Sparrows, sourdough and hoard.

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.

Jar, soap and end of a slog.

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.

Hot water bottle, Word Up and night sky.

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.

Squat, missing knife and named.

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.

Squeal, snowdrops and crocuses.

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. 

Change in weather, dessert and requiem.

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.)

The real end of Christmas, multitasking and life before.

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.