1. I stand on the sun-warmed balcony and wave at Strange: she’s on the path towards the meadow, near the elder tree. She watches me for a while then meows and comes to me in a roundabout way to avoid the nettles and tall weeds in between us. When she reaches me, I tell her that I hope she appreciates what an awesome playground she has.

2. Lily sits with me as I dig out the weeds. She watches and waits, then rubs her nose in the freshly turned over soil.

2b. In the park, we meet a dog called Noodles: a pretty cute name for a pretty cute dog.

2c. A pair of crows peek over the gutter, then a little way down another two small crow heads appear. More birds swoop past as a formation and the birds on the gutter fly up to join them. I can’t call them a murder of crows: on such a sunny evening, silhouetted against such a perfectly blue sky, that’s far too morose. I’ll call them a convoy, party.

3. Little Tilda comes to sit with me on the sofa – a rare treat – so I sit with her until I have to make dinner.

3b. I pull the cushions from underneath me and stack them in a pile. Strange sits on top of them, princess-and-the-pea style.

1. Two chickens stand in the middle of the herb bed, orange against green.

1b. The blue tit hops around the collapsed clothes line, looking for bugs to eat. Then another appears, to do the same thing on the railings, and yet another on the steps up to the balcony.

2. The setting sun softens the Chevin.

2b. We order far too much food and it is delicious: spicy prawns with lemongrass, aubergine tempura, heavily little pork dumplings, duck with tamarind, and massaman curry.

3. It features characters we already know, in a timeline we know the unfortunate future of, but really the second half of the episode stands alone as a beautiful short film. Everything about it is perfect and, after a day of struggling with my own writing, I feel like such a hack in comparison.

1. Someone says the date – “seven seven fourteen – oh!”. I enjoy it as well.

1b. I’d pictured the letters smooth but they just look … flat. I gouged some scratches into the clay and suddenly it comes alive.

1c. I take the time to do a neat job on the peacock’s tail feathers. I’m happy with the result.

1d. I have a new favourite brush: a flat hog bristle apparently.

2. A pair of lolling pink tongues come towards us.

3. The rich sauce, the crunchy lettuce and the sweet-sour vinaigrette.

4. Heavy summer rain.

1. Just waking up, I can’t focus far: the dog’s whiskers – those little pointless things that are sometimes invisible and sometimes all you can see – blur and sharpen as I look at them then beyond.

1b. Strange-cat jumps on the bed to say hello. Backlit by the morning sun, I look at the veins in her ears – the one that goes around the edge and all the little ones branching off from it.

2. The colours are perfectly peacock – very nice to play with.

2b. It’s a bit of an experiment – an excuse to play with fibre and colours more than anything – but it turns out just as I’d imagined.

(I was making a little felt pouch to hold my phone and, in a separate little compartment, keys or bank cards/a couple of notes when I go out. This is it when it was still very wet. It’s still drying now, but then I’ll hopefully embellish it to highlight the stem and shape of the feathers, which got blurred during the felting process — I’ll probably just handstitch lines but might add a few seed beads if I fancy a little sparkle.)

3. The smell of water from the garden – that fresh scent of summer.

4. Enjoying the echo under the bridge.

5. The frozen chocolate is a warm mink grey and it looks as soft and fuzzy as velvet.

(I’ve written a couple of blog posts over at The Really Good Life about our new allotment – lots of before/after pics from today’s clearing work :) )

(In other elsewhere news, I’ve been strangely super popular on Pinterest today – usually I get 20-30 notifications of follows, repins or likes a day, but today it’s been (literally) thousands. I wish I knew what had prompted it!)

1. I laugh out loud when I find the box of beer & cider tucked away on the bottom shelf – I assume it is forgotten reward juice. (It’s only when I look at it a little closer and see it’s quite out of date that I realise it’s probably for slug rather than human consumption.)

1b. The ease with which the rosebay willowherb can be pulled out of the ground.

1c. I flick back and forth between the before and after photos. There is a huge amount of work still to do but it’s nice to see how much progress can be made in just a couple of hours.

2. We take Lily down to the canal. Rather than waiting until our normal spot a little way down, she runs straight in to the water while we’re still back in the woods. I know the water is shallow there, and the bank easily mountable, but John urges me to run on to check just in case. Before I can though, we hear a little shake of her collar and a head appears over the grass: “I’m alright!” she seems to say with a grin.

2b. Not really understanding why she does it, she shakes off while still up to her chest in the water. The splashes exaggerate how her body twists – there is a good delay between her head and tail flicking off their excess water.

3. I feel utterly refreshed after my shower and I ache far less than I thought I would after so much gardening.

1. One of the chickens is busy in the nest box so misses out when I throw corn for the others. I give her a treat – handfeeding while she’s getting ready to lay. She pecks at my hand happily.

2. “That’s so un-you,” she says about my crazy bowl project. I like that I have “me” things at pottery now so that I can do “un-me” things from time to time too.

2b. The carvings look … meh, until I take them over the edge.

2c. I had forgotten about my little meeple figure – it’s come out of the kiln a perfect speckled yellow.

3. Really good burgers. John handles the meat, I prepare the salad and bread, then we squirt on mustard and relish with free abandon.