Three Beautiful Things

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.