Three Beautiful Things

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. 

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.