Thank Goodness for El Molino, I Think…

Feeling pretty swanky in pristine monochrome, it was a cheerfully prompt entrance that I made to Restaurante El Molino that first day and soon found myself on a guided tour of premises and colleagues with handsome Valencian barman, Ángel (an-hell).

First was head chef Rafael – Rafa to his friends – a short and dumpy specimen of Spanish manhood boasting more gaps than teeth and, despite my Spanish being somewhat improved by that stage, for the most part utterly unintelligible.

Rafa hailed from Córdoba in Andalucía (anda-loo-thia) – a region renowned for producing impenetrable accents, but personally I remain convinced that it was actually down to the dearth of gnashers, as I found Isabel; his equally tiny but rather more dentally endowed wife; infinitely easier to understand.

With them in the kitchen was Miguel, a cheerfully hirsute and heavyset young man from Cádiz (cad –eeth).

Offering potential for confusion, my fellow waiter was also Miguel, but this Miguel was from Valladolid (current title holder of “most inventive pronunciation, ever” – by-ad-ol-eeth) in Western Spain, and I disliked him on sight. Far too tactile for my liking, he appeared, like many gropey men, to be distinctly disdainful of the fairer sex so I decided there and then to give him a wide berth.

The owners of the establishment were Ángel’s older brother, Vicente (bee-then-tay) and a Mallorquín called Tomeo. Sitting me down to explain the working conditions, they unwittingly improved my day yet further when I was informed of the monthly salary. 165,000 pesetas was hugely much more than I had earned as an unenthusiastic junior receptionist in England – but at their next words, my jaw dropped.

‘Day off?’

‘End October.’

‘?!?!’

Gulp.  I had just been welcomed to the joys of seasonal work. With only six months of guaranteed tourism, it made sense to make the most of it, but…gulp.

So there it was: a monthly salary shaped seductively like a small fortune, but in return a minimum twelve-hour working day for six months with no day off.

“Character Building” I think my parents would have called it. “Soul Destroying” was a term I felt would be more apt.

But to my great surprise, I actually quite enjoyed those first few months.

Without wanting to honk my own bugle, I was rather popular with the customers – the majority of whom were (unsurprisingly) British, German or Scandinavian – people on holiday are generally far more laid-back and undemanding that when they dine out at home, so although we were always very busy, the atmosphere was a pleasant one.

This, despite the fact that the picturesque little canal that ran along the bottom of the restaurant’s terrace appeared to have one sole purpose, and that was to provide a breeding ground for a particularly virulent strain of mosquito: I am not sure that seeing a waitress madly scratching various parts of her anatomy was terribly conducive to an enjoyable meal, but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about that.

My linguistic skills were also galloping along; Rafa and I could actually hold a semblance of a conversation (at the beginning of the working day, before I become too exhausted to concentrate) and I think that occasionally our conversations even made sense, which was nothing short of miraculous.

The biggest source of angst was my feet.

After racing around almost incessantly from 11 o’clock in the morning until sometimes 2 o’clock the next morning, I cried myself to sleep every night for an entire fortnight because of the searing pain. During the working day I even nipped off to the restaurant loo when occasion permitted, just so I could lift those miserable appendages, swollen and throbbing, off the ground for a blissful couple of minutes.

But even that pain passed when I took the advice to swap pretty black pumps, for some orthopaedic looking things that everyone seemed to be wearing.

It was like stepping into little clouds and a vast, if unsightly, improvement.

Note to readers: Should you ever be in Spain and be suffering from similar podagral discomfort, bunions or the like, just go to your nearest pharmacy and ask for zuecos (th-wecos). They come in two delightful shades – navy blue and dentistry white – and cannot fail to add a little “je ne sais quoi” to any discerning holidaymaker’s outfit.