(24th January is the anniversary of the day I became a homeowner for the first time – 11 years ago now. After a fairly exhaustive (and exhausting) search across almost the entirety of West Yorkshire, I bought the house I’d been renting for a few years in Leeds. Three beautiful things about that house:

3. The kitchen was ancient but the cupboards were painted a lovely pale sea green, which contrasted nicely with the orange streaks in the flagged stone floor. The bathroom was equally old but the turquoise walls were always cheerful.)

Three from today:

1. I feel like I tell Kaufman “no” an awful lot – no, don’t eat Carla’s food; no, don’t lick that plate; no, don’t bother Lily – so instead of saying no this time, I just scoop him up into my arms. He closes his eyes and purrs, blissed out.

1b. Carla climbs onto my shoulders like she always used to, and slowly, slowly, I carry her back to the window seat. John is sat on it, playing guitar, but as I approach, he moves: Queen Carla comes first.

1c. Tilda bobs her head from side to side, a slightly manic look in her eye: her way of saying “I would like a cuddle, please please please”.

2. The plates are a perfect temperature: well warmed but not too hot.

3. I’ve had a headache all day and I’m too tired to do anything so I slump on the sofa. In time, after they’ve had a mutual smell across the room, Lily and Strange join me: the former under my head as a pillow, the latter curled against my belly. Strange purrs enough for the both of them.

1. The project that went well yesterday comes to a surprising early finish and I am momentarily put out: I was enjoying the quiet work, making tiny corrections and tweaks. Then I find another project that needs a similar polish and I am happy again: two lots of improvements for the mental price of one.

2. To come back from the (very nice) salad bar to heaped plates of food.

2b. My “Texan links” remind me, in a good way, of the warm sausage rolls my mum used to buy me as a treat when we were in Crosby. I remember standing eating one in the corner of the post office when I was about four or five, thirty years ago now.

2c. Lily isn’t barking when we come home.

3. I cut the dusky pink thread to remove the ugly stitches. The raw ends look redder, like they’re bleeding.

4. The moon is impressive but fleeting: it is perfectly framed in the right bedroom window when I come to bed but by the time I have finished writing these, it has dashed away and all that is left is a faint glow at the right hand side of the pane.

1. In the dying light of the day, the white rice looks almost blue against the muddy brown ground.

2. The site revamp goes surprisingly smoothly. There are things to fix, as always, but I’m happy with how it well it has gone.

3. I go back to basics. A square, one colour, one fill stitch. Then another square, three colours and a careful gradient.

1. For the life of me, I can’t work out why the garden smells of Tunes* then I finally realise: I was just grappling with a chicken in a blackcurrant bush.

1b. The woods are breathing.

1c. A belly laugh when the chickens start chasing the twigs alongside the cats.

2. To learn a new technique that is radically different to what has come before.

3. The chocolate cracking in the mousse reminds me of frozen chocolate sauce on ice cream – that rare treat from childhood. Sometimes my mum would make a homemade version and we would keep it in an old, large coffee jar in the fridge.

* the cold lozenge; I don’t have synesthesia