Three Beautiful Things

1. I hear the door go, and then voices downstairs. A lovely mum from school has come by with some dried yeast. We send her away with a geranium plant. 2. On the way out of the house I stuff my pockets with a double handful of bouncy balls. 3. I am finding Hound of the Baskervilles  much more enticing than A Study in Scarlet  and The Sign of the Four.  It seems more lively somehow, and relies less on Watson's astonishment at Holmes's smug deducing. Watson always strikes me as a bit of a sad character, somehow. He's a first-rate storyteller; but he lets first the British Army and then Holmes treat him terribly badly in order to get excitement and adventure that he is not able to generate for himself.

1. The reflection on a wet roof of a bird passing overhead. 2. The smell of toasted brioche bread. 3. Alec speculating about what might be going to happen next in the book we are reading. It's The Railway Children , and I feel as if I've reached peak motherhood.

1. Watching birds -- too far away to see what they are -- throwing themselves about the sky outside my study window. 2. I escape for a run around the park with Zombies Run. 3. Our Zoom writing group is starting to feel 'normal' now. I am leading but I lose connection briefly because of network problems. I had passed a plan around beforehand, and the session continues without me while I get back online. I've noticed we're much less shy about sharing our work.

1. At lunch, the children fighting over a salad of leftover rice that I had assumed I would have to eat myself. 2. We're reading Beverley Cleary's Ramona and Her Mother and the other night there was a scene where Mrs Quimby looked out on to a rainy afternoon and wished she could sit outside on a cushion in the sunshine and blow dandelion clocks. So I thought of her as my children jostled with each other to get a particularly good one as we walked on the common. 3. Hot cross buns for tea.

1. To spend a little time on the jigsaw puzzle we have under the PVC cloth on our kitchen table. The children sidle up and join me, adding a few pieces here and there. 2. I love the snooze feature on Gmail -- it means a lot to be able to put a message to one side until the new working week. 3. It is satisfying to sharpen a kitchen knife and draw it quickly across the dough before the loaf goes in the oven.

1. It seems miraculous to make more yoghurt by adding a little of the previous batch to a litre of milk.  2. We've got distracted chatting and suddenly wonder where the children are. To spot them flickering through the gaps in the shrubbery.  3. I am restlessly searching through the library's selection of ebooks looking for something light and easy that isn't checked out. And then I remember that I have a complete Sherlock Holmes loaded up and ready to go.

1. We take our hour of exercise as a walk up to the cricket ground. The place smells of water on dry ground because they have the sprinklers on. It's a hot day and  the groundsman is way over the other side of the field. So the children run in and out of the spray for a few minutes when we arrive, and again for a few minutes before we leave. 2. To -- at last -- get a decent loaf from the starter I've been nursing on the windowsill. I let it rise all night, and then shaped it and let it rise until mid-afternoon. I think that I hadn't been giving it enough time before -- and this time I had better flour, too. 3. This evening was a bit exciting for the children. They watched livecast by the Tunbridge Wells District Scout leader, joining their friends at cubs and beavers in renewing their promises; and then they did the clap for carers in their uniforms. They were absolutely buzzing by the time we took them up to bed, but we felt very proud of them.