Balls

Breakfast was intended to be a civilized affair of hot coffee, croissant and orange juice, accompanied by the morning papers and perhaps a little bit of doodling with marker pens. I failed to appreciate the appeal of the nearby 'Old Chang Kee' stall, peddling coronaries on sticks - and within minutes of reading the football pages, Saffron was tugging at my pocket trying to get my attention. Or so I thought. Actually she was trying to coax my wallet from my pocket, in order for her to go and place her order for deep fried starch on her own. It's called pick-pocketing, and in earlier times they'd have carted the little artful dodger off to Australia for something like that. But a pretty girl can be forgiven for most things, so instead she was rewarded with two sticks of fishballs.

After she'd eaten, but before I'd managed to finish reading about the Gooners, she started rifling through the pages of the 'Life!' section of Strait Laced ... for a horrible moment I thought she was reading one of Sumiko Tan's vacuous columns, and was therefore relieved to see Saffy poring over the cinema pages. We ended up compromising on 'Night in the Museum' (PG), after she'd initially been drawn to some naff Jap horror show ('Death Note 2', certificate 18) on the basis that one of the characters looked like a skeleton (Saffron has a thing about skeletons. The most optimistic spin on this is that she wants to be a doctor. However the more negative amongst us worry that she's going to be a goth chick by the age of eight).

Happily there is a fossilised dinosaur in Night in the Museum, which seeing as Saffy likes skeletons and dinosaurs (preferably gummy sweet ones), managed to swing it for Ben Stiller and friends. And so we wandered over to Cineleisure where she was introduced to the joys of popcorn (salted), as well as 'love seats' at the back of a half-empty cinema. As the final credits rolled, Saffron indignantly asked why the film had ended ... and the lights came up to reveal the budding film critic becalmed in a sea of crushed popcorn.



A few errands and a snooze later, and she was raring for more action - which was just as well as we had agreed to meet with Uncle Tim to watch the Lions take on mighty Vietnam at the National Stadium that night. Dressed in our finest red Arsenal livery, Saffron and I were disappointed to see that Singapore was actually playing in blue, and that it was the Viet supporters who were decked out in red. Still, she did her best to revive the 'Kallang Roar' during the game, even if she was more interested in the linesmen (they have flags). Following a thrilling 0-0 draw, maybe she had a point.