Three Beautiful Things

I'm quite fond of Eat The Seasons, a website that lists each week some seasonal foods. Today, they've suggested chestnuts, and the feature starts with what looks very much like a 3BT list -- I'm sure it's not, but I thought I'd share it with you. 1. One of the flowers on my white potted azalea has a flash of shocking pink in one petal. I wonder at the colour locked up in the plant's genes and the chance errors that allowed it to be expressed. Ain't life grand. 2. On his second visit of the day (he came yesterday, too,) I tell the delivery man that it's wedding presents. He smiles broadly. 3. I am taking enormous pleasure in the oak tree that I can see from the desk. It covers fully a quarter of my view, and has ponderously changed from green to yellow to ochre. I expect to wake up any day now and see an even more dramatic transformation.

1. Seeing a treecreeper hunting on the mossy wall outside our office. It had a white belly and a long beak which it uses for winkling insects out of trees. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has more details. I've see one once before -- you know you've got one because of the way it walks up and down vertical surfaces. 2. Finding my first geocache. What happens is people hide a box of goodies and post the GPS co-ordinates on a website. Then anyone can go and find the cache, swap some of the goodies, and log their find on at geocaching.com . 3. Going out to dinner with my parents and my sister. It's strange to go from eating every day with people for the first 18 years of your life to only eating with them on special occasions -- it was The Mother's birthday.

1. Kate Adie's memoir, The Kindness of Strangers . It reminded me of why I am so keen to keep up with the news. 2. Clean windows. 3. My mother's linen chest. It's carved with oriental scenes and made of camphor wood that makes the bed linen smell medicinal and clean and homey.

1. A gi-normous, and I do mean gi-normous - it's about the size of my head - dried spikey pufferfish that I see through a basement window I pass on my way to work. It's sitting on a plate on someone's dining room table. 2. A thrush - they're the ones with the speckly breasts - hopping around on the grass with a beakful of something wriggly. 3. Putting my trousers back on after having my legs waxed.