1. For now, we're a household with a jar of home made chocolate chip cookies.
2. For the bathroom, a new bar of Marseilles soap with the name of the scent moulded on in sharp blocky capital letters.
3. Today, I've finished reading two books that were a bit of a slog (but both worthwhile in their own way). Perhaps the next ones in the pile will be easier.
1. The sighing glug of a hot water bottle filling, and the soft belch of air making room.
2. Spoken word night. The energy shifts from poet to poet -- from loud men just come from work, urgent stories backed up like floodwater; to folks working through a complex idea; to little voices with a tentative question 'is it just me?'
3. Sky is hazy. Stars show up anyway.
1. Thinking as I hold a squat that I couldn't have done this six weeks ago.
2. The missing knife is found -- it was in the cake tin, rather than anywhere sinister.
3. There's now a nametape on her coat and I feel better about that.
1. In the café where I've been waiting, a high-pitched mechanical sound has been bothering me sporadically. One of the three plasterers eating cooked breakfasts on the table behinds me grumbles, too. The sound is still annoying, but at least it's not just me.
2. The park lawns are broken and dead, but anyway snowdrop clumps -- ice white and blue-green -- stand up in the ruins with no sign of dismay.
3. And the crocuses, pale like mushrooms, fragile as ghosts, have arrived one by one, until the silent defiant crowd of them tells winter that this is unacceptable.
1. In the time it took us to walk through the house from the back garden to the front, the air has filled with misty drizzle.
2. She had the foresight while I was serving the sausage casserole to put half a dozen of her chocolate chip cookies in the cooling oven and now we are eating them wrapped around scoops of raspberry ripple ice cream.
3. In a row on the sofa, our eyes wide at footage of ash-drowned towns, midnight at noon, and rock boiling and rolling and running like swift water, we watch Werner Herzog's requiem to the volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. (One child wanted something introspective; the other had been writing a presentation on disaster preparedness in Hawaii; and I just like Werner Herzog.)