Three Beautiful Things

1. No matter what, there are always a few tomato side shoots that need pinching out. 2. She's on a school trip. From time to time, I check the family app to see where her dot is. 3. We've appreciated the cooler mornings, even with the gusty disruptive breeze pushing at the blinds -- but the afternoon air heavy and still and warm like bathwater is welcome too.

1. Through a gate, a glimpse of 1950s cars in bubblegum colours. 2. Poet Dan Culmer jumps on the bus and of course I wave him over like the shameless fan and ambitious writer that I am. I want to hear about how he supported the even starrier poetry celeb Brian Bilston. 3. One of her friends is moving schools -- to my old school, to be precise. And, I tell her, the school where a whole crocodile of her aunts and uncles (both blood and friendship) went. This is very startling and difficult to compute -- perhaps the first time that she has really understood us, with toddlers on our hips and jobs that keep us from fun days out with her, as year 8s and 9s. PS: Speaking of which, Nennis and Douglas, a bedtime stories YouTube Channel is run by an old school friend, and I would consider it a great personal favour if you would take a look, and listen to a story and like it; and even subscribe.

1. There's a terracotta brick building up town, baked until it shimmers, but somehow, tufts of wild yellow corydalis grow three storeys up, right out of the wall.  2. That was one hot bus ride -- but here's a cold glass of white wine and a shaded spot to drink it in while I wait. 3. 'Which bit that wasn't my bit did you like best?' she wants to know. And so we comb out our memories of the show in search of details we liked. I liked the huge self-satisfied smile on the face of a tiny girl who was thrown in the air; and the pair of dancers in red and white squeezing each other tight at the end The 30th , Billie Eilish's narrative song about a close relative surviving a car accident.

1. I arrive just as they reach the front of the queue, and there's still time to get my coffee order in. 2. In the woods, it's all shade -- a relief after the glaring stretches of shimmering pavement. 3. Nick has cooked, and we've eaten. Now I'm sitting in the warm garden with a drink that is just about still cold, carefully sharing pieces of incense with the dying barbecue.

1. After lunch, we nibble round the cones of Cornettos. 2. With air currents lifting the blinds, scampering through the hall, jostling on the stairs, and playing with the papers on my desk, the heat is doable. 3. At the end of the day, I lie with my legs up the wall, Radio 4's very lightest offering playing on my phone, against feet swollen by the heat and a lot of editing work.

1. At school, there are always people keen to gee him up. He's done well to get up the hill today. 2. A wood pigeon settled comfortably in the shade of a lime tree, wings spread and feathers fluffed for improved ventilation. As we come down the path, it gets up and hurries away. I wish that it had stayed and that I could join it on the cool grass. 3. Nestling boxes and bundles among the paperchains in the party box, which will be going back into the loft very soon.

1. New potatoes -- a fair few of them -- cooked with some mint leaves, ready for salads this week. 2. There's a Polish cultural event on the Pantiles, with red and white flags and flower headbands and folk songs. It's very jolly -- but not really intended for us. I think it must be a relief for expats to find a bit of space and time that is just for them. 3. 'Shall we get the barbecue out this week?' Nick wonders as I am meal planning and setting up a supermarket order ahead of some high temperature days.

1. We've slipped a barcode into the packaging, and the courier has a label. This box will be passed from hand to van to hand to hand, and in due course, there will be a refund for this failed monitor. 2. The work that seemed impossible last week? I'm going to deliver it ahead of the deadline. 3. The pop of thread pulling through fabric tight in the hoop.

1. I can't see them, but I can hear the sparrows spatting and quarrelling on the garden wall. We now have a small family flock, with some juveniles who occasionally squat with tucked necks and wide beaks, begging for a feed. Perhaps the parents will try another brood as the summer turns, and the flock will grow. 2. I have occasion to remember our butterfly, Bob, who never flew because one of his wings didn't inflate properly. But in his fortnight, he got on with sunbathing and sitting among flowers and fruit in our kitchen and in the garden. 3. Open mic -- I'm struck by the poems that open the boxes of memory and bundles of experience that people carry with them, sorting and curating the contents so that they can be decoded and understood by others.

1. As always, our lunch is a whirl. Salad, sandwich, all the gossip, coffee, a couple of photos, a shared cake, a little birthday candle, a funny meme. It's over far too soon, but we must get back to our desks. 2. Stirring bright turquoise plant food into watering cans and sharing it around the garden. 3. I'm trying and trying to learn one of my poems so I can recite it from memory, looking right at the audience; and so that it's mine, no matter what. It's hard -- as hard as writing it; and frustrating because I've got the words how I want them on a page, but some phrases are tricky to speak, or difficult to remember. But each time I go through, it feels less ragged and more like itself.

1. After a fraught school run in the main heat of the day, I can take my huge mug of green tea out of the fridge. 2. The leftover Chiang Mai chicken is just is delicious this evening as it was for supper last night. 3. It's been a bad day, but we're sitting on his bed with him, and he's wondering what an actuary does, and whether a career as an analyst might suit him.

1. This is the weekend when she officially walks over the teenage threshold. She has organised most of the celebrations with lists and sticky notes, using us like extra arms and legs to make things the way she likes.  2. We bring in flowers and alpine strawberries and snips of herbs for the cake plate. 3. One good jump scare gives our nervous systems an airing.

1. 150g of rainbow nonpareils has been delivered, and it looks sufficient for our needs. 2. Every time I see her, she is working with scissors and card, preparing pastel decorations for her party. 3. To my startlement and delight, there is aircon in the footwell of Pete's open-top Saab; and we need it, even riding home under the high half moon well after 10pm.

1. Seeing a familiar face coming up the stairs at the station. 2. There is the promise of nasturtium flowers in furled buds with a snip of red and yellow showing. Maybe tomorrow or maybe the next day. 3. No one feels like eating much -- but there are some bones of cold chicken to pick at, and thin slices of bread and butter.

1. Breakfast in the garden during a heatwave. Down the wall and over, the tidal sounds of next door's bathwater, and someone else, further away, sings softly. 2. Sat deep in the sofa in the draught from the open window, we can hear people going up and down the hill. 3. Peering through binoculars at the moon-by-daylight, viewing the great craters and the shadows in the dust.

1. I make a remark about the edit I've just done -- really just for good manners and to tell the writer that I see the labour that lies beneath, and to acknowledge that this short text will be very good news for the body concerned. The writer reciprocates with context, including a level of drama that very much pleases my nosey self. I love the way measured corporate sentences hold safe a whole world of human beings and their outlandish doings. 2. We get the impression that he is very pleased with his maths work today. And we keep looking at each other saying, 'He's very pleased with his maths.' 3. There's no lemon left for my soda water -- but I remember that some mint has been quietly and competently growing in the garden.

1. To dip-sample my small library of poetry and micro texts to find a quick consolation. 2. Pinks, striped with red like seaside rock, scented, if you care to bend down, of cloves. 3. I have in my stash just the right stickers for her revision notes.

1. A friend once said that my gardening method is a lot to do with editing. I think of this as I pull out this herb bennet, but not that one; and finger through my pot of lawn daisies to pull out herb robert seedlings, but let it grow where its fern leave soften hard edges; and cut back the seedy mildewed alkanet so that it will again in due course give more twinkling blue flowers -- for the bees of course. 2. There is something in the scrub at the side of the path, rustling and fluttering, now before us, now behind. I catch a flash of cream speckles, and then quite suddenly, there it is on a fallen branch, bright eye and tilted head -- a song thrush. 3. Under the front door step -- two buttercup flowers yellow bright as make-believe suns. 

1. I'm rather achy, but Saturday's work shows in the tied in sweetpeas and the tomato plants in their grown-up pots. And my to-do list is a little less weighty. 2. There is something so nice and glowy about seeing my daughter folding backwards into the kneeling camel pose stretch that I cannot manage. 3. At tea time, seeing me drooping over the kitchen table, Nick assures me he has supper in hand and sends me upstairs to lie down.

1. I'm wearing what the children when they were small used to call 'scary tightses', which is any pair of tights with an unusual pattern. This one has red chinoiserie figures up the back, and even the supermarket delivery man is startled enough to comment, when, having waved him into our road, he sees me over the carpark, still holding my phone and turning to walk back to our gate. 2. I'll only be gone for a few hours, but Nick comes to the door and kisses me before I set off out into the early evening. 3. With poems read aloud to a small crowd who are drinking slowly while rain blows past outside and busy people break stride to peer through the window, the pictures of lambs and gardens and bunions and fox cubs chasing magpies for fun are so much better

1. I'm in a little-and-often era -- 15-minute exercises every day. One shelf at a time. Fifty pages in a morning. A novel chapter tucked into a short wait. 2. I'm working again with a client after a break. I'm loving the 'welcome back' emails. 3. My children are helping each other with homework. 'This formula comes up in every test, even if it's nothing to do with respiration and photosynthesis.'

1. It's been a week of rain, and we are now used to the routine of peeling off wet clothing and hanging them to dry. We've taken to warming up in our pyjamas. 2. I finish work a little early, and there is time for a chapter of Bleak House  before supper. It's another chapter in which innocent grifter Harold Skimpole's creates carnage, and I hold in my head how John Jarndyce's inherent goodness and tolerance starts to harm the family he has collected around himself. 3. We lie in bed listening to Shakira's Whenever, Wherever in English and then in Spanish and then in English again and agree that it is just the best.

1. With my coffee, I have a little bun flavoured with elderflowers. 2. The first of my marigolds has come out, like a reliable, robust helper. The pelting rain we're having this week won't hurt her flaming orange petals, and she is welcome as sunshine. 3. There is a spoonful of sharp garnet red stewed raspberries to spoon over our chocolate fondants.

1. The alarm that I set on Monday while I was planning my week reminds me to tune into a professional development call on Thursday. Thanks, Monday Clare. 2. It's a pleasant feeling to overshoot my page count target for the day because I'm immersed in the edit. 3. A song comes on the radio that has a bone-deep familiarity. I realise that it can only be one of the songs from our primary school hymn book.

1. I'm still marvelling at the freshening effects of the rain we're having. The weeds at the edge of the bean field are gleaming and glittering and steaming in half-eight sunlight, and the woods are dripping, cool and restoring as well water.  2. Peeling off clammy wet clothes and climbing into something warm and dry. 3. On my way to a poetry event, a friendly shout. We'll see each other in there.

1. Radishes don't often come with greens, and when they do, the leaves fade rapidly to yellow mush -- so today they feature in every meal. 2. I will never not love pouring hot water over a soup cube and watching the dried veggies and seaweed and tiny shrimps expand. 3. Evening message: do I want to walk tomorrow morning? Yes I do.

1. Thank-you cards crowd the shelf behind our meeting. 2. He comes back triumphantly with a pudding. The children, despite their great ages, are astonished that there could be a pudding on a Monday. 3. We've sat up very late, but I'm glad because it means we heard the promised rain falling steadily in the dark.

1. Really, the climb up on to the common is always the hardest part of the walk. 2. We cut across a housing estate -- busy with car washers and gardeners and hedge snippers and flags -- and dart down a twitten past the playground to find Georgian cottages squatting calm and cool around a spring-fed pond on the edge of the woods. 3. Around the next corner, over the next stile, we find a cool spot by the stream that is not taken. We sit down with a bag of sweets to watch black dragonflies that turn iridescent green when they cross a sunbeam. I think they might be Calopteryx virgo, otherwise known as 'beautiful demoiselle'.

1. Flutter of red -- a field poppy has dropped its petals. 2. Early supper and very quick showers -- we're getting ready for a night at the theatre. 3. Jupiter and Venus are tangled in the spires and fancies on Trinity's clocktower.

1. There is, after all, blackcurrant ice cream in the freezer. 2. Over the back fence, a few golden curls of honeysuckle invite us to a scented evening in a few weeks' time. 3. After carrying watering cans back and forth, the smell of wet dust on an evening when the ground is still warm.

1. The orange that I am peeling emits a spray of oils that glitters in a shaft of morning sunlight. 2. This is a big mug of milky coffee sort of day. Nick is out, and the cafetiere doesn't quite work if you make coffee for one. 3. There's a moment after supper to admire the moon by daylight. I cram myself and my binos against the doorframe so that I am steady enough to inspect the craters.

1. We get one of the taxi drivers who addresses me as ma'am -- like the Queen. 2. I bought a shop sandwich for my lunch, and it has cress in it, which feels retro and gives it rather a lift. 3. I can smell the different stages of Nick's risotto -- the onions caramelising, and later the wine and then the first ladle of stock.

1. She greets us as the couple in the Tunbridge Wells water crisis photo, and then she greets the wire-haired dachshund with the strangely human face and her friend who owns the gift shop.  2. I finish my working day with that pleasing 'everything done' feeling. 3. A bulky grey-pink wood pigeon dozes on the side fence as the light fades.

1. This week, Bach Before Seven on Radio 3 has a theme -- they are playing his fan compositions of other people's music. 2. When I bring the bin bag down the hill, I feel there's more leaving the house than a litter of physical rubbish. 3. I finally settle down with the SCP audio series Alec has been asking me to check out. It's exactly as horrid and as bleak as I expected. Our shared taste for cosmic horror is perhaps our attempt to rehearse for life in world where we must often make choices in which no options align with our values. But despite that, we variously continue studying for our GCSEs, propagating houseplants, stopping for elevenses and learning to recognise birdsong.

1. Weeding the marigolds leaves my hands sticky with resin strongly scented with summer. 2. Lunch is yesterday's noodles with prawns stirred through and snips of green and white spring onion. 3. We learn from Digging For Britain about the vast forest of giant club mosses and horse tails from which the Welsh coal seams are formed. I try to imagine what it would have been like in those swampy forests, without birdsong but noisy with insects.

1. He shimmers past me like a fish heading into the fast water. 2. There is a Medusa mask, very stern and powerful, drying in the kitchen.  3. Nick is leaning out of the bay window and I'm holding the roof light hatch above my head. We are hoping to catch the spark of ISS rising up in the west -- and as the ISS Pass Tool and the Stellarium star map promise, it appears between Procyon and Jupiter. A win for international cooperation, and for predictability.

1. Waiting for us as promised is an orange bag of homegrown rhubarb. 2. We do not go down Bogey Lane. It's not because we're scared. It's because it would shorten our walk unduly. 3. ...and suddenly the bowed green bud is a red poppy.

1. At the top of the bank, between pavement and empty air, a drift of orange poppies. 2. We got the expensive kind of passion fruit substituted into our supermarket order. They were as large as goose eggs -- but she only likes them once they've ripened and dried, collapsing into ridges and hollows. I halve one for her, and the scent crossing the table makes us think they're worth the extra money. 3. I am ridiculously pleased with my nasturtium seedlings -- nine pairs of leaves so far -- which will eventually spill over to cover the compost heap.

1. I do not think that I will ever in my life whip an egg white to soft peaks without marvelling. 2. 'Ohh, great question,' says the lady next to me. 3. I return home triumphant with a cheese boule under my arm.

1. On the way home we stop to test the unlovely scents of hawthorn, horse chestnut and cow parsley. 2. While she works on my teeth, we compare parenting notes -- it turns out we both occasionally gifted with surprise emotional reveals when all we really wanted was to go to bed. 3. To smooth over the fold in my ballot paper and post it into the black plastic box.

1. A flat white in a speckled ceramic beaker, a sit-down and a scribble in my notebook. 2. Two fairly ripe tomatoes and a sharp knife. 3. I've been feeling vaguely anxious about backing up my pictures, so I do an imperfect tidy-up while we listen to the Folk Show and then copy the entire folder to an external hard drive. There are still more pictures to sift through -- but I do feel better for starting. 

1. It's a day when I'm stepping from appointment to task to event to task to event. Two things get cancelled -- and breathe. 2. At the front door, I glance around to find the starling who is dropping electronic blips and bloops and clicks from a high place -- he's on next door's TV aerial, sifting the airwaves for the latest sounds. 3. I bring myself round to sleep -- last thing there's hard science fiction in Rendezvous with Rama  and then in the small hours, a collection of death scenes by Turgenev.

1. Waking in grey light to birdsong through the open window.  2. I look up and catch sight of Nick coming in from the street. 3. The beech leaves, new unfurled and underwater soft, still have fine fair hairs along their edges.

1. The fridge has been dredged for jars and roots, and now a venison stew is bubbling on the stove. 2. I put the last stitches into my little doll's pink felt shoes and hand her over to my daughter with the big scissors. 3. I'm wakeful, but there are two volumes of Turgenev on my e-reader, so I follow him into a lost world of mystic serfs and aspen groves and low mists and cart tracks.

1. We're having technical problems; we get a slightly out-of-breath call from the counsellor, who is also running late, and it occurs to me that she's as nervous as we are. 2. Early evening, I splash a little water about the garden and clear handfuls of fallen wisteria petals off my seedling marigolds. 3. The little doll now has stiff felt limbs stuffed with pipe-cleaners, and a dress -- but her fringe remains pinned flat and untrimmed because we don't quite dare.

1. We drink coffee and take courage from our stories. 2. A little blue butterfly lurches about the garden like a torn corner of sky caught in the wind. 3. In the late dark as I am falling asleep there's the sound of the quiet rain shower promised on the weather radar.

1. A great tit in pinstripes flies into the ivy, flies out again. 2. I catch a speck of red in the garden, assume it's plastic litter from a broken toy. But it's a ladybird, stretching its wings. 3. We've been shifting around each other, in and out of the kitchen all afternoon, and now there is a curry, and for afters, warm cookies with ice cream sandwiched between.

1. Looking out over the view from Mount Ephraim across the town's bowl, I can see that we are a lot greener than we were before Easter. 2. I ask Nick if he wants to come with me -- and he does. 3. After an hour of laughter and joining-in-with-the-chorus presented by two thirds of The Gluten-Free Trio (plus guide dog), we head home across the Pantiles -- which looks particularly charming all lit up. We are cheerily relaxed and really ready to enjoy Friday.

1. The traffic is so bad that we are just meters behind the bus that passed us at the start of our walk. 2. She asks to be allowed to trim the doll's bangs, which are for now pinned against her felt forehead to set flat. I will probably say yes. 3. We go out to see what we can see in the sky -- we're rolling through some dusty space and there are more meteors than usual. We don't see any of the promised Lyrid shooting stars, but we do see plenty of satellites, and Arcturus is shining straight down our street.

1. Ripe blackberries in April -- just a handful, gleaming in a cardboard tray -- brought in by slow boat from the Mediterranean and put at the front of the fridge to be eaten by anyone who fancies one. 2. Slipping the skins off boiled beetroots -- some for Nana, some for us. 3. A few dozen stitches and her little face appears.

1. Oddly, the burnt corner of my toast with chocolate spread is so delicious that I am jolted out of the story I am reading at breakfast. 2. The taxi driver tells us that now his second son has a university place. 3. We decide we do not like this and drop it mid-show, mid-series.

1. Last day of the holidays, and I've woken very early. I summon up George Saunders' Pond in the Rain  and bob around with his Russians and their short stories before sinking back into sleep. 2. Like a bonfire spark and its afterglow, a yellow centipede returns to the darkness at the bottom of the compost heap. 3. In the hour before bed we let David Attenborough's nesting swallows and path laying mice yank our heart strings around. 

1. Overnight soft and persistent rain has fallen and the town is breathing quietly. 2. The difficult purple of honesty flowers keeps catching my eye. 3. Our turn with the psychologist has arrived very suddenly but we're in a position to seize it with both hands.

1. Through the magic of persisting in poor decisions my Baldur's Gate character ends up with a new eye that can see the invisible. 2. Nick comes back from Lidl with a box of Moomin biscuits just for me. 3. I've had to chase and chase round the internet to get the instructions for a charity shop doll kit. I thought I could guess; but I needed the picture and steps in a 2013 magazine to make sense of the felt circles and limbs and dress pieces. 

1. While I wait, I rake a weeding knife along the narrow space behind the railings and raise the scent of springtime soil.  2. Along the path, blue drifts of early forget-me-nots set off the yellow of a few late daffodils. 3. A mug of hot tea and a couple of hours free on a Sunday afternoon.

1. As proud as Cornelia Graccha, I photograph the lawn daisies and dog violets that grow in my garden. 2. I see my son's hands are now larger than mine, and I wonder who stole away my baby. 3. Tipping threads and slivers of felt off the cutting mat and into the bin.

1. Just to stand in the sun and feel warm. 2. I can smell the weight of the wisteria blooms hanging from bare grey branches on the wall round the corner. 3. Three adventurers down, one swaying, and the goblins keep summoning more wargs and now this big blood spattered fella with a beard and plaits has appeared... Oh! That's the druid we were trying to rescue, and the goblins are running away.

1. When I open the window first thing, I hear geese in flight honking to each other. 2. Clear bubbles are rising in my pan of sugar, Neil Martin is chatting with a Dubliners tribute act and Nick is spotting planets through the open back door. 3. After all that careful mixing of boiling sugar and cooling and measuring, yes, I can taste caramel in the finished cake.

1. The shallow sunny part of the pond is now alive alive alive with tadpoles -- so numerous and so wriggly that we can hear them. 2. Out of sight, a woodpecker knocks. 3. After supper, I go down to do the bins in the alley along the bottom of the row. I'm startled to a halt by reflected sunlight bounced by a window that I can't see on to a wall that is normally only lit briefly at sunrise.

1. We are not even 100m from an A-road and birdsong is the main sound -- chipping and cooing and trilling and chiffing and chaffing and the ratchetting call of the magpie. 2. Violets on a woodland bank, blinking in the harsh April sun. 3. We have eaten enough chocolate and now we are cheerfully tired of it.

1. There is a lot of playful April foolery on social media. Some of the brands and organisations seem to be reaching towards a better world where otters trained in water rescue support the emergency services; while others are just looking for chaos (the Macquarie comma and Aldi's law arm, Legaldi).  2. Nick brings me a bag of asparagus, even though no one else likes it. I have some spears, cooked briefly to a bright clear green, with my lunch. 3. Sitting up in bed, tablet between us, to watch NASA's rocket launch. The BBC commentator says it's taller than the Elizabeth Tower that holds Big Ben. That's hard to hold that in mind as Integrity dwindles to a dot in the blue sky.

1. Yes, this movement takes less effort than it did in December. I give up less often, and I'm intrigued by the harder versions. 2. The moon untangles itself from the clouds and presses its face to mine as I climb the hill. 3. As we step out of the door, I reflexively pull my coat around me against the cold -- but there's no need tonight. The air feels softer, and more joyful, carrying voices and the scents of flowering hedges.

1. The auto-till attendant is a nervous speaker -- but nonetheless helps me scan my reward card, which just won't work. She's a bit of a reward programme expert and gives me a useful tip-off. It's funny to see how when I relax to force myself into a more patient state, she relaxes too, and how when she's showing me on her own phone, she achieves fluency.  2. To pot up fresh new geranium plants for the front windowsill. 3. We're pulling treasures out of the freezer this week -- a bag of frozen mango to eat with our yoghurt.

1. We are all a bit resentful about the clocks changing -- but I happen to know that there are a couple of pain au chocolats in the freezer to sweeten the early breakfast deal. 2. Last skiing of the season. We get away just before the cold rain and walk out past banks tumbled with primroses and early bluebells. 3. Jabbing candles through the sugary crust of a lemon drizzle cake.

1. There is a garden on Mount Ephraim where grape hyacinth bulbs have spilled over the wall and forced themselves into gaps in the pavement cobbles. 2. There on the edge of the path, looking breathless, squashed and dusty, some early bluebells. 3. There is satisfaction, I suppose, in threading elastic through a waistband, pulling the rucked cloth flat along the length.

1. He is sitting more or less content among drifts of cheap packaging from China. 2. It's a black sky and gold light afternoon. 3. She wants a refill for this one particular pen from a shop that is only in London. This feels like familiar behaviour.

1. Jackdaws, quick and smart as croupiers, flicker themselves in and out of a playing card sized hole in a sealed chimney. 2. I do consider a cheeky sign-off (almost certainly no one is reading or reviewing) but I haven't yet been paid, and I'm not entirely sure of the comms plan. So I deny myself and bask in the peace of mind. 3. Just yesterday I was thinking that after the run of dry weather I'd need to start watering the garden. Now stormy rain has set in for a few hours.

1. With the sun behind her, my friend comes down the hill towards our gate. 2. We step over a wet place where a rust-coloured chalybeate spring runs over the road. 3. I walk over spring mud and wonder which of my footprints will harden into summer ruts and which will flake away into dust.

1. I find myself deep in a book that makes me laugh and forget where I am. 2. A little hand sanitiser quickly lifts the biro ink stain. 3. Among his photos of the weekend -- the play of lake water light on a swan's breast feathers.

1. The taxi driver and I have been talking on the five-minute journey. As I get out, he thanks me for my story of rocking and jolting over fields in my grandfather's ancient green Land Rover that always smelled of petrol because of a leak in the tank. 2. I catch the gaze of a baby in a backpack and we both smile. 3. The sky is clear and dark enough that I can view the zodiacal light. I'd never heard of this before, but apparently around the equinox, light from the sun below the horizon reflects off space dust to brighten the sky just after dusk and before dawn.

 Today, Satya Robyn has published her interview with me over on Substack.  Do take a look. 1. My cake comes with a dish of whipped cream, just like in the 1980s. 2. Degree by degree, the sunset has moved round until I can't see it from my window -- but I can see it warming the building at the end of the Pantiles. 3. I deliver an edit and pretty much float downstairs when supper is called.

1. Through the trellis between the back yards, a jigsaw piece of our neighbour's face. 2. Two bees looping about the garden glinting in the sun. 3. There she is up ahead on her way home. She will be mortified if I call out in the High Street, though.

1. A yellow dog with a plumed tail runs joyfully across the lower cricket field. Of course it's a retriever. 2. We are discussing a window box plan. He spends a long time describing a particular kind of flower. We have to use an image search to find them. 'Those ones. I don't like them.' 3. We are very excited -- but very quietly because it's late at night -- to see the viscount married.

1. I am allowed a look in the back of his sketchbook. 2. In response to a rumour, I divert our walk, and there is indeed frogspawn in Fir Tree Pond. 3. I turn and look back. There is a hazel tree putting out tiny leaves in a tentative way, as if not quite sure how they will be received.

1. I take the falling path and let the rolling fold of the hill shelter me from the biting March lion wind. 2. There's a woman on a bench by the cherry tree road and she's talking to herself... talking to the magpies... talking on her phone. 3. The washing-up is done to rule and I drop my apron, leave her bath running and hurry out the door to hear poetry in a pub.

1. And now the forsythia is more yellow stars than hedge. 2. Quiet café; bored barista; good coffee; reading task. 3. What I really like is a letter box with a good wide slot.

1. As I'm leaving, I ask for and am indulged, a biscuit for my hand to sustain me in the supermarket. 2. Cold drizzle prickles my face, shakes me awake. 3. At this time of day, another bus will be along very soon.

1. Today, I get to hear the morning birds and see her turn to look back up the hill. 2. I buy the best tangerines squatting fat and bright in their oversized skins. 3. Our youngest bans us from the kitchen and cooks supper. She has done all the little things that we would do if we were not always slightly frazzled -- like hiding the heap of things that gets abandoned on the end of the table, serving lettuce in a bowl instead of the salad spinner and grating a piece of parmesan.

1. In one hand I have Clive Oppenheimer's book about volcanoes; in the other my phone with Google Maps -- this is so much better than following along with an atlas. 2. While dusting, I find the book I was looking for a week and a half ago. 3. Ginger, garlic, onion, chicken and beans lined up behind the pan in a comet tail array.

1. We are swathed in mist this morning, like we've been laid in tissue paper for storage. 2. Already, someone has made webby nests full of tiny black eggs in the tops of the nettles I was growing for the kitchen. 3. I test her on her science and think that she knows a lot more than me -- I never got my head around  the whys and wherefores of waves.

1. It is a relief to see magnolia flowers, and new leaves of nettle and cranesbill. 2. The train after the one we missed arrives early and leaves promptly. 3. '...and,' she snaps, tired and grumpy after parents evening, 'I bet he pulls the chair out for all the mums.' I'd noticed that too, and simultaneously appreciated it and found it awkward. 'It's because he has good old fashioned manners; and he said you were nicely raised, so you probably are.'

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.

1. It's been a difficult morning already. To reset, I take a walk through Søstrene Grene without buying anything to remind myself of things I like that I already own. 2. This croissant seemed ridiculously pricy, but when I cut it open, I find airy crumb, instead of collapsing pastry flakes, and that explains the cost. 3. There's always herbal tea.

1. The little cyclamen which has been cheerfully putting forth dolly mixture pink flowers all winter has fallen back. There is nothing left but a pile of yellow leaves and a saucer-sized corm. 2. I've seen a rabbit and she wants to see it too. It's sitting by that fallen tree just past the strand of ivy, by those nettles, just up from the broken branches, down from the dead bramble. The moment it wriggles its ears and resolves itself. 3. A bag of lichen-scaled and tassled and fringed and bobbled sticks was collected on our walk for a photography project. I put them outside the back door until they are needed, and recall all the toddler stick collections that I quietly released back into the wild.

1. The town's horizons are layered in morning mist -- something intriguing to open the curtains for. 2. We quietly split a pastry and eat it before the children notice. 3. In sturdy boots we plough right through the muddy places.

1. When he comes home, his haircut is just fine -- pretty much exactly how it was, except it looks cared for and intentional. 2. A little brown bird with a stubby tail hops up the bare jasmine, on to the wall and through the trellis: the divisions significant to us and our neighbours are nothing to wrens. 3. It is nice to find a beer in the fridge after a good day's work. We share it -- those big bottles of ale are just right for two of our collins glasses.

1. Pulling tiny weeds from a pot I find among the tangled leaves chilled blue fists of grape hyacinth flowers. 2. At games night, there's a word puzzle -- the moment when you see three letters that could fit together, and then there's a cascade of fitting letters, and then a whole word and then another. 3. I'm falling asleep, but I'm trying to explain to Nick why I like Maigret. 'It's raining and there are boats and they've already poisoned the Pernod and calvados bottles. And everyone in the café has mistresses.' 

1. A hailstorm changes the ground from asphalt black to a strange bright grey that mimics the brightening sky. 2. We set up a disco light and dance in the kitchen to a playlist of bubblegum pop. 3. Nick calls us to look out of the front door at a rainbow in a brassy sky.

1. The increasing height of her jumps over the bumps at the top of the slope, and the deliberate swish of her turns. 2. A rainstorm has darkened the afternoon into evening. I start to close the blinds but find the western side of the house washed in light the colour of worn silver plate. 3. In the dark, snowdrops gleam and pale crocuses glow like a ghost army. A porchlight illuminates a scarlet camellia. 

1. As often happens, the taxi driver offers me a lift back into town. I don't resent this duty, and I profit the brisk walk home; but now I feel seen and heard in the tedious logistics of our situation and it makes all the difference. 2. I've had a long break away from Flit and Folio's Voices spoken word events, and I'm very excited about sharing the familiar songs and skits with the two friends who have come with me; and as always I'm wondering what new material the usual (and unusual) suspects have in their notebooks. One of my favourite ever love poems, it turns out. 3. Hattie the dog gets up and walks to the front of the stage to gaze lovingly at her amanuensis, who is singing about fried chicken. PS: the new layout should be more convenient for smaller screens. Hope the change is not too alarming.

1. ...and so I bring home a paperwhite, two feet bulb to bud, wrapped in an orange bag for life. 2. Thudding feet and red tops -- a teacher and four boys from my son's school pass me on the pavement. 3. We watch an episode of Abney and Teal  because Bettany can't remember this gentle, whimsical animated CBeebies classic. I'm surprised at how much I've forgotten, as this was a real favourite. I have to re-learn the world nearly from scratch. How did I lose track of Bop and the Poc-pocs?

1. Flipping through my library book to check the glossy picture section in the middle. 2. I bend right down and check the green spikes so I can assure her that the rats have not eaten the flower buds on her emerging bulbs. 3. I stand for a moment admiring the display of weird 1960s and 70s sci fi books -- giant purple cats and suffering astronauts and spaceships shaped like skulls.

1. I walk home across the common -- it's bruised and muddy, but still here, and birds are calling to each other. 2. Now I have time to sit and look carefully at the glass paperweight I found in a charity shop on Sunday. This one has three trumpet flowers made from elongated millefiori petals in red, yellow and white, emerging from a cloud of ink blue glass and silver bubbles. I turn it this way and that to admire the details  on the backs of the flowers, magnified by the thickness of the glass. 3. 'Well, supposing you meet a handsome French boy and you want to chat about daily routines past and present, including unexpected disruptions and your opinions on various chores?' I am flailing now, trying to tempt her onwards as we work through the sentence builder for her French test. She looks at me as if I've missed something key and says, 'He will learn English if he wants to talk to me.'

1. Fluttering on the edge of vision -- a few little brown sparrows touch down in the garden, and then take off again. 2. We suddenly remember the bread, and treat ourselves to a bakery loaf. 3. At last we've got round the Digging For Britain episode covering the Norfolk Carnyx hoard -- a mass of metal and soil lifted from a building site that turned out to contain an Iron Age Celtic battle trumpet, a standard and shield bosses. One interpretation is that the collection was a votive offering, buried to affirm an end to hostilities. I keep thinking about the high worth of those objects -- the effort needed to smelt the metal and smith the fine sheets that make up the trumpet, and the way it had been repaired and used over many years. Even those fierce people put a high value on peace.

1. For now, we're a household with a jar of home made chocolate chip cookies. 2. For the bathroom, a new bar of Marseilles soap with the name of the scent moulded on in sharp blocky capital letters. 3. Today, I've finished reading two books that were a bit of a slog (but both worthwhile in their own way). Perhaps the next ones in the pile will be easier.

1. The sighing glug of a hot water bottle filling, and the soft belch of air making room. 2. Spoken word night. The energy shifts from poet to poet -- from loud men just come from work, urgent stories backed up like floodwater; to folks working through a complex idea; to little voices with a tentative question 'is it just me?'  3. Sky is hazy. Stars show up anyway.

1. Thinking as I hold a squat that I couldn't have done this six weeks ago. 2. The missing knife is found -- it was in the cake tin, rather than anywhere sinister. 3. There's now a nametape on her coat and I feel better about that.

1. In the café where I've been waiting, a high-pitched mechanical sound has been bothering me sporadically. One of the three plasterers eating cooked breakfasts on the table behinds me grumbles, too. The sound is still annoying, but at least it's not just me. 2. The park lawns are broken and dead, but anyway snowdrop clumps -- ice white and blue-green -- stand up in the ruins with no sign of dismay.  3. And the crocuses, pale like mushrooms, fragile as ghosts, have arrived one by one, until the silent defiant crowd of them tells winter that this is unacceptable. 

1. In the time it took us to walk through the house from the back garden to the front, the air has filled with misty drizzle. 2. She had the foresight while I was serving the sausage casserole to put half a dozen of her chocolate chip cookies in the cooling oven and now we are eating them wrapped around scoops of raspberry ripple ice cream. 3. In a row on the sofa, our eyes wide at footage of ash-drowned towns, midnight at noon, and rock boiling and rolling and running like swift water, we watch Werner Herzog's requiem to the volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. (One child wanted something introspective; the other had been writing a presentation on disaster preparedness in Hawaii; and I just like Werner Herzog.)

1. We eat the last of the Christmas treats with our coffee -- a few stray stollen bites from Lidl. 2. While listening to a work webinar, I fix everything that has been annoying me about the jumper I am wearing. 3. 'I interviewed this comedian,' I tell Bettany as we are listening to Laura Solon's Talking and Not Talking . She isn't impressed -- it was in 2008, long before she was born. But it was published in the local paper, and I got paid for it, so there's a win.

1. Our taxi driver has a string of blue glass beads hanging by his window. He speaks proudly about his two boys -- one at school with my son, and one away at university. 2. There are buds on my Christmas cactus, promising hot pink flowers in due course. 3. Slices of bergamot lemon in my soda water -- a tiny adjustment to the normal routine while their brief season flies past. 

1. I glance up at Toggl, which I use to track my work, and find that I've made good time writing my bridge news. 2. The steady rain gives over to a silvery shower, washed sky and sunshine that looks as if could do with a coffee and a walk round the block. 3. I can't sleep -- but that's okay: I've got a Murderbot book on the library's Libby app so I'm far away in distant future space rescuing scientists from colonists with an alien remnants issue.

1. I am intrigued by an article in The Guardian  about psychic phone lines, and then by the author's upcoming thriller about a toxic lifestyle guru who rises out of the Essex saltmarshes. Anna Stothard's  Follow Her  is not out yet, but Amazon gives me a free advance ebook (for algorithm reasons, maybe?) I drift towards the sofa with my cup of tea. 2. Nick is pretty disappointed not to record a single landing visitor in the Great British Birdwatch -- but even a zero is honest data and it will be welcomed and useful. 3. Full of haggis and drinking just one more whisky and water, we lie on the sofa for the BBC's Burns Night concert.

1. Instead of the horrible news on my phone, I have a new Fortean Times to read at breakfast. 2. I'm thinking there is no chance we'll keep the white chocolate white, when she comes up with the ingenious idea of mixing it with the red dust from the packet of freeze-dried strawberries to make pink chocolate. 3. My current edit is set in Venice in the height of summer. It's grey and wet here and I'm Januarying as hard as I can with a good activity and writing routine, but this month is such a slog. I find refuge in the uncomfortable heat and the water and the narrow streets and the weight of history.

1. We've put him between us in the centre of the screen, and now we just have to listen while he tells the doc all the things he won't tell us. 2. This new coffee is delicious -- Ethiopian Sidamo with clear citrus notes -- and completely justifies our fussy tastes. 3. There it is, the taste of fennel. Hours earlier, when I was cooking fish in the milk that would go in the white sauce, I dropped a few fennel seeds in the pan.

1. It is cold (although less chill than it has been) and cloudy (although less grey than it has been) and a robin sings loudly from the top of a streetlamp while bulbs push insistent leaves out of the earth and a couple of ladybirds sit out. 2. A well risen batter pudding with sausages floating like barrage balloons. 3. Mulled wine in a heavy stone goblet. 

1. I know I won't stop thinking about this paper cutting book, so I give in and take it up to the till.  2. The satisfying crunchy sensation of shredding a red cabbage. 3. After some tense negotiations over sofa territory, cushion rights and blanket division, we settle down for an hour of shouting at the Traitors.

1. Mist the colour of skimmed milk fills the Spa valley, drains and then fills it again. Here, the sky is clear blue all the way to the top. 2. There's no charge for today's visit. 3. A joyful greeting from the massage therapist, who is also a writer friend.

1. I find yet more recycling and squinting in the drizzle, go down to the gate to put it out. Our neighbour is at her gate and we grumble gentle complaints at each other about the weather. 2. There's a party invitation in my email -- something to look forward to in the spring. 3. Slipping cooked beetroots out of their peel. These are small ones -- three to a handful -- so perhaps they will be sweet and go well with apple and some walnuts.

1. She's poorly and wants fresh strawberries, and I get them for her though I wouldn't usually buy out-of-season air freighted fruit. I allow myself a moment of marvelling at the miracle: it's January in England and I'm giving my child ripe strawberries grown with water from the Nile. 2. Reflection of a bird swings across a wet roof. 3. We find a Welsh story-teller Owen Staton, who has a rumbling, resonant voice and a lot of podcast episodes, to soothe our tired selves until we're ready to sleep.

1. Watching the thermometer lounging in the marmalade pan creep up to 104C. 2. Fine rain is blowing on a mean wind across the slope, but she's still working away -- putting into practice everything she's observed in videos and considered over the week. 3. We slip in a quick episode of  Ghost Story for Christmas  -- an adaptation of E. Nesbit's  Man-sized in Marble,  clinging together in the dark, peering into this strange artificially unseasonable world unable to do anything to help the doomed characters.

1. The time has come to finish up, but we're still swapping podcast recommendations. 2. The call comes -- his guitar has arrived at the shop. 3. The rain has put much sought-after curls in her hair.

1. A man from a white van is trundling and scraping a red plastic grit spreader around the car park, which has been an ice rink these last few days. 2. A pearly sliver has fallen off one of my front teeth. When I call the dentists, their lack of urgency (an appointment is available in a week and a half) is oddly reassuring. 3. There is an icy sort of rain falling and I am very glad to leave the window and step back across the cold floor and into bed, which is still warm. 

1. To eat a few fat sweet dates with my coffee. 2. A video showing careful, elegant parallel turns comes home from the dry slope before they do. 3. His interests have turned to the occult and I'm pretty sure I have an esoteric zine with an article that will answer his questions. It only takes a little digging among dusty magazine files to find it, and it also has stickers and a flexidisc.