TV woes, Take 2

Another stub. Another day hijacked by technology nonsense. 

We had ordered a new Bell Satellite TV receiver/PVR yesterday, to replace the one in our living room that was no longer sending audio to the TV. Today, someone from Bell called and told us they didn't think we could use the model we had ordered. She couldn't explain why this was so - or why it was suspected to be so. 

She gave me a number to call where they could explain, she promised, and would help me select an appropriate model. The number she gave turned out to just put me into the main Bell customer service queue. I was not best pleased.

The upshot was that we decided to postpone replacing the supposedly malfunctioning PVR. We would try and get an older receiver that we have, that we hadn't used for a couple of years, working in the living room to replace the broken one.

Four hours and three tech support calls later, I put everything back the way it had been, having achieved absolutely nada. I did, however, score a technician's call - for Friday - which they assured me I would not have to pay for. If the technician who comes is as good and experienced as some who have come in the past, he might even be able to figure out what's wrong with the original receiver. Here's hoping. 

*

I did get out for a run this morning, accompanied by Fred Douglass. (He's still in the British Isles, still wowing audiences and annoying colleagues.) But had no walk this afternoon.

In odd moments, I did continue with renovating winter 2016 pictures - from late February and early March in Valencia. The first two are of a magnificent giant fig tree in a park in the centre of the city. I've photographed it many times.

By early March, the preparations for Fallas, Valencia's end-of-winter festival, are well underway, especially in the Ruzafa neighbourhood, where some of the best falla - giant tableaux made of wood, styrofoam and acrylic paint- are built. Artisans are unwrapping the component parts, piecing them together, touching up paintwork. Karen and I kept going back to the neighbourhood to watch the progress. It's quite exciting.

TV woes

This will be a stub - as Wikipedia calls its incomplete entries. It's well after 10. I have little to report anyway. 

The day was hijacked by a tech crisis: our five- or six-year-old TV receiver has given up the ghost - it won't output audio. I spent a lo-o-ong time with tech support, then a fruitless long-shot attempt to get it to work by using a different kind of cable.  All for naught. It has to be replaced, at a cost of $500!

I did get out for my walking exercise with Fred Douglass in the morning. It's the mid-1840s and he's spending a year in the British Isles on a speaking tour. His successes keep mounting, but his relationships to and within the American Anti-Slavery Society and its British allies are starting to fray. It sounds like he was not an easy man. But who could blame him?

Most of the post mid-day meal period was taken up with sourcing a cable that I thought might solve the TV receiver problem, and trying to install it. As I say, to no avail.

In the meantime, I've carried on in odd moments with my project of renovating photos from our 2016 winter away. These two were taken in a very European setting,  a park-like triangle of land hemmed by three huge apartment buildings. The local street artists had found a nice quiet place in which to practice their craft. Also, alas, the dog walkers who seemed to feel that picking up after their mutts was not required in this place.

The murals, completed in 2013, were still fairly fresh in 2016. When I went back in 2020, they were looking a little decrepit. The colours looked nothing like this. The long one is  a stitched-together panorama from two exposures.

Jab time

Hallelujah! Happy days are here again. 

Or will be soon. Karen and I were able to book our first Covid jabs today. We'll get them April 9. 

Friends let us know that Perth County - Stratford, Goderich - was accepting bookings for people in our 70-to-75 age group. We booked appointments in Stratford, but had to accept two different days, April 15 and 16.  

It occurred to me that changes to age eligibility were supposed to be province-wide, and maybe I should check our local Middlesex-London Health Unit to see if they had now changed their requirements too. They had. So I booked us into the Agriplex, about a ten minute drive from here. And cancelled the Stratford appointments.

It means I'll be able to go back to hockey before the end of next month. Yay!

*

As I listened again today on my morning run to David Blight's  biography of mid-19th century black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, it brought home both how little really has changed in America in almost 200 years, and how 'modern' Douglass and his fellow activists were. 

In one passage about an anti-slavery rally in Indianapolis in the 1840s, Blight describes how a pro-slavery mob - Indiana was a free state - attacked and badly beat Douglass and some of his white American Anti-Slavery Society colleagues. In a telling detail - I'm not sure why Blight even thought it worth including - one of the witnesses is quoted as noting that the pro-slavery thugs were led by a man in a coon-skin cap.

This immediately made me think of the videos of Trump supporters attacking the Capitol in January - led by a man in a coon-skin cap (albeit in his case, with horns.) I would say that man, Jake Angeli, who was arrested and charged days later, is a direct philosophical descendant of the fur-hatted guy and his cohorts who beat Douglass and his friends in Indiana. If such people can be said to have anything as sophisticated in mind as a philosophy.

Then I read an article in the Globe this morning about jury selection for the trial of the cop who killed  George Floyd, and all the issues around whether the guy can get a fair trial given the intense public-opinion pressures on both sides. The defense argued, unsuccessfully, that, because feelings were running so high in Minneapolis where the crime occurred the court should change the venue .

The article cited the cautionary case of Rodney King  in Los Angeles in the 1990s. White highway cops beat King, a black motorist, to death. They were charged. The defense argued, successfully, that the venue should be changed to avoid inevitable bias. The trial was moved to a suburb, where an all-white jury was selected and eventually found the cops not guilty. Riots erupted in Los Angeles in response.

It just never seems to end.

*

Got out for a short walk about 4, by which time the temp was up to 8 or so and the sun was shining. I wandered over to the library and picked up a title I'd seen recommended at a website as one of the best recent books of nature writing: To The River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing. The place was practically deserted so I did a little browsing and also picked up a book about Harry Callahan, one of my favourite mid-century American photographers.

Took a few pictures. I'm trying to take at least a few every day.

Clarence St. between Dundas and Queen's Ave

One London Place on right

A slightly different angle

St. Paul's Anglican cathedral

Self-portrait with mask

*

I also re-worked a few photos from my winter 2016 archive.

Street somewhere in Carmen

Waiting room at Estación del Norte

Silk exchange

 

A dull day brightened

It was a blustery dull day, brightened by a late-afternoon video chat with Shelley. 

The news: She has given notice at her apartment, for the end of May. She's putting her earthly belongings in storage and "going nomad," as she puts it. She'll move up to the cottage, probably in late April and stay there except when other family members have it booked, when she'll move to a friend's pied-a-terre in Toronto, or possibly even brother Tyler's home in London for a spell. She's hoping to be gone to Europe in September, home briefly for Christmas, then back to Europe for the winter. 

She's a crazy lady.

*

The weather was cool and windy today, overcast except for a few fleeting partly-sunny spells. But there was very little rain in the end. 

I got out for my exercise in the morning, accompanied, as always, by Fred Douglass. We're into the 1840s now, he's a full-time employee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, employed on almost endless speaking tours of the northeastern states. His poor wife, Anna, is at home with - by the early 1840s - three young children. Fred is rarely home for more than a week at a time. 

He is becoming a celebrity, a must-see attraction, who can move audiences to tears, laughter and outrage with his oratorical skills. It's an astonishing tale. He's still only in his early 20s and free of bondage for only a few years. 

*

In the afternoon, I got out for a brief ramble, not going far from home. I took pictures, but can't imagine what anyone would make of them.

St. Peter's Catholic cathedral reflected in windows of One Richmond Row

St. Peter's Catholic cathedral reflected in windows of One Richmond Row

One London Place viewed from Victoria Park

Victoria Park: plane tree

*

I finished Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way this morning - somewhat unexpectantly as there were still hundreds of pages left in the ebook edition I was reading. They were taken up with acknowledgements, bibliography and an index. I'll perhaps report on amazing bird facts from the final chapters in a future post.

In the meantime, I've had an email from a friend in town who is a birder. He says he recently saw a golden eagle - a rare sighting apparently.

Signs of spring

Ran with Frederick Douglass this morning - or at least, with his biographer, David Blight. 

Fred has two kids now, and his labouring days are over. It's 1840 and he's been discovered by white abolitionists. In particular, they've discovered his oratorical skills, partly self-taught, partly learned from preachers at the small black church he attends in New Bedford, where he had begun to preach occasionally himself. 

The American Anti-Slavery Society has just hired him and sent him out on his first speaking tour. The early notices indicate he's a star in the making. So begins his real life.

*

I had two photographic projects today. One was to try my hand at 'found abstract' photography. I'm not sure if that's my own coinage or if others call it that too. I think it's a good way to describe what I was trying to do.

On my run in the morning, I had noticed the layers and layers of cracking paint on the piles holding up the Queen's Ave. bridge. The cracking and chipping exposes earlier colours, including colours of graffiti and tagging the city has tried to cover over. Sometimes the random patterns look like maps, sometimes like abstract paintings.

Some photo artists make very interesting shots of patterns in rust and lichen. This was supposed to be the same idea. Not sure how well it worked, but I like a few.

There's a word I've always liked that describes what these images represent: palimpsest. It originally meant a document page that had been erased or covered over so it could be written on again, but where the original writing shows underneath. The definition I just found online is more general: "something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form." I've always liked the way buildings and billboards and other public surfaces can be palimpsests.

I did also snap a little bit of spring down in Harris Park before I reached the bridge. Karen says they're called scilla or squill. These were growing wild just below Eldon House.

*

The other photographic project was continuing my rediscovery of 2016 winter-away pictures. We spent that winter partly in Valencia, partly travelling with friends Ralph and Pat Lutes across Spain, and partly in Lisbon. In mid-February, we were still in Valencia on our own. One late afternoon, I took this stitched-together panoramic shot of Plaza de la Virgen, with the Basilica (the salmon-coloured building on the left), the back of the cathedral and the bronze statue of Neptune in the foreground.

Meanwhile in Valencia

Nothing much to report. For the first time in a long time, I haven't gone out for an afternoon walk, and won't. It's cloudy and blustery, with rain threatened, and I've got a bit of a migraine. That's my excuse.

I did go out this morning, for exercise, with my long-time companion Fred Douglass. It's 1838 now, he's met and married his first wife, at 20, and has made his daring escape to the free north. 

He's taken a new surname, the one we know him by - his birth name was Bailey. One of his underground railroad conductors selected the name, at Douglass's request. The man was inspired by a popular poem of the day by Sir Walter Scott featuring a hero of that name. Douglass added the second 's' at the end to make it more distinctive.

He and his wife Anna have settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, centre of the booming American whaling industry. Fred is doing wage work in the shipyards. He has already fallen in with abolitionists. I'll let you know what happens next. Within a few years, though, he'll be writing his first autobiography. (He wrote three; he was not a modest fellow.)

*

This afternoon, I returned to Valencia, Spain, 2016. As anyone who has been there in the first half of March knows, Valencianos are mostly crazy as a bag of cats. This is when they celebrate Fallas, an end-of-winter festival with some very strange traditions. 

Neighbourhood groups around the city build storeys-high sculptures from wood, Styrofoam and bright acrylic paint. (Originally they were papier mache.) They're erected in the neighbourhood, usually at a street corner. Many of the streets are blocked off and pedestrian-only at Fallas time. 

The sculptures depict all manner of subjects, almost always satirical and/or fantastical. The modeling is like three-dimensional caricature or illustration. Valencia - Spain in general - has a strong tradition of respect for the illustrator's craft. Valencia has a museum partly devoted to it.

What makes the whole thing crazy is that at the end of the two-week festival, they burn the sculptures down in the crema (same root as crematorium but pronounced kraymuh). That happens on 19 March, the official last day of the festival. 

In light of Covid, the city agreed to postpone Fallas 2021 until some time in the second half of this year. Last year - when we were there - preparations were well underway, with many Fallas sculptures partly or completely erected, when the government abruptly locked the country down.

As well as the huge outdoor sculptures, the city's many Fallas art studios also produce smaller ninots - the name for the figures in the big tableaus. They're usually finer than the big ones, often with themes to appeal to children. The ninots are displayed together, and judged, at an indoor venue. For the first time in 2016, it was at the Science Museum in the City of Arts and Sciences.

Karen and I went to see them in mid-February, and of course I took photos. What strikes me in looking at and working on these pictures five years later is that I hadn't really appreciated the astonishing level of craft and artistry poured into these things. And for what? To be displayed briefly in the spring and then mostly forgotten. (The little ones aren't burned.)

As I say, bag of cats. 

Birdsong

I've been listening to an audiobook of David W. Blight's Pulitzer Prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, a biography of the mid-19th century black abolitionist. It's a fabulously well-researched and written book. Blight is the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University. The book is also beautifully "narrated" - read - by a black voice actor named Prentice Onayemi.

It would not be light reading. I noticed the other day that even though I'd been listening for over three hours, I still had more than 30 to go. How the hell long is this book, I wondered? I finally checked today: 912 pages! 

This is the beauty of audiobooks, though, and of listening while exercising, when you've got nothing else to do with your brain. I would never in a million years undertake a 900-page biography of a figure in whom I had only a passing interest. But this I can do. 

Will I stick to it till the bitter end? We'll see. I'm certainly enjoying it, in part because it's so beautifully read. Onayemi has a gorgeous baritone and uses the cadences of a preacher. I doubt I'd have any difficulty renewing it, which I will definitely have to do. I noticed the book is already remaindered, listing for $30 in paperback but selling for under $10 at one Canadian online bookseller.

The fabulous photograph of Douglass on the book cover is a modern colourized rendering of a Daguerreotype held by the Onondaga Historical Association in Syracuse NY, where Douglass lived for a time. He apparently instinctively understood the power of photography for propaganda and image building. He had many taken. 

Why wouldn't he? He was a striking-looking man. This photo in particular shows his mixed-race heritage - he had some native American ancestry as well as African and probably European. He must have been one of the first black activists to sport an 'afro'. 

I can find no credit for the photo other than the Onondaga Historical Association, but the colourization is very reminiscent of the work of a brilliant Brazilian practitioner named Marina Amaral, who calls herself a 'digital colorist'. Amaral has definitely done another one of Douglass taken about the same time, but her website doesn't show this one.

*

I went for a walk this afternoon down to Gibbon's Park, looking for photographic inspiration. I didn't find much - except for the tried and true willows.

The trouble with photographing along the river at this time of year, or anywhere really, is that nothing looks its best. Foliage in summer and snow in winter soften and hide. At this time of year, you can see everything: all the woody detritus, all the fallen trees and limbs, last fall's dead leaves caught in the crooks of branches, leaf-encrusted mud. Not pretty.

CPR railway bridge from Gibbon's Park

You are more likely to catch sight of birds, though. Besides the mallards and Canada geese, I glimpsed a cardinal, a red-headed woodpecker, red-winged blackbird and a robin today, and heard lots of bird song.

*

Gibbon's was the park where we went as kids - pre-teens and early teens - to swim in the municipal pool, and occasionally, the river. We were always told the river was filthy, though, as well as dangerous, so we didn't swim it often. 

From my house to Gibbon's, Google Maps tells me, was about 4 kilometers. We regularly rode our bikes. Can you imagine parents today letting their 10- or 11-year-old ride his bike on city streets 4 kilometers to a park with a river running through it. It just wouldn't happen.

Today, I walked over the footbridge. I'm not sure when it was built but there was no bridge when we were kids. I ended up walking along the west bank a way, and remembered how we - friends and I - used sometimes to wade across the river here. It's often quite shallow in the summer, though fast moving.

The attraction, besides the adventure of crossing into relatively unknown territory, was a then still-operating tannery. I don't know what they manufactured, and I can find no reference to its existence online. It's long gone, of course. There are houses and a university facility there now.

We'd go there in search of leather scraps we could use in crafts. I think I had learned leather crafts at a PUC summer day camp or from cubs or scouts or something. I remember the stink of the place and the great piles of scraps outside. If it had rained recently, the leather would be sodden and useless, but if there'd been a run of fine weather, some of it would be salvageable. 

In my memory, nobody paid us any attention, although I remember being afraid we might get caught. There was no fence around the place, and no security - or anybody who interfered with us when we came prowling. We could just walk up to it and root around in the trash.

Different times.

Note to self: check at the central library's London Room sometime if there's any information or pictures of that old tannery to be had.

Still spring...for now

Apparently spring is going to take a break in a few days, but for now, it's still lovely. It was 19 or 20 today with some sun most of the day. It did rain a bit in the morning, including when I was out for my walk with Frederick Douglass. (His self-education has hit a few roadblocks, but I know he'll overcome them.)

In the afternoon I went out on my bike, intending to stop along the way and take pictures, but somehow I just kept cycling. I went along the path to Gibbons, through the university, across the river flats to Adelaide St. and up the path behind the Waltzing Weasel. The Weasel appeared to be busy, judging by the cars in the parking lot.

The path led me into Stoneybrook, and one of the first streets I came to was Tennent Ave., so I turned down it and rode through my old highschool, A.B. Lucas. It looks exactly the same - except the only people about appeared to be neighbourhood families out strolling.

I rode along the roadway that goes by the football field, passing within 10 feet of the spot where 53 years ago, I was first presented to my darling. Karen had roped a mutual acquaintance into introducing us at a football game. 

The shameless minx made no secret she was interested in me. Heaven knows why she was. I had picked her out weeks before. It was easy as she was the hall monitor near where my locker was. There she'd be every morning in her mini skirt, knee socks, penny loafers and clingy sweaters. My assessment: gorgeous, but out of my league. Some might still agree.

I crossed Adelaide and rode into the subdivision, at one point turning on to a path that crossed a stream through a wooded area. At some point, I turned the wrong way and ended up at Fanshawe Park Rd. So I just rode down to Masonville and around behind it to Richmond St., and eventually back on to the river path and home.

I was bagged by the time I got home. Not unreasonably - I just calculated the distance and it was about 20k. Not bad for the second ride of the season.

*

I've started to troll through my photos from winter 2016, to see if I can spot overlooked shots worth working on or ones I think I can improve. It seems I was very much in my phase of wanting to photograph street art. Most of what I found to work on are shots in that genre that I apparently deemed of the second rank.

The single exception - at the beach

One of my favourite of the Valencia street artist, Hyuro, who I just learned died very young of leukemia a few years ago

Near the MUVIM museum of illustration

Carmen

The rest of the day

So now what do I do with the rest of the day?

I'm still a cryptic crossword addict, unrepentant. I spend some of every day working on puzzles, mostly from The Globe & Mail, occasionally from The Guardian. Sometimes, it's far too much of the day. But probably not today, because today I beat my personal best time to solve a Globe puzzle: 22 minutes 50 seconds flat, completed before 9:30 in the morning. 

Here are the last two thorny clues: 

• "Still waiting for a formal proposal?" (10)

It's tricky because the real clue is "still," meaning "at rest" - not, as the syntax suggests, "continuing to." The answer is formed from a word that in some contexts can mean the same as "formal proposal." The answer: motionless. 

• "Two birds, not the tern, make a tasty morsel" (6)

Very gnarly. Luckily, I already had TI__I_. The real clue, it seemed clear, was "tasty morsel." And the cryptic clue suggested it was a word-builder, the answer being made from the names of two birds. 

The gnarly part was "not the tern" - which I didn't get until after I'd solved it from other clues. The answer: titbit. (I'd be more likely to spell it tidbit, but I know it's also spelled this way.) The second bird, after tit, is bittern - but without ("not the") T-E-R-N.

Yesterday's puzzle was much more difficult and took quite a bit longer. I'm still looking for one answer:

• "I should be when small" (6) I have D_T_E_.

Completely flummoxed.

*

I'm reviving my Amusing bird facts feature, as I've gone back to Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way. So...

Today's amusing bird fact  The theme of the chapters I'm reading right now is "parenting." The specific topic: nest protecting. Ackerman describes various strategies, some quite clever - such as the plover who pretends to be crippled and easy prey to lure predators away from her nest. But the Australian magpie takes the cake. It will viciously attack unsuspecting humans that come anywhere near its chicks.

According to Ackerman, 85% of Australians have been attacked at some point in their lives. "The birds swoop in, often from behind, and hammer your head, neck, and face with their powerful beak and scratch with their claws." One city, Brisbane (900 km north of Sydney), reports 800 to 1,200 attacks a year. 

Australian magpie about to attack bicyclist

This is really only funny until you learn that besides minor cuts and scratches, the magpies can sometimes cause real injury, including broken limbs and damaged eyes. "There are thousands of people injured every year," Ackerman writes, quoting behavioural ecologist Darryl Jones, aka 'Magpie Guy'. "People have terrible accidents on bikes. And every year eyes are lost. So it's a genuine issue."

Okay, not that amusing maybe.

*  

Synchronicity. 

Shortly after writing about Australian magpies attacking humans, I opened my Pocket list and found an article I'd saved from Harper's magazine by Lauren Markham called "The Crow Whisperer." It's a story about how humans - or some humans anyway - appear to be able to communicate with animals.

The lead anecdote is about a friend in California whose dog injures a crow fledgling. For days after, whenever the people or their dog come out into the yard, a murder of crows gathers in the trees, makes a terrible racket and sometimes swoops at them threateningly. Even if they go for a walk in a different neighbourhood, crows somehow hear of it and harass them. 

The people finally hear about and ask help from an animal trainer named Yvette Buigues, who is sometimes called a crow whisperer. Buigues came by her sobriquet after rescuing and nursing a crow who, she says, became her friend, and spread the word in the crow community that she was an ally. 

She comes to the people's house, talks to the crows and calms them down, then discovers the injured fledgling lying in long grass. She suggests placing the bird, obviously dying, in a comfortable box, and leaving peanuts out for the crows as a way of making peace and "apologizing." They do, and the crows cease their campaign of intimidation.

The rest of the story is about Buigues and others who can or claim to be able to communicate with animals. The author suggests that perhaps the time is ripe, as animals and humans have come into closer contact during the pandemic - with lots of reports of wild animals venturing into deserted urban settings - to reset the relationship between the two. 

It's an interesting read.

*

I don't know why everybody doesn't use Pocket. It's a brilliant web app that is completely free. It reformats any article you find on the web removing advertising and links from the original page, leaving, ideally, only the text and illustrations. You can save the reformatted version in your Pocket list and read it later, including off-line. 

The article at the Harper's site

The same article in Pocket (Note: leaving off the article title is a rare error in Pocket reformatting)

There are Pocket extensions for most if not all browsers. Once they're installed you simply click an icon in the browser task bar to automatically save the current page to your Pocket list. I have a Kobo e-reader and it allows me to automatically synch my Pocket list to it and read on the more comfortable e-reader screen.

Pocket also sends out weekly newsletters with suggested articles, usually long form journalism, with a heavy emphasis on American sources. (You can also find lots of long-form journalism that you can convert to Pocket articles  at longform.org - again, skewed to an American perspective.) 

A river runs through it

I was reminded again today that we live in a riverine community. 

More of my time than I can ever remember has been spent the last couple of months beside the river. I walk or run the paths along its banks near home at least once a day, sometimes twice, and stand on its bridges to take photographs. 

Today, the morning exercise was a walk, only partly beside the river. Along the way, I heard, from my audiobook, more harrowing details of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass's childhood as a slave in 1820s Maryland. (Where he lived beside the Wye River.)

It still seems incredible that Douglass went from being a half-naked, half-starving urchin running around a plantation to being one of the great American literary voices and one of the great political activists of the 19th century and a world famous orator. 

I'm just starting to hear how that happened, or how it started to happen. He has just been moved, at age nine or ten, to Baltimore, to be companion to a white child. There, he begins to learn to read, taught by his kindly mistress.

By afternoon, the temperature had climbed to 18C or higher, and I took my bike out. It was glorious. It definitely helps that I pumped the tires up before I left the apartment. It makes it so much easier to peddle.

I rode the path from Blackfriars, through Gibbon's Park, then through the university along the east bank. At Richmond the path goes under the road and comes up on a newly extended stretch. It crosses the river at one of two new footbridges and then crosses it again - the river winds across flatlands here - a little further on. I came out on the flats near Adelaide and Windermere.

A bend in the river below St. Peter's Seminary

I could have kept going for quite a way, all the way out to where Pat and Ralph live and beyond, without ever coming up from the river.

View north along river from new footbridge near university

The new footbridges are nicely designed, the paths are pristine and new - or some sections are. It was a good ride with a couple of stops to photograph river views. I'm looking forward to more.

Spring...really?

Sunny and 16 today. This feels like real spring. And yet we know winter can trick us. 

Ran in the morning, in shorts, only the second time it's been warm enough for bare legs this spring.

Walked in the afternoon, starting off with Karen, then splitting up when she went in search of spring gardens and I went in search of ice cream bars. No photographs taken: not in the mood.

I was in the mood, somewhat surprisingly, last night. A while back, I tried my hand at self-portraiture. I wasn't completely unpleased with the results but there was something odd about the pictures; they didn't look like me so much as they looked like my doppelganger. 

Last night, as I looked into the mirror during my evening ablutions, I realized what it was : I'm used to seeing this guy, the guy in the mirror - mirror me. The other guy is the wrong-sided, public-facing partner in the operation. 

The solution it struck me was to take a mirror selfie, and the bathroom mirror with its relatively bright lighting was an ideal studio. It was late, though, I didn't fuss over it. Here's the best of a mediocre lot. This is me, as I experience me.

*

I also continued with - and finished - my revision of winter 2018 photos. I found a few worth taking another look at, most in Naples.

One of the most impressive things we saw in the city was the Santa Chiara church complex in the centre of the city, with its Basilica church, monastery and - most impressively - monastery cloisters with majolica decorations and ancient frescoes. Shelley Boyes was with us on this day. You can see her with Karen in the first picture.

Another of my favourite places in Naples was the Certosa (charterhouse) di San Martino. (A charterhouse is a Carthusian monastery. The Carthusians were a very strict order founded in the 11th century in France.) This place had the most fantastic art, everywhere - room after room with richly coloured frescoes. This picture is of the monastery church. It may have been a "strict" order in some respects, but they apparently went in for opulence too.

From Naples, we went to Pompei. I took a ton of pictures there, and processed many at the time, but this one, of a 2,000-year old fresco in a Pompeian villa, somehow slipped through the net. There are lots of other, better pictures of better-preserved frescoes, some still in place at Pompeii, more at the archaeological museum in Naples,. But I like this one, for all it's being faded almost to oblivion, for the lushness of the painted foliage just visible and the surviving blue pigment in the sky. Wouldn't you love to have something like this painted on your living room wall? 

We went on from Pompeii to Salerno and from there did a day-long self-guided driving tour of the Amalfi Coast. These pictures were taken at the town of Amalfi, but for some reason, ignored the first time through.