Squeal, snowdrops and crocuses.

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. 

Change in weather, dessert and requiem.

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.)

The real end of Christmas, multitasking and life before.

1. We eat the last of the Christmas treats with our coffee -- a few stray stollen bites from Lidl.

2. While listening to a work webinar, I fix everything that has been annoying me about the jumper I am wearing.

3. 'I interviewed this comedian,' I tell Bettany as we are listening to Laura Solon's Talking and Not Talking. She isn't impressed -- it was in 2008, long before she was born. But it was published in the local paper, and I got paid for it, so there's a win.

Blue glass, hot pink and bergamot.

1. Our taxi driver has a string of blue glass beads hanging by his window. He speaks proudly about his two boys -- one at school with my son, and one away at university.

2. There are buds on my Christmas cactus, promising hot pink flowers in due course.

3. Slices of bergamot lemon in my soda water -- a tiny adjustment to the normal routine while their brief season flies past. 

Good time, after rain and far future.

1. I glance up at Toggl, which I use to track my work, and find that I've made good time writing my bridge news.

2. The steady rain gives over to a silvery shower, washed sky and sunshine that looks as if could do with a coffee and a walk round the block.

3. I can't sleep -- but that's okay: I've got a Murderbot book on the library's Libby app so I'm far away in distant future space rescuing scientists from colonists with an alien remnants issue.

Follow Her, no birds and Burns Night.

1. I am intrigued by an article in The Guardian about psychic phone lines, and then by the author's upcoming thriller about a toxic lifestyle guru who rises out of the Essex saltmarshes. Anna Stothard's Follow Her is not out yet, but Amazon gives me a free advance ebook (for algorithm reasons, maybe?) I drift towards the sofa with my cup of tea.

2. Nick is pretty disappointed not to record a single landing visitor in the Great British Birdwatch -- but even a zero is honest data and it will be welcomed and useful.

3. Full of haggis and drinking just one more whisky and water, we lie on the sofa for the BBC's Burns Night concert.

News, white chocolate and Venice.

1. Instead of the horrible news on my phone, I have a new Fortean Times to read at breakfast.

2. I'm thinking there is no chance we'll keep the white chocolate white, when she comes up with the ingenious idea of mixing it with the red dust from the packet of freeze-dried strawberries to make pink chocolate.

3. My current edit is set in Venice in the height of summer. It's grey and wet here and I'm Januarying as hard as I can with a good activity and writing routine, but this month is such a slog. I find refuge in the uncomfortable heat and the water and the narrow streets and the weight of history.