We have been busy at our finca in rural Mallorca lately. The Boss cleaned our terraces with his new  Kärcher pressure washer, and they’ve never looked so clean. As with many tasks done around the finca, there’s a consequence job: the powerful machine blasted away not only a load of winter grime, but also some of the grouting between the tiles. Ho hum.

When I haven’t been working on writing jobs, I’ve also been outdoors doing jobs – including painting one of the small walls blasted clean (of its former paint!) by the mean machine. Most of my time outside though has been spent on the relentless Battle of the Weeds. It was while doing a spot of weeding yesterday morning that I saw something very unusual in the lane that runs alongside our property.

There have been other strange sightings here over the years. We once saw two donkeys walking down the lane like a couple of people out for a country stroll. That experience turned into an inadvertent case of donkey-napping – and one of the early posts on this blog.

And a little faster . . .

On another occasion – while our dear friends Duncan and Kristina were visiting from the UK – we saw something even more unusual: a team of speed skaters, dressed in tight bright Lycra, speed skating up the lane – having been driven to the bottom of the valley in the team’s minibus. We were exhausted watching them whizz up the hill. They appeared to take it all in their glide.

And even racier . . .

Yesterday, Good Friday, I saw something else memorable in the lane, while out in the battlefield (garden). To be honest, seeing three walkers isn’t unusual, as people do drive out to our valley to walk along the peaceful lanes. I could hear that they were German: two young men and a woman – probably in their late 20s or early 30s. The guys were dressed in the sort of clothes you’d wear for a walk in the country; the woman wore . . . a white bikini (and presumably shoes, although I couldn’t see her feet).

I’m far from a prude, but somehow a bikini didn’t seem like the most appropriate apparel for someone miles from the sea or a public swimming pool – and walking around countryside that’s largely inhabited by Mallorcan farmers (some of them on the elderly side and likely to have crashed their tractors at the shock of seeing so much flesh exposed in public).

We were once reprimanded by one of our Mallorcan neighbours for working in the garden on a Sunday – God’s day. Goodness knows what they would have thought of Miss White Bikini on a Good Friday!

If you were hoping to see a photo of her, I’m afraid I didn’t take one. I’m sure the woman felt embarrassed enough when she realized that the outing her friends had planned was a walk in the country – and not a trip to the beach . . .