A Bastard History of Crap Christmas Presents

The worst present my Dad ever got my Mum was perfume.  This iconic moment from the late 80s that says so much about their relationship when they were together, was captured on video tape and thenceforth available to enjoy for posterity.  I can see it now:  My mum opening the parcel;  my Dad - in stark contrast to the family trait of offering a self-deprecating apology when giving anyone a present - displaying naïve optimism about how expensive and top-of-the-range the gift was;  my Mum’s face, stony and stoic as the moment of denouement becomes akin to unwrapping a turd.  My Dad watches her, crestfallen, as she opens the bottle and sniffs.  “Do you not like it?” he asks, pitifully.  She retches; one of those enormous, hacking, phlegmy retches.  An uncontrollable wave of nausea engulfs her senses.  If my Dad had placed his buttocks either side of her nose and sharted, she might not have responded quite this badly.  “It’s like the stuff Greek women wear!” she moans (not actually with any xenophobic spite, as she is half-Greek.)

I have therefore never bought my wife perfume unless she has specified the type.  I learned from my Dad’s mistake.  But I didn’t learn enough.  When I met my wife, she was still 19 and had something of a different taste to what she had as she was pushing 40.  Not that I noticed this development.  So, when I purchased a pair of coconut shell ear-rings, made in West Africa and carved into elephant shapes, I believed it was a fiver well spent and just the sort of thing she likes.  It wasn’t.  She made it VERY clear the ear-rings were crap.  So, I rewrapped them and gave them back to her the following two Christmases.  By that point the joke had worn thin and she set fire to them before casting them into the rubbish.

This present-buying crapness dates back to when I was first old enough to get on the 29 bus and go to Wood Green on my own in order to choose something for the family. It would be harsh to call me a thoughtless present-buyer though.  An unimaginative one maybe.  At the time, I recall asking myself the question, “What does Mum like doing?”  The answer led me, on one occasion, into buying from Argos a drying rack for dishes and cutlery.  Even my Dad saw the error in this choice and pointed out the ungrateful message I might be sending Mum.  So, most other years I concentrated on her other pastime and bought her ash-trays, lighters or (when I was really short of ideas) just 40 Embassy.

Not that my Dad was (or indeed is) any easier to buy for.  Being a cynical old goat, he doesn’t really have any interests.  I tend to buy him a book each year and suspect he never reads it.  The only time he showed true gratitude towards a present was when I put a bet on for him for Italy to win the 2012 Euros (actually, that was a Fathers’ Day gift.)  They didn’t win, but it gave him more interest in the competition.

Within families, people tend to pick up on one thing that you’re interested in and then buy you something related to that every year for the rest of your life.  When my brother reached 16 or 17 he must have got so pissed once that my Dad ended up recounting this misadventure to my aunt who then formed the assumption that booze is his chief interest.  He thereafter received beer each Christmas and felt quite insulted by it.

You can, of course, just make a list and use your family like a retail delivery service.  This stops them making any mistakes.  I first did this at 12 and wrote down that I wanted Adam and the Ants’ new album, Prince Charming.  This was duly bought for me.  Dad inspected it after I’d opened it, cast aspersions on Adam Ant’s sexuality (and by implication on my own) by saying, “He looks like a pooftah” and then reading out the tracklist which included the song S.E.X., which he repeated until I had cringed my way into a small ball of embarrassment.

If only we could sometimes muster up the courage to say, “I don’t know what you want, so I bought you fuck-all.”  I’m sure my Mum would have preferred the smell of fuck-all to whatever foul liquid was in that perfume bottle back in ’88.

Bastard Catalogues of Useless Shit

Once upon a time, probably on a Hampstead pavement over an almond latte and a chicken pesto, a person of the corduroy persuasion must have experienced a light-bulb moment in which he or she resolved to start a business of selling useless shit to people at extortionate prices; prices that are justifiable on account of the fact that the products are personalised, unavailable anywhere else and presented in a sophisticated glossy catalogue and modelled by white, blonde, Midwich children and their fleece-clad families.

Without leaving myself open to a law suit (do we get them in Britain?) and naming any particular company, I would like to share with you the amusement I am receiving from flicking through one such catalogue of sickeningly twee over-priced useless shit, where indeed the major USP is that you can have anything personalised and you won’t find any of it for sale anywhere else.  But that’s unsurprising, as it is without doubt the most pointless lot of take-the-piss-priced crap you’d ever foolishly bang out your debit card details for.

To begin my sojourn through this emporium of excrement, I would like to present to you a pair of personalised Mr and Mrs cushion covers (£36).  Given that every straight man alive considers the very existence of cushions anathema to logic, a superfluous lump of discomforting adornment to a perfectly functional sofa, I can’t see such a present going down too well this Christmas.  Should anyone buy a pair for me and Mrs Bastard, I am likely to fill the covers not with cushion but with dog shit and post it back to the sender.

For a mere £75 you could purchase a personalised chopping board.  What the fuck would you choose to write on a chopping board except perhaps “Chopping Board” (in case some backwards idiot ever mistook it for a giant coaster)?

For £135 you can order a canvas print of… wait for it… WORDS!  Not just any words, but in fact words that you choose yourself.  The catalogue suggests, rather nicely in a fuck-off-nice sort of way, that you choose names of all the members of your family and their dates of birth, which would look NICE in a word-cloud on a grey background.  Nice or perhaps crap?

Now, if Dad didn’t like the cushion set, then let’s buy Dad some beer.  Yes, men like beer.  So, for just under a hundred pounds Dad receives each month for 3 months a whole crate (ie. six bottles) of British Beers of the Month, with mats and pub quiz so it feels like Dad is down the pub and not at home with his frighteningly blonde children of the damned.  Calculators out folks!  That’s £100 divided by 3 times 6 bottles, which is a fiver a bottle.  Twice what you pay in a supermarket for a bottle of bitter. So those beermats are probably made of gold then.

You can’t personalise the beers unfortunately, but you can personalise some cufflinks for Dad.  A different word on each cufflink, along with the dictionary definition in beautiful Times New Roman font.  I should think they have a lot of demand for the words FUCKING and MUG.

Perhaps the cufflinks will match the personalised collar stiffeners (£26).  Bits of metal that go inside your collars.  Inside.  Out of sight.  Where no one can see that they have your fucking name on.  Hmmm. I’m sure they’d work better stuck down your foreskin, as you’d be hard-pushed to get it up ever again after the despair you’re likely to suffer should your wife ever buy you such an item of unadulterated shit.

Sadly, the section of gifts For Her doesn’t warrant having the piss taken out of it, as it is full of predictably dull kitchen and jewellery crap, with kids’ names on or twee little slogans about cooking and wine-drinking.  Skipping therefore to the children’s section, I am expecting to browse my way through products that are either cute or educational.  Because I’m sure every customer’s child is “very bright and needs to be challenged.”  I was right.  Lots of wood, lots of wool and a plethora of diverse children’s names ranging from Josh and Noah to Katie and Lucy.

Finally, I’d like to imagine the conversation on that café table on that Hampstead pavement in which someone says, “We could sell a door mat in a novelty shape.  What shape would be fun?”  And the person answering, “A moustache” does so to the sound of a little piece of his soul dying from the indignity.

Educating the Bastard N.A.M.M.S (New Age Middle-Class Males)

While that paradigm of turpitude and self-aggrandising man of destiny Mr Gove slices at the education system with his relentless rapier of regression, someone really needs to have a word in his misshapen Pob-esque shell-like about the urgent need to introduce some form of specialised education for those of us who climb the social mobility escalator from council house to over-valued ex-council house in moderately affluent middle-class pockets of leafiness.

In other words, where are the fucking life skills for us New Age Middle Class Males?

Mr Gove, I hearby present to you my blue-print for such a qualification.  A new O’Level, if you will.

Unit One: Identifying Different Forms of Vegetable.

Up until the age of 20, when I met my Surrey-born Mrs, I could name 3 types of vegetable.  Carrots, Peas and Sweetcorn.  I had a suspicion that potato might be a fourth and never could remember about tomatoes or cucumbers being animals, minerals or fruits. But once I was cast into a middle-class jungle of exotic vegetables, a mind-expanding journey of un-tinned, soil-encrusted foodstuffs ensued.  What the holy fuck was a courgette?  This deformed cucumber was just the first muddied object to introduce itself to my dinner plate, followed by parsnips, aubergines and various coloured peppers.  It was with trepidation that I nibbled at these oddities, after all, I had grown up picking the onions out of beef burgers (ah, onions, that was a 4^th vegetable I’d heard about.)  Clearly, your average working-class lad must be made to learn the names of 364 vegetables by rote.

Unit Two: Dish-washer stacking

We don’t want our NAMMs to lack manual skills and so, with an eye to the fact that he will spend each day of the rest of his life loading a dishwasher, he must be trained to analyse space and items of used kitchenware; to think logically about maximising the former in order to provide a comprehensive cleansing of the latter.  Male pride is a fierce furnace that can warm the heart or explode in anger, and the successful and efficient loading of a dishwasher, in which no cubic centimetre is wasted, is what separates the middle-class men from the boys.

Unit Three: DIY

Your average 4-bedroom semi with all mod-cons and extensive garden is a minefield of “shit that can go wrong”.  A leaking tap, a flat tyre, an unreliable electricity supply to the garage, a cranking sound from the washing machine while on spin… these sorts of things can trigger long bouts of depression in your average NAMM unless he is trained to sort out the tragic inconveniences that can afflict a comfortable and care-free life.  Naturally scathing of anyone who “knows someone who can fix it” (which is one of those things a working-class person says, that you immediately distrust), a NAMM must learn to access information about the most widely recognised local tradesmen and to be able to research on the internet the true meaning of all the little icons next to the company name in the Thomson local or on their website.  (If they have no website, they’re cowboys so don’t use them.)  A NAMM will then expect the worst in terms of cost, feel they’ve got a deal if they charged any less and forever use that same tradesman confident that they don’t rip you off, because you didn’t notice that they had.

Mr Gove, of course, might dismiss my proposal, because he doesn’t foresee the NAMMs of the future being a particularly sizeable social group, given the financial constraints on access to Higher education for the working class, the unemployment levels in the under-25s and the fact that home-owning for the young is now a fucking Walt Disney fantasy pipe-dream.  There’ll be fewer and fewer lucky bastards like me who had his degree paid for and got on the property ladder when you didn’t need to put a kidney down as a deposit.

But maybe that’s all for the good.  All they do is write blogs, fret about how people drive and wish it was still 1982.