Three Beautiful Things

1. Nick has put some washing on the line -- looking forward to clothes that smell like the outdoors. 2. The forsythia hedge is dusted with yellow stars, just clearing its throat before its big moment. 3. The full moon has been silvering our left cheeks all the way home, but now I have time to really look, it is nowhere to be found. I have to lean out of the bedroom window to catch it round the roofline, and my varifocals don't work sideways so it is a jellybean-shaped blur.

1. The alarm goes off, and it's light outside. 2. After a run of murky wet days, clear hot sun light rushes into our kitchen and suddenly anything seems possible. 3. I return an edit, and feel like I deserve a glass of wine and some telly with the children.

1. I am definitely procrastinating because I don't want to do my exercises. Then Jenny Eclair pops up on my feed complaining about how hard it is for her to go down the road to her local pool (free for the over sixties); and a lot of other women say they also find it hard to begin.  2. She brings me a tiny blind box she has made out of paper stabilised with stickyback plastic, and requires me to sign a delivery note. 3. The steady dribbling drip of draining stock bones.

1. I toast the year's first hot cross bun, and butter the two halves. 2. The light of birthday cake candles. It was Nick's birthday, and really he should be the beautiful thing for his careful, affectionate work in keeping the house and family running. 3. This takeaway doesn't have an app and it's not attached to a delivery service. I walk in and give our order, then later come back and collect our brown bags.

1. Nick's birthday gift  -- a portable dice tower -- arrives just in time for the big day. Alec and I have a play with it, enjoying the leathery rattle of the falling die. 2. After supper, Nick and I escape to an event at our local independent bookshop. It's been a year, and we still can't quite believe we've got a real bookshop on our high street. 3. Because I've been watching Bridgerton with Bettany, and reading Katie Waldegrave's book The Poet's Daughters  about Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge, and chasing down rabbit holes that take my interest, I've suddenly got reference points that I can use to understand the context of the strange violent Kentish happening described in Mad Tom's Rising .

1. The Romanesco cauliflower with its green fractal spires will be cauliflower cheese this evening -- but for now, it's sitting up on the microwave so we can admire it. 2. There's a bit of a wait, sitting in the sun with my book, half hearing teenage voices and tinny music. 3. He's a sturdy fellow, pottering about while we have a rapid and efficient catch-up, responding amiably to boundaries and calling on us only occasionally to dip our heads and play some part in his waist-high world.