Three Beautiful Things

1. I look down and there are snowdrops and hellebore and scyllas. 2. The children run off down the parallel path and I am free to walk and listen. 3. The reassuring feeling from knowing that someone who has been in peril is now safe at home.

1. It has been a very wet morning -- but the line of blue sky advances from the west. 2. Hazelnut milk in my coffee. 3. To learn that in central Europe they sometimes turn up concave Iron Age coins called 'rainbow cups' because of the way they shine after rain on ploughed earth.

1. On this clear and frosty morning a man takes a moment to smoke a cigarette, leaning on the bonnet of his car. 2. I love the foam leaf the barista makes on my coffee. 3. The scent of a freshly opened box of redbush.

1. Only imagine my joy at finding packs of reasonably priced thermal knee-high socks in the softest plain black. 2. As I go out for the evening, Nick and Bettany are about to start making a complicated type of icing involving eggs and hot sugar syrup. On the whole, I'm pleased to be leaving them to it. 3. We've had a change of gaming system, and none of us knows what we're doing. With a lot of fumbling, though, there's a lot of laughter, and an airship.

1. To cheer Bettany up by letting her have a bit of my perfume. 2. The faces children make when they are trying to be very, very quiet. 3. In the centre of the Grove it is dark enough and clear enough to see the stars. Bettany finds Orion,  and I point out Cassiopeia and the Pleiades on Taurus's shoulder, and what is probably Jupiter. I prefer to keep looking up, rather than launch my Stellarium app to check.

1. Eating black forest cherry cake and drinking coffee with Rosey. 2. To hear Nick downstairs and to know that everyone is safe inside from the storm.  3. Bettany confides that she misses her small cousins.

1. To get out and back before the rain. 2. I close the shutters against the cold that the gale is forcing through the glass. 3. Zoom means that I can chat face-to-face with another editor based on the other side of the world who specialises in games. It's my evening and the daylight coming from her right seems as magical as the fantasy worlds we are discussing.