Another shopping saturday

Its not a well known fact that as the fourth largest city in the UK, Leeds has no large shopping mall to speak of.

It could be argued that with such a vibrant city centre we have no use for an out of town shopping mall and that is indeed part of the reason, the other reason is that while Newcastle was building its Metro Centre, Sheffield its Meadowhall, Manchester its Trafford Centre etc etc etc, the Secretary of State at the time (who's name escapes my memory banks) placed an embargo on planning permission for any more out of town Malls, stating the financial destruction of existing city centres like Newcastle and Sheffield (especially Sheffield) as a direct result.

Leeds ended up with the White Rose Centre which is probably worth one fifth of The Metro Centre and a quarter of Meadowhall, and we invested in a vibrant city centre instead, which is why Leeds city centre is full of Geordies every saturday, come to visit and reminisce over what Newcastle used to be like.

Which takes us to today.

Next weekend is the 25th wedding anniversary of some close friends, they are having their "do" at a golf club, they promise that its not a posh frock do but you try and explain that to any woman who has got half a chance of buying a new posh frock for a golf club "do".

And so it was decreed this morning that the wife and my youngest daughter would like to go to Meadowhall to do the shopping thing for a posh frock for next week, I did try to explain that it was not a posh frock do, but they weren't listening, actually I told the dog that it wasn't a posh frock do as I knew they would not listen anyway.

Its a 40 minute drive to Meadowhall and once there I did my usual thing of losing them inside the mall within two minutes, they keep in touch by mobile and when they are ready to go home they call me, I'm only there for the chauffeur duties.

Its hard trying to keep yourself interested for three hours in Waterstones and WH Smith, there is only so much reading and re-reading of book sleeves that you can do, only a finite number of times that you can read every single magazine on the rack without shop assistants starting to notice you.

I went for a coffee, ate a large muffin with it, read their newspapers, sat and stared at the ceiling for a while and then the Costa Coffee assistants came to clear the table and stared in that way that they have that says, "you've drunk our coffee, read our papers, now piss off".

I wandered around shoe shops picking up shoes that I would never buy in a month of sundays, pointed shoes seem to be in this spring, I found myself in the Apple shop with no intention of buying yet another iPod, we've got three already, but they do have some very nice looking PC's and I mentioned this to a very bored assistant who was aged about twelve years old.

In Body Shop I sprayed myself with all three of the gents aftershave that they sell - just three things for men in the whole shop, Anita Roddick you're a bitch, but didn't buy any of them, left smelling like a tarts boudoir though.

I avoided the likes of Top Shop or River Island as the clientel in there seem to be still in kindergarten these days and so found myself browsing Marks & Spencers with zero interest in anything they had to sell, and Debenhams with just a flicker of interest in a big fookoff coffe machine with loads of chrome on it and some very dangerous looking tubes and spouts and loads of buttons to press to impress guests.

The coffee machine ignited an interest and I went and sought out the Kitchen Shop where apparently their stock is for professional cooks, their coffee machines were certainly fookoff professional ones at fookoff prices too, but it killed ten minutes just comparing each one and counting the number of buttons on each and how their uses differed, the interest wained as I reminded myself that I've got a perfectly good caffetierre at home that only needs you to push a plunger to make perfectly good coffee without the need for a plumbing qualification.

And then finally she rang me to ask where I was and would I come to Wallis' to see what she'd picked for herself, the thought did cross my mind that Wallis' was the very first shop that she'd walked into, it was where I'd left her three hours earlier, and sure enough when I got there she showed me the outfit she'd picked and confirmed that it was the one she'd seen within three minutes of us arriving at Meadowhall, but of course I am by now too wise in my ways to point this out to her, and not too keen on receiveing another black eye in the middle of a shopping mall.

Money spent, outfit obtained and we were on our way back home.

Until we reached the outskirts of Leeds and she uttered the words I had been dreading, "We pass The White Rose Centre coming this way don't we, I need a blouse for this outfit".

Fortunately I was as mellow as the weather has been today and so I found myself browsing again in the Whte Rose version of Debenhams, a half hour enlightened by an announcement that if all customers would make their way to the "Home" department then every adult in the store would be given a free chefs knife.

As it happened I was already in the "Home" section looking at coffee machines again, Debenhams coffee machines aren't as good as the Kitchen Shop's by the way, they haven't got as many knobs (god I must have been really bored by then), and I was nearly trampled in the tsunami of elderly women who descended on the "Home" department for their free chefs knives.

Within fifteen seconds the demonstration table was mobbed by at least 70 or 80 old ladies, many of whom probably didn't even know what was being given away, but it was free so they wanted one, whatever it was. I left quickly as something in my mind felt uneasy by the thought of hundreds of people, many of them already senile, wandering a department store armed with free chefs knives, as I left Debenhams I could already hear the clash of the cutlery at the demo table, either they were handed them out hand over fist, or the old gits had already started hand to hand combat to get at their freebies.