Three Beautiful Things

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.

1. With my coffee, I have a little bun flavoured with elderflowers. 2. The first of my marigolds has come out, like a reliable, robust helper. The pelting rain we're having this week won't hurt her flaming orange petals, and she is welcome as sunshine. 3. There is a spoonful of sharp garnet red stewed raspberries to spoon over our chocolate fondants.

1. The alarm that I set on Monday while I was planning my week reminds me to tune into a professional development call on Thursday. Thanks, Monday Clare. 2. It's a pleasant feeling to overshoot my page count target for the day because I'm immersed in the edit. 3. A song comes on the radio that has a bone-deep familiarity. I realise that it can only be one of the songs from our primary school hymn book.