Summertime

 It's summer, it's still Pandemic and I'm not  on holiday because I teach English on Zoom, from my house. 

The weather has been hot, and because Jaca is a great base, we've been able to do lots of excursions. The other day we did a tough one: La Raca in Astún. We didn't get to the top, but we weren't far off.

This was just a rest: we walked all the way!

There's a ski jump; I'd  seen it from afar before but never so close! Jumpers must be quite mad! It gives me vertigo just looking at it!

It was foggy in Astún when we started and a lot of the way. But higher up the distinctive peak of the Midi d'Ossau rose above the fog.

La Raca isn't like Candanchú for flowers, but I did find this lovely one though. It's yellow mountain saxifrage: saxifraga aizoides L

Lady orchid

 In our walks quite near our house we've recently found some lovely orchids.

They stand on their own, the nearest neighbour about a metre away on the rough verges of the outskirts of town. I put my photo in my lovely plant identifying app Plantnet and it came up with Lady orchid, Orchis purpurea. 

Virtually anything!

 At the moment, Jaca is closed. As of midnight last night, nobody is allowed in or out of the district without a good and official reason. This is because the rate of infections with Covid 19 have risen from none to double figures since the Easter holidays, today is May Day and next Friday is Jaca's festival, the First Friday, and it's not going to be celebrated in public. We've cancelled the church service. This is what we can see from afar:

Oh well, it's only nine days, and the state of alarm will be over and they'll have to find andother way of controlling infections until we are all vaccinated. It's coming along, but we're not there yet.

There are some things we've got used to, ways we compensate for our changed lives. One of them is virtual meetings of different kinds- meeting family, workouts. I've become a member of a group called Team Body Project. They have quite a lot of workouts published on Youtube which you can do in your home. They are challenging, encouraging and fun. I did them for several months before subscribing (paying) and then found access to programmes and lots of workouts , even new ones every week. So I do lots of exercise and am pretty fit even though we don't go out so much.

That's one of the virtuals.

The other is singing. I miss singing in a choir. I miss my friends. We can communicate on Whatsapp but it's not the same as rehearsing together. We started off well last year with a few projects but I think we got discouraged; you can't really rehearse together on Zoom because of the time lag. I took part in a large-scale project before Christmas to sing Haendel's Hallelujah chorus. We were given films and tracks to follow and we had to record audio and video with specific instructions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXFhkmyVRgM Follow the link and you'll see the finished product. You won't see me though! I've hunted through and although my name is in the credits, I'm not visible. It's a lovely piece of work but I was a bit disappointed. 

A couple of months ago, through a link in Facebook I started a project with the Stay At Home Choir. This was started during the first Lockdown in the UK by two young English musicians, Jamie Wright and Tori Langdon. They did many amazing projects over the year, presenting a piece of music, learning tracks to point people in the right direction and then organising Zoom sessions to train, rehearse and encourage the sing. The first project I did was an old pop song called Songbird, arranged and accompanied by the King's Singers, who took part in some rehearsals and even let us into their own rehearsals on the screen. In the end you have to record yourself-you listen to the guide track in one ear and send in the video to be blended into the others. I've just sent in the video for the second project, a new composition of Locus Iste, specially written and presented by Gareth Malone, who is a very well-known and popular choir leader in the UK. I thinke there were literally thousands of us.

This is just one page of a Zoom session. If you can't do the time, you can catch up on Youtube. It's not like a "real" rehearsal, but it's the best we can do at the moment. I learn a lot; even though I've been in choirs for 25 years or so; always in Spain. It's nice to do it in English for a change.

Bird Cherry

 Last year, we literally missed spring; we were stuck indoors except for essential shopping trips. We are lucky enough to have a little garden which we could enjoy and be outside without leaving the house, but even so it's not the way to enjoy the spring.

This year, it's still pandemic. We're not locked down and we are allowed anywhere in the autonomous community of Aragón-we've been to Zaragoza a couple of times, and to Huesca to get our first vaccinations.

Now it's April. I had daffodils in my garden,

I know there aren't so many but they were the first ones; later there were some lovely narcissi in between them.

This is a photo I took to identify the white flowers in the foreground, which are probably radishes, but you can see some of the lovely yellow narcissi as well.

There have been tulips-not so many, and lots of grape hyacinths, which do very well here.

At the right time the plum trees were lovely, although ours had such a radical professional pruning it wasn't lush!

What really is lush, gorgeous, is the bird cherry down the road. 

It's so pretty people turn to look as they go past!

Prunus padus L

Here is a little corner in Jaca where I found what I think is apple blossom, cherries already setting and bay.

Almond trees

 It's late February. Here in Jaca I've got daffodils in the garden, but the countryside is rather harsh and dry; there was deep snow in January and the long grass and bushes are still rather flattened. 

Today we drove down to Huesca, on the old road through Ayerbe to try and see the almond trees in blossom. There wass some thick fog on the way, and the almond trees had mainly finished blooming. However, the views, particularly of the Mallos de Riglos were spectacular, and there were a few almond trees as well.

Life in Christmas carols

 Christmas, New Year and Epiphany (Kings Day) have been and gone. We have celebrated, but the celebrations have been subdued, because of travel restrictions, social distancing and prohibitions on singing and other things. It's been snowy here for more than a week. It's been bitterly cold; yesterday the thermometer in our kitchen window showed -5° in the morning. There are piles of frozen snow everywhere and our roof has a frightening overhang of snow; before entering the front door you have to look up and check that the fall isn't imminent.                  

Walking has been difficult. Last week, when the snow was fresh, the theme in my brain was Good King Wenceslas. 

Trudging through the deep snow, following footprints to find the best route.

Now it's just cold. The snow has set hard. The theme today is more like "In the Bleak Midwinter"

Frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone. Snow had fallen, snow on snow.