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.