Autumn

Today it started to feel a bit cold and we needed coats when we went out into the windy morning. You couldn't see the mountains for the clouds on them. Looks like the autumn weather has come at last. There are fallen leaves all over the pavements just to prove it really is the beginning of November.

Yesterday we went to Gavín, a village just past Biescas in the Tena valley-first to visit the Mozarabic chapel of San Bartolomé and walk in the country, and then then a wander round part of Gavín. It was completely destroyed in the civil war; only one building remained standing, and now there are quite a lot of newly-built houses. Very pretty and well-kept. Was there one balcony or windowsill without pots of geraniums decorating it?

It was warm and sunny - for November, and the trees on the hillsides were in their autumn colours.

Mountain flowers

You can see this is an old photo; it's from when my camera was new. We went to Cerler, the highest Pyrenean ski resort in Aragon. I found this patch of spectacular flowers which turned out be aconite; monk's hood (of course it's terribly poisonous) but aren't they pretty?

Tomatoes, figs

One of the nice things about being home; just one of them, is eating Jaca tomatoes. What are they like? Big, dark red, soft and sweet. Some are quite ugly and misshapen, but that doesn't matter, they are delicious. I don't know if they are only grown on allotments; they couldn't possibly be sold in big places because they are almost as squashy as the figs I bought from a woman selling garden produce outside the cathedral this morning, and would disintegrate if roughly handled.
In the spring I bought a tomato plant, tended and watered it, and missed all the fruit while I was in England in the summer. No matter, the ones you can buy now are better than anything else!

Punting on the Cam

The cliche for Cambridge is punting. I had to look after a class for a teacher who was ill, and the lesson was a trip in punts. We took them into the city and to the boatyard, where a "touter", or should that be "punter"? gave us a price for our 28 students, reduced it and handed us a written quote which was higher than what we had told the students: £6 each for three punts full instead of the £4.50 we'd previously understood. The kids had started handing over the cash to us when the manager said he couldn't do it for that, only two punts and four of the students would have to punt themselves instead of being punted. There were protests; I think all the boys wanted to do it!
I sat in the front (stern) of a big punt and handed out the slices of stale bread for the students to feed to the ducks.
My goodness there were a lot of punts on the river! In some places there were real traffic jams where amateurs were drifting across and bumping into others. The professionals just glided peacefully through the chaos making it look very easy.
It's a nice guided tour, past the pretty sides of the colleges and their gardens. We were told little snippets of history and tradition, and we threw bread for the ducks who came rushing towards us as if they were starving! On our return we saw the boys who were punting themselves struggling along with all the mess of punts near the boatyard; they'd had a great time, but not got very far.

English summer

There have been some hot days this summer in Cambridge, but the overall impression is wet. Not really cold, but every time I open a door and see the rain, I think: "Not again!" Being used to Pyrenean summers in which it can be wet and stormy but on the whole bright and sunny and not too hot, this English summer is a bit depressing. That thing of not knowing what to wear; what to put on your feet, or if you need an umbrella grinds you down a bit. A lot of the drama of swine flu is just summer colds as far as I can see.
On Saturday I went to the theatre. It was in one of the University college gardens, where, with a small wooden platform and a ladder hidden by a screen, a small company performed Romeo and Juliet under an ancient spreading fir tree. There was a circle of three rows of plastic chairs on the grass. The audience sat down and it started to rain. People got out umbrellas and spread plastic sheets over their laps, some took glasses and bottles of wine out and sipped throughout.
During the performance it rained more, or less heavily nearly all the time. In the interval mulled wine was served from a thing like a tea urn and I warmed my cold hands as I drank.
The cast pretty well ignored the rain. Juliet, in a white cotton nightie got muddier and muddier as the evening progressed. I felt cold for her and for Romeo, who stripped to the waist at one point.
At the close we applauded as much for their fine performance and hardiness in getting so wet for so long.

A taste of England

Rather unexpectedly, I'm not spending the summer in Jaca; I'll miss the folk festival which takes place every two years there, as well as the mild climate and the floods of tourists. I'm working in Cambridge, as a director of studies for a Young Learners course. Cambridge is even more full of tourists than Jaca! I'd forgotten how pretty and gracious it is. Not having brought my camera with me, I've bought a disposable one with which I should be able to make a disc and digitalise to put one or two photos on this blog. (On the left there's a photo of a Victorian postbox outside King's college)
Oh yes, a taste of England: Yorkshire Tea, Indian restaurants, cheese scones are some of the indulgences of being here!
Walking on the lawn. there's another luxury. Grass here is so well-tended. And the garden flowers as well. The English really are good at that. In and around Jaca the wild flowers are spectacular. I can think of orchids of various kinds, wild irises on the mountain slopes, gentians of different shapes and sizes to mention a few. In England it's really the parks where I've seen good displays of flowers, like the lovely areas full of daffodils you get in the early spring. I miss that at home in Jaca; my daffs don't come up very abundantly in the garden.

Candanchú, spring flowers

Late spring in the mountains is pretty. One Sunday we went for a short walk in the ski resort of Candanchú. The snow had all gone from the lower slopes, leaving the detritus of the season: ends of ski poles, straps, gloves, and even a mobile phone - needless to say it didn't work!
There wasn't so much rubbish that you couldn't see the flowers on the ski slopes. There were lots of little (blue) gentians and pink and yellow orchids. I've looked in my flower books, but accurate identification is difficult, so I won't try. There are so many sub-types I wouldn't like to say for sure.
We know our way perfectly well in the winter, but it looks so different when there's no snow. You see the slopes in a different way if you haven't got skis on. Sometimes we've seen marmots and wild goats. Where do they go in the winter, when the snowy slopes are so full of people? Where do they find food?