Three Beautiful Things

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. 

1. I float in a bath the colour of the deep sea listening to the instructions for a blue-themed writing workshop. 2. Just as  Traitors  gets exciting, he joins us, wedging and levering his bony limbs between us in our nest of blankets and cushions on the sofa. 3. We fall asleep to the promise of snow.

1. Words have not been easy recently. When they do come, they seem unsettled and easily startled, like wild birds that have lost trust. Nevertheless, I know what I know and I follow the workshop instructions with a good will and a lot of hope. 2. While we wait for the year to spool out, with a generous orange box of pralines between us, we watch a documentary about the election of the pope, described through interviews with a few of the cardinals involved, as well as journalists, observers and a tailor specialising in religious vestments. The cardinals are very human, talking about tears and pizza and projected sizes of cassocks. 3. At last it's 2026 and I can sleep.