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.

Oros Waterfall

 While the weather is nice it's good to go out. Oros waterfall is a place we'd wanted to see for a while. It was worth the scramble along very broken paths to get to it!  

Although the "pathways" weren't actually taped off, it looked as if they had been; there were shreds of plastic tape all over the place, and the route was rocky scree most of the way.

A quick trip

 It's difficult, in these pandemic times, to know what to do: we've left Jaca very little in the past few months, and we don't mix much, but it's good to see our sons once in a while. We thought things were fairly safe, and went to Valencia to see Andrés, stopping off in Zaragoza for a few days with David. We are careful. Always wearing masks, and never touching people. My hands are cracked and dry from the amount of gel I use on them! 

So, after a few days in chilly Zaragoza, we changed season and drove to Alboraya, our usual stepping-stone to Valencia. As you approach along the coast you get tantalising glimpses of the sea over the crash barrier; Valencia isn't very good at showing off its lovely coastline - you have to make a concerted effort to go to the beach when you're there.

Well, we arrived, found a parking space and checked into the hotel we've used several times before. The only difference was that we couldn't share lifts with other guests!

And off to the city centre in the convenient metro train, being careful not to touch barriers and handrails, into the Valencian warmth and sunshine. We were lucky to find a restaurant with tables out in a square with no traffic and few pedestrians

and we had a delightful meal in the shade of an orange tree loaded with unripe fruit. We ate there again the next day; it was relaxing and the food was good.

Ok, the second day we visited the Silk Museum, which has only been open for a few years. It's in a big restored palace, and it was delightful! Valencia has a long history with silk. I particularly liked being able to get close to the dresses on show, the spectacular recreation of a painting called "the Silk Merchants in the Lonja of Valencia"

recreation and, behind it, the painting

In this photo you can also see the wonderful tiled floor. 

Here's a link for a little video about the restoration of the building:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T_MU5uM7XU  It's in Spanish!

When we bought the tickets for the Silk Museum we were offered, at only one euro more, entry to two churches, San Nicolás, called "Valencia's Sistine Chapel" for its frescoed vaults.

You could probably spend a long time gazing at these paintings; for my taste it's a bit too much, but it's very impressive.

The church of the Saint Johns was the other one.

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