Tl;dr I did a silly little thing in WordPress that made me happy.

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Last week was a funny old week for podcast-prompted nostalgia. First, there was an episode of BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking podcast: Taking the Long View with the Animal Kingdom. Two very old friends, Phyllis Lee and Tim Birkhead, talked entertainingly and at length about what they've learned from long-term studies of elephants and guillemots respectively. Not a lot of this was all that new to me, and Radio 3 is not exactly the most popular of channels, but it was very good that long-term studies were being given the public airing they deserve and, perhaps even rarer, that scientists were given the time to express themselves.

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This past weekend, what with it being Easter and all, I decided I would attempt to go all in on indiewebifying one of my WordPress properties. I downloaded all the plugins and all the additional plugins they told me to download and set all the settings and then retired whimpering with my tail between my legs to regroup.

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It being Easter Sunday, The Main Squeeze suggested a walk across the top of Trastevere to visit the church of Saint Onofrio. He's the one who has amazingly long hair that clothes him and keeps him warm (and decent), and I've always had a soft spot for him. The church, I was sure I'd seen; although a little dull it seemed a good idea for a destination.

I was wrong. The church I thought I knew as Sant'Onofrio isn't, and the actual Sant'Onofrio al Gianicolo is breathtakingly lovely. I snapped a few pictures as an aide-memoire¹ but the overall feeling I came away with was that I had wasted far too much time passing this place by, stuck within the unlovely Bambin' Gesu hospital and always beset by chaos.

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Sally Mann is a photographer of some notoriety. She is also, it turns out, an amazingly good writer able to create word pictures every bit as nuanced and beguiling as her picture pictures. An interesting question is whether, had she not been a renowned photographer, we would ever have learned what a fine writer she is. Would she have been prompted to write her memoir had she not been invited to give the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard?

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