Saturday routine, Love Your Art and Mrs Norris makes a kill

1. I started my Saturday routine rather late. I am a person of habit in some things and visiting the centre of York to buy the Saturday Guardian, have a cup of coffee and wander around Barnetts is a safe one. This little weekly event gives me a great deal of pleasure. I enjoy the newspaper. I read some of it immediately, but I like going through each section and looking for things I will read later. I often start in the magazine and read (without waiting till later) Alex Petridis tiny column on men's fashion, just because its always funny. Then I often read out loud "The Measure", it's completely vacuous. Next I might turn to the Family section and catch up with the mad woman who writes "Living with Teenagers". She makes me feel better about my past parenting skills both successful and pathetic. And finally I would probably take in Ben Goldacres' column "Bad Science". This weeks rant is about the vitamin business and since I some connection to it in the past I read it with a smirk. All of this takes the length of time I need to drink my fresh orange juice, my latte and eat my almond croissant with Allan. As I write this I realise how very happy this silly little routine makes me and how precious it is to me and how grateful I am to be able to do it without thinking.

2. We went down Coney Street looking for action. There wasn't much. A few boarded-up shop fronts and Lush exhaling an overwhelming odour. But just as we were about to turn for home we came to a new shop Love Your Art. A very nice person greeted us. She was dressed with sufficient eccentricity to suggest that she might be an artistic type. She was friendly and chatty. The work in the gallery is not amazingly original but there were some very pretty things including some photographs by Yukio Namba of "Japanesie" scenes printed on hand made paper. Upstairs there was one painting in particular that I really liked by a bloke called Ian Rawling who paints a bit like L S Lowry but with fatter people. The best idea they had was sticky-backed plastic wall art. Fablon lives hooray! Basically they can digitally print art (or even bits of it) on the sticky backed plastic which you can use like very expensive wallpaper. They can also do it with fabric. This is art that you can therefore change when ever you get fed up with it. I'm guessing this is a chain store even though it looks more authentic. I was very taken with the printed fabric and Fablon though and glad to find something new on a street that seems to be having a hard time.

3. My third event is perhaps a bit of a strange one to record as something I feel grateful for. In the late afternoon one of the cats, Mrs Norris was spotted with a half dead wood pigeon in her mouth which she was proceeding to finish off and devour. My first reaction was horror and then fascination. Mrs Norris is a tiny cat who has a very scary glint in her eye and a insatiable desire to catch her prey. I did consider for a moment trying to intervene but I could see that it was too late for the unfortunate bird so I left her to skulk into the wild woodland that is the back of our garden. I must say I was impressed and happy that she is being a real hunter and clearly in her post-modernist, radical feminist element. Mr Tumnus on the other hand was doing what he does best, sleeping curled up but with one limp wrist dangling down, camp as tits.