1. It’s lovely to see everyone’s zines coming together – neon pamphlets with serious messages, little fold-ups on mental health and feminism, and muted colours & pages from old books gathered together into what looks more like a gorgeous artbook. Mine feels silly and frivolous as I knew it would but I’m still happy with it when it finally comes together. I have a lot of compiling and stitching work to do this week but I decide I want one finished before I leave the stall. When I get home, John says it feels like a proper book.

1b. It’s been a great little course – learning about letterpress, bookbinding and all sorts of collage/layout techniques – but the most important lesson I’ve learnt was probably in the first week. Someone said that we – as people, as women – need to learn to take up space. A few times while I’ve been making my zine, I’ve thought ‘who would want to read this?’ but the point isn’t to sell to a million people: it’s to reach a dozen or so people who nod along because they experienced something similar or are interested because they didn’t. Nearly all my favourite comics/graphic novels are by indie biographical artists – I just like reading about their everyday lives. And, most notably, they nearly all started out self-publishing zines – daring to put their work and themselves out there, to say ‘I’m here, I have a voice to be heard’.

2. I need something to eat but not too much because we’ll be eating dinner early. I grab a hot sausage roll from a bakery and you know what, it’s pretty good. It’s salty and greasy, and deeply nostalgic of when I used to eat hot sausage rolls, while waiting for my mum in the old post office in Crosby.

3. To Leeds. A smooth hot chocolate and a wander around the shops. MyThai looks like it’ll be full again but the friendliest waitress in the world invites us inside, saying there is an empty table right at the back. A table also opens up for us at North Bar, where I spin my little straw around my coke glass, and I get John to lean in to me, then burp loudly in his ear. Finally, we go back up the road to the Grand. We haven’t really heard much by either the support artist (Fuzzy Jones) or even the main band (The Shee) but are won over by both. Specifically, I enjoy the complementary sound of the two guitars and the warmth of the bass over Fuzzy’s vocals, and am impressed with the fullness of the sound particularly in the last song. And we just don’t know where to look during The Shee – each instrument and voice just beautiful in their clarity and passion.

3b. John looks around to see if we know anyone there. I doubt him but then he notices that we’re sat next to his mum and dad’s neighbours.

1. He’s not hungover but we have fish butties for lunch anyway.

2. I’m sticking together the most fragile, most collage-y part of my zine and the cat decides she must ‘help’. I enjoy the irony that I am, superficially, sticking down some pictures expressing how much I love the cats.

3. Friday evening: croque monsieurs, steam cleaning the kitchen and giggling from behind my hands while watching a new episode of Broad City. Rock n Roll.

1. I’m looking for a particularly picture of my old cat, Zoe but instead I find something better: a collage I made when I was 13, of photos taken across the twenty years before that. Back then, we’d have had to wait weeks for the pictures to be developed then I cut them out and sellotaped them together. Today, I snap a picture of the collage with the camera on the computer I keep in my pocket and by the time I walk downstairs, the image has been set across the world and arrived on the computer in my office, where I can correct the layout and colour balance with a click of a button.

2. I bob into Leeds to have a pre-Leeds Ruby Thing meal with John – something I used to do all the time before Lily but which seemed too much of a bother when she was waiting, anxiously, at home. We try to go to My Thai but it’s full, so go next door to Fuji Hiro (which is a long-time favourite anyway): it’s wonderfully convenient to have them right next to each other, both offering quick yet delicious food.

2b. We finish up at exactly the right time – just when John needs to go over to the pub, and three minutes before my bus is due on the Headrow. We chat to each other on the phone for the rest of our short, separate journeys.

3. I pass the rest of the evening sketching and re-sketching some more little portraits for my zine. When John texts to say he’s on the bus, I sit back and realise how hard I’ve been focused all evening – and how pleasantly tired it’s left me.

1. The smoothness of a freshly sharpened pencil (a Staedtler, naturally).

2. The ginger cat salutes us with its tail, inviting a cuddle. Its fur is so much softer than we thought it would be.

3. The cutting and pasting is considerably more fun than I’d expected. I see how it quickly becomes addictive.

1. A beautiful sunny day.

2. My desk is covered in bits of paper but here and there, it looks like it’s coming together.

3. The moment when, finally, the onions begin to brown. And the way that they do – slowly, turning from gold to caramel before settling into a nice nut – tells me they’ll be super sweet.

1. In decent daylight, it’s easy to see the two cats are completely different shades of black.

2. She starts off incredibly shy but by the end, she is running around the house, demanding we do all sorts of things.

3. The cheese is a little bit sharp really, but in tiny amounts, it adds an intriguing flavour.