Three Beautiful Things

1. I wake in my sleeping bag just before dawn and crawl out into the cool dry air to admire the eastern sky, where the clouds are gilded on their undersides and all hung about with birdsong. 2. There is on our right an abandoned apple orchard, dark, unpruned and heavy with red-green eaters. We take one each for the continuing journey. 3. Every year, at the tired tail end of summer, I am so pleased to see cyclamen -- clean dolly mixture pink and white -- doing a kindly service  by brightening the dusty leaf litter under hedges. Cyclamen aren't natives, but they often pop up far from gardens, as if someone on a mission has tucked corms into banks and woodlands where they might be needed.

1. It takes me a moment to identify it -- but that's honey in my piece of rocky road, rather than golden syrup. 2. The rain has coaxed a fuzz of green out of the dry baked fields, and everywhere plants are giving it another shot. 3. He returns from the dentist with a packet of antibiotics and a promise that they will start working within 24 hours; and also an extraction appointment for next week.

1. To walk through town cradling a huge bouquet of flowers -- butter-yellow scented stocks and sunflowers and a galaxy of daisy flowers. 2. Following my cousin's recommendation, last week I pushed a few spring onion roots into a pot to see if they would regenerate. I notice now that they are pushing up green stalks, and digging into the soil with new white roots as if they mean to give it a go. 3. She says that the thing that made this evening worth coming out for was my thing.  PS: My thing is on the Word Up Instagram, but it's too early in the morning for me to listen back to my own voice.

1. When I wake in the night, I have something to look forward to: Kim Stanley Robinson's lyrical descriptions of another planet in Blue Mars . 2. There's a bit of an anxious buzz about in my emails -- a website I'm writing a bit of content for is launching. All good wishes to you,  Bridges Insight . 3. It is disconcerting to stitch a school nametape into a man's suit jacket, but that's how it is with teenagers.

1. The kitchen is smudged with chocolate and there is a bowl of ganache icing cooling in the fridge. After lunch, she will bake the cake. 2. To rub between my fingers the tracing paper moons of honesty seeds. 3. Now that my mind is settled and made up, the tasks I've been putting off tumble over each other as if they are in a rush to be done. 

1. I come down to the smell of rain and the smell of coffee. 2. My son is going away for a few days with my parents. His luggage includes his Madeline pan and some weighty reading matter. My parents both make the same assumption about his chunky hardback -- but it is just Game of Thrones . 3. This summer's sparrows fly low through the garden so close that I can feel the air displaced by their thrumming wing feathers.