1. I find yet more recycling and squinting in the drizzle, go down to the gate to put it out. Our neighbour is at her gate and we grumble gentle complaints at each other about the weather.
2. There's a party invitation in my email -- something to look forward to in the spring.
3. Slipping cooked beetroots out of their peel. These are small ones -- three to a handful -- so perhaps they will be sweet and go well with apple and some walnuts.
1. She's poorly and wants fresh strawberries, and I get them for her though I wouldn't usually buy out-of-season air freighted fruit. I allow myself a moment of marvelling at the miracle: it's January in England and I'm giving my child ripe strawberries grown with water from the Nile.
2. Reflection of a bird swings across a wet roof.
3. We find a Welsh story-teller Owen Staton, who has a rumbling, resonant voice and a lot of podcast episodes, to soothe our tired selves until we're ready to sleep.
1. Watching the thermometer lounging in the marmalade pan creep up to 104C.
2. Fine rain is blowing on a mean wind across the slope, but she's still working away -- putting into practice everything she's observed in videos and considered over the week.
3. We slip in a quick episode of Ghost Story for Christmas -- an adaptation of E. Nesbit's Man-sized in Marble, clinging together in the dark, peering into this strange artificially unseasonable world unable to do anything to help the doomed characters.
1. The time has come to finish up, but we're still swapping podcast recommendations.
2. The call comes -- his guitar has arrived at the shop.
3. The rain has put much sought-after curls in her hair.
1. A man from a white van is trundling and scraping a red plastic grit spreader around the car park, which has been an ice rink these last few days.
2. A pearly sliver has fallen off one of my front teeth. When I call the dentists, their lack of urgency (an appointment is available in a week and a half) is oddly reassuring.
3. There is an icy sort of rain falling and I am very glad to leave the window and step back across the cold floor and into bed, which is still warm.
1. To eat a few fat sweet dates with my coffee.
2. A video showing careful, elegant parallel turns comes home from the dry slope before they do.
3. His interests have turned to the occult and I'm pretty sure I have an esoteric zine with an article that will answer his questions. It only takes a little digging among dusty magazine files to find it, and it also has stickers and a flexidisc.
1. I float in a bath the colour of the deep sea listening to the instructions for a blue-themed writing workshop.
2. Just as Traitors gets exciting, he joins us, wedging and levering his bony limbs between us in our nest of blankets and cushions on the sofa.
3. We fall asleep to the promise of snow.