Three Beautiful Things

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.)