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.

Blue glass, hot pink and bergamot.

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. 

Good time, after rain and far future.

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.

Follow Her, no birds and Burns Night.

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.

News, white chocolate and Venice.

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.

Listen, justified and fennel.

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.

Winter is passing, toad in the hole and mulled wine.

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.