Three Beautiful Things

1. To dip-sample my small library of poetry and micro texts to find a quick consolation. 2. Pinks, striped with red like seaside rock, scented, if you care to bend down, of cloves. 3. I have in my stash just the right stickers for her revision notes.

1. A friend once said that my gardening method is a lot to do with editing. I think of this as I pull out this herb bennet, but not that one; and finger through my pot of lawn daisies to pull out herb robert seedlings, but let it grow where its fern leave soften hard edges; and cut back the seedy mildewed alkanet so that it will again in due course give more twinkling blue flowers -- for the bees of course. 2. There is something in the scrub at the side of the path, rustling and fluttering, now before us, now behind. I catch a flash of cream speckles, and then quite suddenly, there it is on a fallen branch, bright eye and tilted head -- a song thrush. 3. Under the front door step -- two buttercup flowers yellow bright as make-believe suns. 

1. I'm rather achy, but Saturday's work shows in the tied in sweetpeas and the tomato plants in their grown-up pots. And my to-do list is a little less weighty. 2. There is something so nice and glowy about seeing my daughter folding backwards into the kneeling camel pose stretch that I cannot manage. 3. At tea time, seeing me drooping over the kitchen table, Nick assures me he has supper in hand and sends me upstairs to lie down.

1. I'm wearing what the children when they were small used to call 'scary tightses', which is any pair of tights with an unusual pattern. This one has red chinoiserie figures up the back, and even the supermarket delivery man is startled enough to comment, when, having waved him into our road, he sees me over the carpark, still holding my phone and turning to walk back to our gate. 2. I'll only be gone for a few hours, but Nick comes to the door and kisses me before I set off out into the early evening. 3. With poems read aloud to a small crowd who are drinking slowly while rain blows past outside and busy people break stride to peer through the window, the pictures of lambs and gardens and bunions and fox cubs chasing magpies for fun are so much better

1. I'm in a little-and-often era -- 15-minute exercises every day. One shelf at a time. Fifty pages in a morning. A novel chapter tucked into a short wait. 2. I'm working again with a client after a break. I'm loving the 'welcome back' emails. 3. My children are helping each other with homework. 'This formula comes up in every test, even if it's nothing to do with respiration and photosynthesis.'

1. It's been a week of rain, and we are now used to the routine of peeling off wet clothing and hanging them to dry. We've taken to warming up in our pyjamas. 2. I finish work a little early, and there is time for a chapter of Bleak House  before supper. It's another chapter in which innocent grifter Harold Skimpole's creates carnage, and I hold in my head how John Jarndyce's inherent goodness and tolerance starts to harm the family he has collected around himself. 3. We lie in bed listening to Shakira's Whenever, Wherever in English and then in Spanish and then in English again and agree that it is just the best.