Vipp

I never knew it was possible to spend so much money on a bathroom pedal bin. I'd been to the supermarket to return two bags full of recyclable bottles and cans, and, nosing around a few shops on the very short walk home, having extracted some cash from the bankautomat, and having purchased a photo-frame for my wife, I wandered into 'liro', a designer furnishings boutique and art gallery.

Amongst their beautifully overdesigned and overpriced stock were a number of exceedingly smart looking Vipp pedal-bins. I imagined one such in our bathroom, in place of the small blue plastic bucket-shaped bin we'd been using for the past year and a half. I sensed an impulse-buy coming on, but then looked at the price, which startled me and made me think twice, until, very shortly thereafter, having thought about it a third time, I bought one anyway.

I won't embarrass myself further by saying how much I paid for the thing. It looks very good in our bathroom, at least.

I'd already been out once, on another recycling errand, this time to dispose of a bag full of glass bottles, which I walked down to the bottle banks at the far end of Fisktorget. On my way back from there I stopped in at one of the town's two antiquarian booksellers, who also offers a small but occasionally interesting selection of secondhand classical CDs. I rifled through these and picked out one that caught my eye, a disc of Michael Nyman's string quartets. I had a quick listen to this on my return, having eaten a reheated bowl of Friday's delicious home-made leek-and-potato soup.

After that I took back the DVD we'd watched that morning: Monster's Ball, and rented another: Dragonfly. I'd enjoyed the former movie, although I'd not been quite in the mood for such intense drama so early in the day. I enjoyed the latter film rather less: we watched it that evening. I found it too slow-paced. Whilst at the video store, the proprietors, a very friendly husband-and-wife team, surprised me by asking if we'd be interested in borrowing some of their advance preview copies of movies sent to them by the distributors. I replied yes, of course.