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.

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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.