once in a while, regarding other people…or the “system”, but we all learn to forget them and move on… however it is not always so easy to do. One hard working local resident, a highly respected dental practitioner and devoted father, recently found himself landed in front of a judge over a minor altercation that he had seen as little more than an unnecessary confrontation with an obstinate and foolish acting elderly gentleman, in his own quiet neighbourhood, a semi-private, gated community next to a well known golf course in the sunny south of Gran Canaria. The communidad in which he lives is tranquil and well appointed, with a world-class hotel on site and luxuriant vistas across the golf- ing greens. There are long paved walkways running alongside the main road that takes you all the way around the golfing range, with floral verges and occasional examples of the local cacti, a children’s play area, a small supermarket, and access to swimming pools and various restaurants for anyone lucky enough to be resident or visi- tor. The roadways are calmed, with speed bumps, to ensure that what traffic there is stays at a low velocity, and there is even a yellow tar- macked, recreational “sports path” around the inner ring between the road and the golf course, especially designated with distance markers every 100m you travel from the entrance to the hotel, so that runners, cyclists and other active outdoors-types can keep fit and enjoy the lush surroundings without worrying about getting in the way of pedestrians, who walk primarily on the outer-ring pave- ment, as this is also the side where all of the residential dwellings and parking areas are located. At the beginning of May, Dr Eddie Basson took his two young sons out for a little cycle ride for the first time in this idyllic community, with his one-year old strapped to a seat on the cross bar. Dr Bas- son tells us “an elderly resident who was on the sports path sud- denly turned” it seems on purpose, to face the oncoming father and child, “with just a short distance of 10m” between them. Eddie slowed his bicycle so as to avoid a collision, only for the gentleman to then grab hold of the handle bars blocking his way forward. “The man was not able to communicate why he stopped us” says Eddie who himself is multilingual, speaks perfect English and is more than competent in Spanish “he was foreign as well, and may have been Dutch I think.” Eddie was confused by the man’s behaviour and tried to get him to explain “Instead he started screaming and pulling the handlebars.” “I removed his hands and moved him aside – but he lost balance, and so I reached out to hold him firmly by his wrist, mak- ing sure that he wouldn’t fall. For some reason he then decided to hold my handlebars again and drag me and my child towards the street.” So with his one-year-old son strapped to the bicycle and afraid of what might happen next, this father chose to bang heavily on the handlebars, in the hope that his assailant would let go without him having to push the man away. As Eddie’s wife pulled up to the con- fused scene in her car, the old man released his grip and his own wife now also started calling out from the other side of the street. Eddie simply needed to get his son away from the situation and so continued on his way, flustered and a little shocked but grateful that nothing more serious had resulted from the unpleasant and unprovoked confrontation. To his utter surprise, just two hours later, members of the Policía Local arrived at his family home to question him about a complaint they had received from his neighbour, who claimed to have been injured in a road traffic accident! It seems that during the brief struggle, which Eddie saw as no real struggle at all, the man had cut his hand on a cactus or similar and now was blaming Dr Bas- son for his wound, and it seems he had painted a wholly different picture to what had actually occurred, making a Denuncia report quickly and securing medical verification of his “injury”. The following day Dr Basson was asked by telephone to attend the national police station, which he arranged to do in the days that followed only to find himself unexpectedly placed in front of a judge, answering an accusation he believes to have been totally bogus and where the only evidence on offer was a medical report obtained, he thinks, by the man’s wife. Eddie was fined and or- dered to pay the old man compensation of several hundred euros. THEBEST INTEREST