Three Beautiful Things

1. I make a remark about the edit I've just done -- really just for good manners and to tell the writer that I see the labour that lies beneath, and to acknowledge that this short text will be very good news for the body concerned. The writer reciprocates with context, including a level of drama that very much pleases my nosey self. I love the way measured corporate sentences hold safe a whole world of human beings and their outlandish doings. 2. We get the impression that he is very pleased with his maths work today. And we keep looking at each other saying, 'He's very pleased with his maths.' 3. There's no lemon left for my soda water -- but I remember that some mint has been quietly and competently growing in the garden.

1. To dip-sample my small library of poetry and micro texts to find a quick consolation. 2. Pinks, striped with red like seaside rock, scented, if you care to bend down, of cloves. 3. I have in my stash just the right stickers for her revision notes.

1. A friend once said that my gardening method is a lot to do with editing. I think of this as I pull out this herb bennet, but not that one; and finger through my pot of lawn daisies to pull out herb robert seedlings, but let it grow where its fern leave soften hard edges; and cut back the seedy mildewed alkanet so that it will again in due course give more twinkling blue flowers -- for the bees of course. 2. There is something in the scrub at the side of the path, rustling and fluttering, now before us, now behind. I catch a flash of cream speckles, and then quite suddenly, there it is on a fallen branch, bright eye and tilted head -- a song thrush. 3. Under the front door step -- two buttercup flowers yellow bright as make-believe suns. 

1. I'm rather achy, but Saturday's work shows in the tied in sweetpeas and the tomato plants in their grown-up pots. And my to-do list is a little less weighty. 2. There is something so nice and glowy about seeing my daughter folding backwards into the kneeling camel pose stretch that I cannot manage. 3. At tea time, seeing me drooping over the kitchen table, Nick assures me he has supper in hand and sends me upstairs to lie down.

1. I'm wearing what the children when they were small used to call 'scary tightses', which is any pair of tights with an unusual pattern. This one has red chinoiserie figures up the back, and even the supermarket delivery man is startled enough to comment, when, having waved him into our road, he sees me over the carpark, still holding my phone and turning to walk back to our gate. 2. I'll only be gone for a few hours, but Nick comes to the door and kisses me before I set off out into the early evening. 3. With poems read aloud to a small crowd who are drinking slowly while rain blows past outside and busy people break stride to peer through the window, the pictures of lambs and gardens and bunions and fox cubs chasing magpies for fun are so much better

1. I'm in a little-and-often era -- 15-minute exercises every day. One shelf at a time. Fifty pages in a morning. A novel chapter tucked into a short wait. 2. I'm working again with a client after a break. I'm loving the 'welcome back' emails. 3. My children are helping each other with homework. 'This formula comes up in every test, even if it's nothing to do with respiration and photosynthesis.'

1. It's been a week of rain, and we are now used to the routine of peeling off wet clothing and hanging them to dry. We've taken to warming up in our pyjamas. 2. I finish work a little early, and there is time for a chapter of Bleak House  before supper. It's another chapter in which innocent grifter Harold Skimpole's creates carnage, and I hold in my head how John Jarndyce's inherent goodness and tolerance starts to harm the family he has collected around himself. 3. We lie in bed listening to Shakira's Whenever, Wherever in English and then in Spanish and then in English again and agree that it is just the best.

1. With my coffee, I have a little bun flavoured with elderflowers. 2. The first of my marigolds has come out, like a reliable, robust helper. The pelting rain we're having this week won't hurt her flaming orange petals, and she is welcome as sunshine. 3. There is a spoonful of sharp garnet red stewed raspberries to spoon over our chocolate fondants.

1. The alarm that I set on Monday while I was planning my week reminds me to tune into a professional development call on Thursday. Thanks, Monday Clare. 2. It's a pleasant feeling to overshoot my page count target for the day because I'm immersed in the edit. 3. A song comes on the radio that has a bone-deep familiarity. I realise that it can only be one of the songs from our primary school hymn book.

1. I'm still marvelling at the freshening effects of the rain we're having. The weeds at the edge of the bean field are gleaming and glittering and steaming in half-eight sunlight, and the woods are dripping, cool and restoring as well water.  2. Peeling off clammy wet clothes and climbing into something warm and dry. 3. On my way to a poetry event, a friendly shout. We'll see each other in there.

1. Radishes don't often come with greens, and when they do, the leaves fade rapidly to yellow mush -- so today they feature in every meal. 2. I will never not love pouring hot water over a soup cube and watching the dried veggies and seaweed and tiny shrimps expand. 3. Evening message: do I want to walk tomorrow morning? Yes I do.

1. Thank-you cards crowd the shelf behind our meeting. 2. He comes back triumphantly with a pudding. The children, despite their great ages, are astonished that there could be a pudding on a Monday. 3. We've sat up very late, but I'm glad because it means we heard the promised rain falling steadily in the dark.

1. Really, the climb up on to the common is always the hardest part of the walk. 2. We cut across a housing estate -- busy with car washers and gardeners and hedge snippers and flags -- and dart down a twitten past the playground to find Georgian cottages squatting calm and cool around a spring-fed pond on the edge of the woods. 3. Around the next corner, over the next stile, we find a cool spot by the stream that is not taken. We sit down with a bag of sweets to watch black dragonflies that turn iridescent green when they cross a sunbeam. I think they might be Calopteryx virgo, otherwise known as 'beautiful demoiselle'.