Authorlouisa

3BT – lovely weather, ink cat, joint joke

1. A lovely day – at least to start with. We open doors and windows throughout the house.

2. Playing with paint and ink. Some things work better than others – the picture of Strange being the best. I think she’s become my new default when it comes to character drawing – all it takes is a wonky sitting position, a batman mask and splodginess on her back – et voila.

3. I set up the joke and we deliver the punchline in unison. For my future reference, it was about dragons blowing on their food to put out the dragon fire cooking the meat.

3BT – shiny bagel/excited/familiar, portal/new coat/familiar #2, sound/strategy & failures

1. The super hot bagel shines a golden brown.

1b. A small boy gets more excited about a book than I’ve ever seen before. It reminds me of a boy that came through my till when I briefly worked at Asda during university who was unbelievably excited about fruit.

1c. A Kathryn Williams song over the speakers in Waterstones.

2. A new water feature at the restaurant looks like a portal into another, wetter, universe.

2b. The rich orange of S’s new jacket. I wanted a hoody in that colour but the only ones I could find lack depth – so I’m jealous.

2c. The moment when we realise the people being sat two tables away are O’s mum and her partner.

3. I follow their progress around the store by the sound of their voices bouncing off the ceiling.

3b. We all grow more strategic in our planning. Later, we all make stupid mistakes and laugh.

3BT – “it’s you? it’s me!”, leftover, comedy

1. Strange stands on the fallen branch, frozen in either fear or confusion. When she finally recognises us, she lets out a loud meow as if she needs to announce herself to us too.

2. John’s leftover red pepper and chorizo “gravy” becomes a rich dipping sauce for our chips – much better than ketchup.

3. Dense, surreal comedies.

3BT – hidden in the elder, magic, muck

1. Strange has taken to sitting in the elder tree. If it wasn’t for her white bits, she’d camouflage well against the wood’s gold and shadows. I dance in the kitchen until I grab her attention.

2. I like being in the greenhouse when it’s raining. It feels like I’m in a magical bubble.

3. I steam clean around the seal around the window frames. The amount of muck on the cloth is both disgusting and pleasing.

3BT – delicious, Kaufman/Tilda/& Strange, biscuit

1. Four delicious colours of nail varnish.

2. Kaufman squeezes his massive, increasingly ginger body into the tight frame of sunshine on the bedroom floor. He makes noises – cute little chirps – of contentment and enticement.

2b. Tilda is having one of her shadowing days. She sits on my desk and runs around my feet in the kitchen. Such a cutey.

2c. Strange claims the still-being-made blanket as her own.

3. The biscuit base of a Double Decker.

3BT – warm/seeds/stories, sit in the sun/there’s time, sketchbook

1. The soil is warm – I’m glad I filled the pots the other day.

1b. I don’t care for tomato seeds – they look almost false, like shreds of cardboard – but I always enjoy a plump squash seed and the shininess of the beans.

1c. I listen to a fascinating story about a chef in the Antarctic and another one about a man who convinces people to leave the Ku Klux Klan through friendship.

2. John comes by the plot on the way home from the train station. We sit in the sun and we talk about our days.

2b. It suddenly feels like there is a lot to do at the allotment – a lot of beds that still need preparing, a lot of weeds to pull – but I remind myself that there is still time, that things don’t really start heating up there for another month or so. I take the time to tidy out the greenhouse and transform its glass from green to clean.

3. I enjoy flicking through my sketchbook to see how far I’ve come in a short space of time.