It is not every houseguest who weeds at five o’clock in the morning. But I think that Paul Squared has blazed the way for the behaviour of future visitors. I will post a little list of soulless tasks to be done in the kitchen and trust that future guests take the hint!
Yesterday evening after their arrival and the customary visit to the local restaurant we spent the rest of the night sampling the quality of the house wines in various establishments and went to a well deserved rest at some ungodly hour of the morning.
The beach regime has been adhered to and health immersions in the sea have added to a feeling of wellbeing.
This feeling was completely dissipated at lunchtime when, with our first choice restaurant closed for the summer holidays we unwittingly made a major mistake of going to an adjacent alternative - which had been more than OK when we last patronized it.
Without doubt we given the worst menu del dia that I have ever eaten in Castelldefels!
From the tepid arroz a la cubana which was eventually brought to the table after an interminable wait for the menu to the so-called tuna steaks which were dry and inedible and the potato chunks were hard and tasteless the whole meal was a disaster. The waiter seemed incapable of the simplest tasks and amongst other ineptitudes he managed to overturn three bottles of beer. When he finally told us that there was no sweet included in the menu we were ready to give up. He offered us coffee which at least seemed a safe bet. Café con hielo came with one stingy piece of ice that was incapable of chilling the drink adequately. To cap this culinary disaster we found when the bill arrived that we had been charged for the coffee. We left no tip!
Paul Squared’s suggestion that we should have a barbecue in the evening was greeted with enthusiasm, especially by me, as I had not eaten my main course in the so-called restaurant.
A barbecue also seemed like an excellent excuse to replace the somewhat rancid equipment which had been gently rotting in its own ashes for some time. Toni remembered seeing a rather elegant machine in the Bauhaus supermarket (how they get away with using that name I do not know) which is our version of Do-it-all.
After a memory-cleansing swim in the pool we decanted ourselves into the car and set off for Gava to buy the new barbecue. We had been wondering at the number of punters on the beach and on the streets in Castelldefels and we now wondered at the paucity of people in the car park of the supermarkets.
The one time you can guarantee that DIY stores are open in the UK is on a Bank Holiday when the population driven by some strange inner necessity flock to these shops and on Rumney Common bring the entire traffic system to a grinding halt. Spain is not Britain. All the shops were closed. It was a Bank Holiday – which explained the jigsaw parking and the blanket coverage of the beach with bodies and parasols.
The meal (using the old barbecue which we thankfully had not thrown away) was excellent and even the mozzies did not attack with their usual venom.
When the inevitable rogue insect did strike then the bite was treated with the “penny against the swelling for 15 minutes” technique that we had recently learned from the Internet and which is astonishingly effective. It really does work!
A relatively early night to prepare us for the trip to Sitges tomorrow.
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