Can you believe, I’ve been doing these monthly “3 Things” things for 2 years now? That should be a total of 721 things, but in truth I came up empty-handed in March 2026. Still, 69 things, each of which I thought were worth sharing2 is not bad.
There is now a “3 Things” link at the top of the website that links to all of them.
It has been a project that I was able to undertake after retiring, but it was inspired by something I read over a decade ago. In January 2015, Cody Delistraty wrote in The Atlantic about “The Value of Remembering Ordinary Moments“. He describes how our most fond memories are often not the big events in our lives, but small things that for some reason take on an outsized importance. Think of the famous episodes from Swann’s Way3, where Proust’s narrator looks back on “the tea and madeleines he ha[d] with his mother; [] the goodnight kiss he receive[d] as he lay in bed; [..] the strolls he [took] along the Champs-Elysées”.
I’m sure we all have memories like those.
Delistraty describes experiments where the mere act of writing about mundane, everyday things, activates our brains in such a way that these become important, and memorable.
In the past couple of years, I’ve written about music that speaks to me, paintings and other visual art that I like, and even some poetry. I’ve written about things that get under my skin. I’ve written about ideas. I’ve written about the death of men I knew and liked. Whatever grabs my attention really.
I’m very pleased that some of you have told me that you like reading these. I certainly enjoy writing them. So it’s a win-win4.
This month I take a look back at the “things” that I think are particularly noteworthy5.
July 2025 – The Nature of Things
We tend to think that science has solved the mysteries that troubled many earlier generations, and to some extent it has. But it is important to remember that science is a process as much as a destination. Last year, I learned that much of what I studied in my undergraduate microbiology studies was outdated, and wrong.
Click here for the original.
January 2026 – A Vignette
This is probably the best example of me writing about everyday events. An early morning encounter with a woman on a set of stairs6 behind our condo in Toronto spiralled out of control very quickly.
Click here for the original
January 2026 – A Bonhill Story
This one took a ton of effort to research and write, but I know for sure that it has very limited appeal. I wrote about the origins of the Brannan family in the Vale of Leven in Scotland. There is a mystery surrounding the identity of my great-great grandmother, Elizabeth Aimer Bradley Brannan. It’s complicated, and I spent a small fortune at scotlandspeople.gov.uk retrieving birth, death, marriage and census records in my effort to untangle it.
I did the best I could.
Click here for the original
Next month, I hope to share some new stuff.
PS: the header image this month is a drone shot of the David Balfour Park (which covers the Rosesdale Reservoir) behind our condo in Toronto. I am not the photographer. I stole it from the good folks at the Yonge/St Clair BIA Instagram feed.
- 2 years X 12 months/year X 3 things/month = 72 ↩︎
- You, of course, might have thought some, perhaps many, were a complete waste of time. As they say, YMMV. ↩︎
- No, I haven’t read it. ↩︎
- Sorry for lapsing into corporate-speak. Sometimes my writing reverts to my days of living in a world where that sort of terminology was commonplace. ↩︎
- Not necessarily the best, though I think they are pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good. ↩︎
- Which you can see in the picture at the top of this post. They are midway along the pathway that runs on the left (actually south) side of the reservoir (the big green open space). ↩︎
