Three Beautiful Things

1. Lines of paddy paw prints over the snowy carpark clue me in on the night life. 2. The doorbell rings. The triumphant Abel and Cole man hands over our veggie box. 3. Each cluster of pale orange rowan berries is weighed down by snow. The high branches are weighed down by feasting wood pigeons.

1. "Sort of skulking?" "Yes, and picking bits out from between the paving stones." "That's a dunnock ." Another of our home birds identified. 2. My parents' neighbour has four turkeys in a pen in the woods. They are pleased to see us and come to the fence to show off their green-black plumage. One of the males fans out his tail for us. 3. He brings his great dane puppy out to meet us. Its colour makes me think of a batch of biscuits -- pale gold to soft tan. He says its spent the short afternoon testing the boundaries of his garden.

1. To wake early in an unfamiliar room and see that the eastern sky is pink. 2. Our blackbird splashing in the puddle by the bins. 3. The cherry blossom is out in our street. Nick says: 'It was just like this when I bought the flat.'

Sandra has written a 3BT post at Living in 22 . Have a look at the rest of her blog -- she has some wonderful photos of garden birds. 1. I get a coffee and line up my week's work in my notebook. 2. I like to hear the robin chipping-chipping away -- he sits (small and bellicose) in the conifer outside the window to guard the coconut shell filled with fat and seeds. 3. We have moved the kitchen table round to give more space in the kitchen, and now instead of sitting face-to-face, we sit side-by-side. I wasn't keen because I thought it would make conversation awkward. It doesn't really; and now we tend to turn our chairs at the end of the meal to spend some time cuddling and chatting.

1. Our house doctor says: "Whatever you've got baking, keep doing it." It's just a loaf of bread -- but the smell always cheers me up, too. 2. He says that there is a badger track across his town garden, and that friends over the road have a sett, too. 3. Andy walks me home after an evening of catching up and commiseration about the housing market. If anyone wants Tunbridge Wells flats, we've got them.

1. It's Nick's birthday. I make him wake up early so he can have his cards and presents, half-sitting, half-lying in a warm cloud of bedding. 2. Nick stops crunching up the drive to knock on the window. I've only got 20 more minutes of work. 3. One of his birthday presents was a DVD: Badgers - Secrets Of The Set . We sit together and watch amazing footage of our favourite animals. I particularly liked seeing them suck worms out of the ground, and the scratching montage.

Was talking about bird footprints in the snow the other day, and look, Lucille has put some pictures on her blog, Useful or Beautiful . 1.How gratifying to see the apple I put out for the birds pecked into a mass of peaks and chasms. 2. It's such a relief to come off compacted and frozen snow, where I have been sliding and sinking by turns, and on to a gritted road. 3. Coming into a warm, bright house where there will be an evening of pizza and gaming.

1. Seeing a friend's bright red coat at the far end of the street. 2. Yellow gold light has hit the building opposite -- I feel as if I have been greeted with a huge smile. 3. We go to a lecture on what the Weald would have been like in the Cretaceous, when Tunbridge Wells Museum's iguanadon would have been alive. Swampy, apparently. The lecturer puts up a picture of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, and says rather sadly: "I've never been there, but I'm told that's what it would have been like." I have been there -- so all comes to life for me. I can imagine the wet heat, and the forests of horsetails growing half in, half out of the water where the dinosaurs come down to drink.

1. The sound of wallpaper coming off in long strips. Nick compares it to a lightsabre. To me, it sounds like the drawn-out rrrrrriiiiippp of an activity normally forbidden by polite society. When the work is done, the pieces bagged up and the dustsheets put away, the exposed walls make us feel as if we have moved into someone else's house. 2. A father manhandles a pushchair through the mud at the autumn flowershow. He turns to the line of children behind him and says: 'This way, and don't pick up any more worms.' 3. On the underside of a railing, a caterpillar adorned with black bristles and tan brushes.

These posts are about this walk: View Larger Map 1. We turn a corner and look down an undulating three-mile drive to Windsor Castle. The road is dotted with tiny citizens and a few deer walk over from the left, stepping through the double avenue before running off across the park. 2. A long-legged boat winch waits to roll down the slipway to draw a boat out of the water. I get the feeling that if it has to wait much longer, it might lock its wheels and walk stiffly away on rattling metal legs. 3. We are looking for a place to stop. But the hand-wide path runs between fence and river. At a footbridge over a ditch, we find a flattened place where the bank has dropped. We sit with cake and apples and watch damsel flies hover and disappear while the Thames slips by. 4. My aunt says that on long journeys when she was little, she would pick her favourite features from the places passed and weave them into a dream house. 5. Mistletoe looks deep green when growing on a tree with budgerigar...

1. Two ocean green skirts -- one in the broderie anglaise that is everywhere at the moment; and one in strips of silk and cotton. 2. While we have lunch in the pub, two long-haired alsatians asked to be let out into the garden. One is brown and could be mistaken for a lion in times of dodgy perspective. The other was deep, velvety black. Having asked to be let out, the dogs decided that they'd prefer to be inside, and lay with their noses against the window. In due course, the landlady opened the door let them in. The lion dog stood up and came in, but the black dog had gone. 'Midnight! Midnight!' It seems he had found his own way in through another door, because he responded to his name by walking quietly past our table and sitting down behind her. 'Midnight! Midnight!' Puzzled, she turned to shut the door and nearly fell over him in surprise. 3. A documentary about scientists collecting creatures in Nicaragua. A woman spends ten hours a day sitting in a tree...

1. I take my lunch out to the seats in the back of the carpark. Within minutes, I have seen a dragonfly. 2. A new scarlet ethernet cable in a coil on my bedpost. 3. A housemate cooking spag bol and unpacking the Abel and Cole box .

1. At RHS Wisley, the long double borders planted with drifts of waving grasses and daisies of all shapes and sizes -- my favourites were the ones with long droopy petals skirting round cone-shaped centres. 2. Hunting for frogs, wild strawberries and strange plants in my aunt's garden. 3. The sound of blackberries dropping into a box as I pick them.

1. On most mornings I see a father on a bike taking a selection of kids on scooters to school. 2. A Popeye post on Classic Cartoons . Looking at the stills, I can almost hear Popeye's 'Ack ack ack' laughter and his 'ommnyum-nyum-nyum' as he eats the spinach; and Olive Oyl crying 'Aw Popeye, hayulp.' 3. By chance coming across a TV programme about Johnny Kingdom . He was filming stags with their antlers still covered in velvet -- the layer of skin that protects them while they grow. He got them on the skyline so that the light hit the velvet just so, and it looked magical.

1. The snorting gurgle of the coffee pot coming to the boil. 2. Pheasants chasing each other round the garden. They lean right forward and hunch their wings in while making a terrifying cock-cock-cocking noise. It's strange to see them feeding with the little birds, and to think that to a sparrow, a pheasant must seem bigger than an elephant does to us. 3. Amaretto biscuits that taste strongly of bitter almonds.

1. Cooking dinner and seeing someone else enjoying it. 2. Longterm 3BTers may remember the transports of delight I experienced in Africa when a male vervet monkey stalked past me with his bright blue balls on display. Imagine, then, my jaw hitting the floor as in the course of the BBC's wonderful and highly educational The Life of Mammals , David Attenborough narrated very delicately footage of right whales mating. Twelve feet long and highly mobile, apparently. 3. My laptop now has a reliable source of internet that really belongs to us.

1. Unpacking a new computer. I like the cunning tabs you have to pull to free the batteries in the mouse; and the setting it up so it's exactly the way I like it. 2. A wildlife documentary with lots of enthusiastic handwaving and gasps of amazement. 3. A comforting phone call to PaulV in which we realign my universe so that everything is in the right proportion.

1. The smell of wild oregano. 2. Finding a giant snail -- he was as big as a victoria plum. 3. Looking at London from a viewpoint and seeing as little dots on the horizon such giants as St Paul's, the Post Office Tower and Canary Wharf. Picture by Michael Grant

1. It is so cold in the office that Sarah and I have to bring the little radiator up from the games room. We switch it on full because the boys aren't here to complain about being too hot. 2. Caroline explaining that because it was cold and dark outside she put the baby slugs she found in the kitchen in a bowl with a lid, labelled it 'slugs' and went back to bed. Her boyfriend Ian comments: 'It was lucky I didn't fancy a late night snack of liquorice allsorts.' 3. Polishing my boots until they are glossy.

1. Stripey snails. I nearly tread on a foolhardy one that is crawling across the pavement. I pick him up -- he pulls everything into his shell -- and put him at the bottom of a garden hedge. 2. It is so foggy today that we can't see beyond the end of the field. Possibly the rest of the world has been covered up so they can put the leaves on the trees and touch-up the paintwork on the sky without us seeing. 3. The way paths move. Half a beech tree has come down in the woods -- it probably happened during the snow a couple of weeks ago -- and the top branches are blocking the path. Already people's feet have worn a new path around the end, however. When the tree is gone perhaps there will still be a kink in the path.