1. Meeting my goddaughter Ellie for the first time. She has the most enormous blue eyes you've ever seen, and she smiles and laughs and makes bubbles and can support her own head and can follow people she knows with her eyes. All at three months -- is this not the most marvellous baby ever created?
2. My cousin Laura -- this is the one studying puppet-making -- is making a crocodile. To map out the head she has made a 3D model from paper and sticky tape -- nothing else, just paper shapes and tape. I wonder at how robust it is, and how the flat shapes fall into place. From the scribbles and marks all over it, there is obviously some cunning geometry trick to it, but I don't know how it's done, so it seems rather like magic to me.
3. They are not very fashionable -- rather Victorian, apparently -- but I like books with omniscient narrators. I have been reading Family and Friends by Anita Brookner, which uses this device. It gives the book a very dream-like feeling. The narrator is a descendent looking over old photographs, and they float through time, in and out of people's heads.
