1. Teenagers' emotions are labile, and it's possible that when I look in again on my way back up to my desk, the storm will have passed.
2. Selecting broken stars of anise to go in the rhubarb. There aren't many whole stars, but I'm saving them for when looks matter.
3. My hair still smells of the banana bread I've been baking.
1. A moth, in a green so pale it glows, is drying its wings on the grass.
2. It wasn't so long ago that this field was soggy and yellowish. Now the grass stands tall as my thighs.
3. The children come home, and we realise that this is what we've been waiting for all afternoon.
1. After my call is finished, I find myself searching a silent house: the children have gone away with Granny.
2. Nick comes up the hill to the hairdressers with an umbrella to shelter my blow-dry from the rain.
3. I do not think I will ever get over the pleasure of easily and accurately fast-forwarding past boring bits on telly.
1. I wake very early, read for a bit and then sleep again, deep and dreamful, before waking very late.
2. The children breakfasted late and don't want to eat with us at 1pm. We have a private lunch, sharing everything between our bowls of rice. Afterwards, keeping our voices low, we eat secret pieces of chocolate.
3. My tea is made -- a good quality blend that promises much, a mass of petals and scented green stuff floating in the diffuser -- and I start to take it to my desk. But I get called away to help with this and then that needs carrying upstairs, but also another thing that I must to go back down and up for, and then the phone rings. The tea waits on the stairs, and its smell draws me back through the house to where I was going in the first place.
1. Glancing sideways so that it doesn't seem as if I am looking, I see that she has an app on her phone with pages of notes and lists and plans and clippings -- just like me.
2. We stray into what must be a fairy glade -- the grass is starred with pignut flowers and overhead rooks mob a buzzard -- and while we weren't watching our way, the reliable path that led us in has faded among the trees.
3. Aquilegias (descended from seed packets we got at a wedding when then children were small) mostly come up dark blue between the paving slabs in my garden -- but this year, there is one pink and white, smiling shyly at us.
1. To scrub away at the oddly regular iodine stain and the arrow the surgeon drew on my forearm.
2. The leaf green cover of Emily Wild's Map of the Otherlands is good match for our current bedding, among which I am sitting enjoying a late morning.
3. In the afternoon, PaulV comes by with red and yellow tulips and we sit in the kitchen drinking tea and processing.
1. I peep round the corner at the flagstones that I swept yesterday and the cosmos I planted out.
2. Hour-long meeting, camera off: one very useful piece of information carefully stashed; a large quantity of context to reflect on; and a lot of admin quietly done.
3. Sometimes there is not much else to do but pick up the pillows and shake out the cover.
1. I notice a poster advertising coffees in the village's church hall, and we let the satnav and our noses lead us past stone cottages with full gardens, through a ford to a stone chapel with a plain modern door. The hall has a long view across the valley to the fields where they are setting up Glastonbury Festival; we have a good talk with the women running it; and the coffee and cake are very good indeed.
2. We pass Stone Henge again -- the crowd it draws to bleak Salisbury Plain is as much a marvel as the engineering and the weight of history.
3. My two tiny bottles of water from the wells at Glastonbury are intact. I put them on the shelf in the kitchen to remind me of the people in quiet reflection in the Chalice Well's gardens and the White Well's shady roadside spot decked with flowers and ribbons, with a man swinging a thurrible and families filling their bottles and Japanese tourists washing their gemstones.
1. As if the fall of night has prompted a sudden decision, a downpour begins after days of dry, hot weather. I contort myself around my desk so I can put my face near the open window and catch the rush of cool air.
2. Her window was open and now her room smells of petrichor, mixing with the scent of line-dried bedding.
3. A large ticking thing flies through the window, bounces off the wall and thucks to the ground under my desk. It's a maybug on its back, large and rather lost and helpless. It makes me think of a drunken man I saw one midsummer afternoon in East Grinstead town centre, bothering school girls about the way to Wych Cross. People pushed and encouraged him on to a bus and told the driver where to drop him. Everyone was relieved to see the bus lumbering away into the countryside. I catch the maybug in a glass and send it off into the night, turning out the light so it won't come back.
1. A nice chatty gossip with the hygienist who is, it turns out, a mum from the children's primary school. I see the dentist straight after and get extra points for clean teeth.
2. '...and don't let any strangers in.'
'But why?'
'It's for their own safety.'
I leave them arguing about which of them I should pay for babysitting the other.
3. To live in the sort of town where you can go to a literary festival show and have people you know sitting nearby, and a writer you know warming up the audience (Andrew Wallace — always entertaining, always thought provoking). And I think we all feel pretty lucky to live in the sort of town that Richard Ayoade feels is worth promoting his book to.
1. The doorbell chime signalling the arrival of a child home from school.
2. It strikes me how frequently the seconded coppers I am editing for mention their dogs, and the pleasure of their company.
3. For a planning call, there's a lot of laughter -- but we're all of us looking forward to taking a road trip west and a few days away from our routines and worries.
1. His hair today is glossy and clean. It smells faintly of oak moss, and is exactly the same colour as my own.
2. Nick has come home with an idea for supper and is searching through the spices.
3. I realise with only a little push I can finish this job today, rather than on Friday.
1. As the train gets closer to Hastings, more and more details develop -- a woman in white carrying a drum; a crown of flowers; a conversation about recording folk traditions; green dabbed noses; a hat with horns; a jingle of bells.
2. Green painted women -- later I learn they call themselves crones -- with twigs and flowers in their hair ululate and call like foxes in the night.
3. Watching colours flicker across the water -- from sea glass green to indigo to slate grey.
1. The may blossom has been hanging heavy on the hawthorns for a few days, but I have been too polite to mention it before the actual month. It has a strong smell that is faintly fishy: not something I'd like indoors; but out on my walk I love to see the tiny rose-like blossoms and the tight white dots of the flowers to come.
2. There are a lot of deer droppings on the paths -- strange to think of so large an animal stepping between the parked cars, grazing on the cricket pitch then melting away into the woods when people start their commutes.
3. The man cleaning the glass between the sanctuary and the church café pauses to point us up the stairs to the polling station in the hall.
1. In the back of the fridge, on this hot day, I have a huge mug of green tea.
2. Remembering that I have a USB fan tucked away.
3. There was a science fair today. I catch her mixing slime on her dressing table, but don't say a thing.