Three Beautiful Things

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.