Three Beautiful Things

1. Thank-you cards crowd the shelf behind our meeting. 2. He comes back triumphantly with a pudding. The children, despite their great ages, are astonished that there could be a pudding on a Monday. 3. We've sat up very late, but I'm glad because it means we heard the promised rain falling steadily in the dark.

1. Really, the climb up on to the common is always the hardest part of the walk. 2. We cut across a housing estate -- busy with car washers and gardeners and hedge snippers and flags -- and dart down a twitten past the playground to find Georgian cottages squatting calm and cool around a spring-fed pond on the edge of the woods. 3. Around the next corner, over the next stile, we find a cool spot by the stream that is not taken. We sit down with a bag of sweets to watch black dragonflies that turn iridescent green when they cross a sunbeam. I think they might be Calopteryx virgo, otherwise known as 'beautiful demoiselle'.

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.