WOMANHOOD is an odd thing, full of vagaries and secrets I often feel I'm not party to, shopping being one such.

I can't understand why women like to shop. Why spend hours tramping about looking at shiny, coloured things you can't afford? It seems like a gentle torture, not a pastime.

Glasgow City Council doesn't agree. It likes shops. It likes shops and shopping a lot. So much so it plans to bulldoze the steps at the Royal Concert Hall and replace them with a large glass tube leading into a new mega-super-ultra mall chock-full of giant cloth and shoe-filled torture chambers. And it will cost the council £6m to chip away the steps that have cradled countless office workers eating their pieces in the rare Scottish sun, and that have served as a meeting place for friends and lovers and families, for young ones needing a spot to hang out and auld yins needing a wee sit down.

The remodelling of one of the city centre's favoured places is part of plans to double in size Buchanan Galleries. using £55million of public money. As part of a Tax Increment Finance (TIF) scheme the council will borrow £80m against future rates paid by the shopping centre, despite the Scottish Retail Consortium's Retail Sales Monitor showing sales on the high street doing nothing but slumping, and give it to the galleries to expand. They hope to attract big-name American brands and to hang with the smaller local shops round about. This makes little sense to me but perhaps the city fathers just really, really like shoes.

Anyway, the finer £80m details aside, there are murmerings that people will not sit by and let the steps be destroyed. Or, rather, they will sit on the steps, with sandwiches as shields and take away cappuccinos as rapiers, to ensure they are not destroyed.

Chewing gum-mottled and pecked at by seagulls, the Concert Hall steps are really a nothing. They're not historically listed, they don't house great art, they're not even especially easy on the eye. What are they? They're a symbol of friendship and socialising and, perhaps, even the little, family-run businesses that are quaking in shadow of the shopping behemoth looming over Buchanan Street's future.

You can't stand sentiment in the way of progress, but you can try.

IN an excellent example of what I believe managerial-types call "thinking outside the box", Essex police have decided to cut housebreaking by getting in first. Officers are going around homes in the wee small hours checking for unlocked windows and doors. If your entry points are found unsecured they will wake you up for a ticking off. You may call this victim-blaming; they call it a pre-emptive strike.

It reminds me of a morning last year when the local police broke into my house. That's right. If it hasn't already been done in Coatbridge, well, it's not worth doing.

I was trying to have a long lie, which is what ticked me off most about the whole thing, when there was a sharp knock at the front door. "Sod it," I thought. "Whoever it is, they'll go away."

Next thing, the front door pelted open and there were footsteps on the stairs. Having watched many, many a horror film in my time, I should probably have stayed put but ventured out onto the landing to find out what was going on. There, to my shock and to his greater shock, was a policeman halfway up the stairs. I was just in time to see another meander into my living room. "We had reports of a woman in distress," the PC said. "I'm in distress now," I stuttered. Needless to say, they had the wrong address, though they did have a wander about before leaving, without explanation or apology.

Let's just hope the fire brigade doesn't catch on to this scheme.