On the first morning here myself Karen and Tibu decided to go and explore the village. The villa is set outside of the village and so we have no immediate neighbours but just a couple of hundred yards down the road is the village of Ossó de Sió. It stands on the top of the hill and looks really quite distinctive. Before coming out here, I roamed around it on Google Maps and was slightly concerned that I could not find any facilities such as a bar or a shop. It has a church.

And we know all about that because we hear the bells ringing every quarter hour.

The other distinct thing about this village is it has an observatory. Standing tall above all the houses you can see the dome of an observatory with the doors ready to slide open to view the sky through a telescope. Not what you normally expect to find in a village, but this is a dark sky area and it does look beautiful at night, so I understand why that is there. However, if you get thirsty whilst observing the night sky, there doesn’t appear to be anywhere to go.

When we’re being shown around by Monserrat, she had said about using the communal swimming pool. We are quite familiar with these as Bogarra where Tibu comes from, has a huge swimming pool with diving boards and all sorts, which the village uses in the summertime. Apparently they also have a fiesta down at this swimming pool which sounded a bit weird, but we said we’d check it out.

The swimming pool is actually on the outskirts of the village, and as we walked towards it, we could see that there was a bar. Now Rachel was convinced that no Spanish village would not have a bar, and she was correct. The three of us walked down to the pool, to check out what it was like. I think calling it a swimming pool is a bit of an exaggeration.

It’s really a glorified paddling pool. At lunchtime it was completely empty, but the bar had a couple of patrons in there, mainly the life guard for the empty pool.

The barmaid had obviously done something to her ankle as she was on crutches, and her ankle was wrapped in a bandage. When we asked her for our drinks, she actually abandoned her crutches and just hopped everywhere on one leg. She was really quite good at the old one leg hop and could cover the entire area behind the bar bouncing along as she went.

She stood there pouring the beers with one leg bent at the knee. It was a bit like being served by a flamingo. Actually, that’s probably not a good example. I mean a flamingo could never operate a beer pump. Its wings just aren’t developed enough. I think it would also struggle with a toastie machine. I think if I was to set up a bar staffed by animals and birds I wouldn’t be recruiting flamingos. Now monkeys in theory would be a sensible choice. They have posable thumbs, but they have got a reputation for being quite lively. I would imagine there would be lots of meetings with HR for disciplinary chats if we employed monkeys behind a bar. But I digress. Back to the story

So we get our drinks. RACOONS. Raccoons would be the best things to work behind a bar. They are small so they could jump up onto the bar to pull the drinks. They have posable thumbs and I think with enough training, and, or electrodes attached to their heads, they probably could learn how to operate the coffee machine. That’s what I would use in my animal bar, raccoons. Really sorry for that Corbettesque diversion. We will get back to the story now.

After we downed our drinks, we continued our walk through the village. There were no shops. It was purely residential. As we were walking past one house, a lady pulled up in her car and got out and was immediately surrounded by stray cats.

She said to us that we could take them if we like, as there are loads of them, and they just come to her because she feeds them. We think her name was Yasmin, because the house she pulled up outside of was called “Casa Yasmin”. So we assumed she was Yasmin, or she was a friend of Yasmin, or she was a very decadent burglar but whatever she was, she seemed quite keen to get rid of the cats onto us.

And in some way we have.

But that’s a tale for next time.

Ps. Since I began writing this blog, I’ve noticed that my raccoon idea has already been adopted by the supermarket chain Dia. It would appear from their products that raccoons are quite able to wash glassware and clean up. See pictures below.

So they would be perfect bar staff.