1. Each night, after the family bath, the tiny daughter is carried upstairs by one of us, and I sit down with her, in the ridiculously comfortable Poang chair (is it wrong that I found myself thinking that the purchase of said chair represented An Act of Overt Adultness?) for her bedtime feed. It takes about a quarter of an hour, normally, unless she is particularly hungry or half-asleep, and when we’re approaching the last furlong, I bash the footstool on the floor three times using my feet, which is Quercus’s signal to get out of the bath and leg it up the stairs. When he arrives, I wind the tiny daughter, and he lifts her from my arms into his own, snuggling her close into his neck for a last cuddle before he wraps her up in her favourite blanket and settles her into her nest. This is both one of my favourite sights, and a favourite moment – the bit when, sitting in the gentle darkness, I watch her little rump, legs sticking out because of the slightly bulky nighttime nappy, floating up into Quercus’s warm embrace.

2. The hens as they wait by the chicken gate, which separates their run from the rest of the garden (the only way to minimise hen devastation, though, frankly, at present, their attentions could do little to worsen the state of our garden – it’s complete chaos thanks to a combination of utter neglect, building work, and natural bedlam caused by a near-stream which comes right through the sheds when it rains, which, this being Devon, is quite frequently); they gather there any time they see – or indeed hear – one of us near the back door.

3. The lights of the dashboard of my car; I think it’s supposed to be a sort of grown-up grey, but to me it looks like very pale violet.

4. Pyewacket peering over the top of the driftwood larder, an occurrence which always prompts speculation as to quite how she manages to get up there (it’s seven feet tall, and there are no obvious paw-holds).

5. Dark clouds blowing in, a little like this:

6. The stark outline of dead trees.

7. Wixon’s fly-killer face. This involves Wix spotting a fly – or indeed a beetle of virtually any sort, for he is not a fussy cat, in this respect at least – and beginning to chase it. The beginning always goes the same way: mouth half-open, constantly chattering his teeth as if snatching miniature flies from the air in anticipation of his nearing slaughter. The noise which accompanies it is even better – a sort of snap, snap, snapping, complete with little grunts of satisfaction (or frustration, depending on his progress).

8. Spotting Quercus in the back of the orchestra as the tuning begins, and then seeing him flash his eyebrows in appropriate moments during the concert itself, often while playing.

9. Cobwebs decked out in dew.

10. Beech woods, at pretty much any time of year. Preferably those ancient ones, with the odd-shaped hedgey-mounds overlaid with moss to the extent that you can’t really see what’s stone, what root, and what tree

And you?

(Absence due to nothing more exciting than freelance editing work, going into (not freelance) work once a week, invading relatives, and shedloads of DIY. Oh, and yesterday, a day to ourselves – the tiny daughter, Quercus and I went to Tarr Steps on Exmoor, and wandered about in the glorious sunshine, stopping to eat a picnic in indecently warm weather.)