7 Reasons

Tag: PRESENTS

  • Guest Post: 7 Reasons You Need A Personal Budget

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons You Need A Personal Budget

    So, what is a budget anyway and why do I need one? A budget isn’t just a piece of paper carried in that big red sandwich box that worried looking bloke waves about every March outside 11 Downing Street. The Budget is the Government’s best estimate of what they will receive in income for the year ahead – taxation, revenue, sale of signed photos etc – and what they intend spending it on – NHS, wars, salaries, new dart board for Dave’s office etc. In the same way, a personal budget will have a forecast of your year’s income and how you intend to spend or save it; this can very easily be done with accounting software now readily available on-line. Like the Government, you can include borrowings in your budget, but unlike them you can’t decide to “print” money to ease your financial troubles – well not legally anyway! Here are 7 reasons for making a personal budget.

    7 Reasons You Need A Personal Budget

    1.  Paying The Rent. Unless you still live with Mum and Dad, housing costs – whether rented or purchased with a mortgage – will probably be your largest regular expense. Unless, that is, you are addicted to chocolate in which case see below. It is a good idea to start with listing your main living expenses including fuel and Council Tax, Sky TV and other essentials so that you can then assess what you have left at your disposal for your other needs or aspirations.

    2.  Chocolate. If you do have a passion for chocolate or indeed any other luxury for that matter, having a budget will show you the areas of expenditure that you can economise on so that you can indulge your passions ad nausea. This advice is given only on the understanding that you are responsible for your own health and that the author cannot be held liable for any complications arising from excessive consumption.

    3.  Holidays. Home or Hawaii? A few people enjoy holidays at home, but if your ambition is to spend six months in California then your budget can help you reserve the cash to achieve it. If you know in advance how much you can spend on tickets and trips you can often pick up a bargain by advanced booking; or you could be in a position to make a spontaneous purchase when you spot a good deal and be confident that you will have the funds to cover it already in your holiday savings pot.

    4.  Food. In the intervals between clubbing and sleeping, most people eat food. This may be dispensed with but that is not a recommended plan for enjoying a longer life. If you are already aware of what you spend on food regularly it is easy to budget. If you are not aware, then you can take a stab at it and adjust the budget after a while to reflect how much you wish to spend and then shop accordingly.

    5.  Work. Unless you are lucky enough to be able to work from home, then you need to budget for travel to and from work, whether for bus or train fares or the cost of running your own car or bike. You may need to reserve funds for buying tools or clothes. Unless you are expert at charity-shop scavenging you could need to spend a bit on looking smart in the office. Especially true for the office-party when you need to impress someone you want to share your pencil with; or even your boss for that matter.

    6.  Christmas Is Coming! For many people Christmas is the time for giving and having a good time; and the rest of the year the time for remorse – especially after the afore mentioned office-party – and for scratching around trying to pay for it! You can set yourself a budget for presents and entertaining and, as long as you stick to that, the only headache you will have in the New Year will be a hangover and not a financial one. No longer will you have to wrap up a box of tissues for Granny’s gift, trying to convince yourself in doing so that it is the thought that counts and that she will forgive you for your spendthrift ways once again.

    7.  Play. You will need to know in advance whether you can afford that season ticket for your favourite team or will instead have to resort to standing on the touchline at the Rec. to get your sports fix. Perhaps you might want to start a new hobby or activity and to plan ahead for equipment purchases or memberships. Your budget will help you make those decisions wisely

    You don’t have to keep your budget in a big red sandwich box, but it will be useful to have it to hand to see how well you are managing your finances and how much you will have left at the end of the year for shoes or chocolate. Accounting software will provide you with an easily accessible reference and a method of budgeting to enable you, and not your bank, to have control of your finances!

  • Guest Post: 7 Reasons Why Christmas Should Happen In June

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons Why Christmas Should Happen In June

    We are sure many of you remember with great fondness our attempts at rebranding the 24th December as ‘The Day Of The Sausage’. Sadly – and wrongly – the idea never captured the imagine of the masses. As such we have long been looking for a new festive-based campaign to get behind. And we may have found it in today’s guest post. Over to Sam.

    ***

    I’ve had enough of Christmas in December and reckon it’d be far more fun if it were to occur in June. Here are seven reasons why!

    7 Reasons Why Christmas Should Happen In June

    1.  Christmas Shopping Would Be Fun. I don’t, as a rule, dislike buying my family and friends Christmas gifts. However, I do dislike turning out onto busy, dark, weather-battered streets in search of the perfect pressie. The ensuing festive scrum is just unpleasant. Admittedly moving the event to June wouldn’t lessen the crowds, but I have a theory. Defending oneself from the elements with sweaters, jumpers, coats, scarfs and the rest increases ones size. I, for a while, owned an anorak that was large enough to warrant its own seat on the underground. If Christmas happened in June this wouldn’t be an issue, t-shirts, vest tops, shorts and skirts would give us room to breathe. And it is also worth mentioning it would negate the instant sauna effect every time you enter a store that occurs with our current date arrangement. Imagine the possibilities. It’d be a merry stroll on sunny streets and, when you were done, an ice cream in the park.

    2.  Online Christmas Shopping Would Be Less Fraught With Potential Pitfalls. I’ve not finished with Christmas shopping yet. A counter to point one would be the suggestion that the modern Christmas shopper notices that it’s December 1st and promptly makes a cup of coffee and a cheese toasty, before sitting down at their computer and surfing straight to various gift themed websites. A click here and a click there and your Crimbo shopping is done quicker than you can say, “I am a gift giving god!” And you are – as long as there is no adverse weather forecast. It’s December though, and adverse weather is what December really likes to do. Cue impenetrable blizzards and M5 stranded delivery drivers eating that hamper of chocolates you ordered.

    3.  Santa Would Become A Positive Role Model. Currently Santa is a heart attack waiting to happen. In a world of health awareness holding this fellow aloft as the most important person in a young person’s life alongside Pikachu is surely a bad idea. Christmas in summer would see Santa trim in no time. He’d sweat off those extra 200 pounds he’s carrying in a couple of years, especially having to scoot around the world in half the usual time due to shorter nights.

    4.  Cold Weather Is Rubbish! Having already mentioned the weather in points 1 and 2 does not negate the requirement for an entry on its own merit. Cold weather is miserable. Plus it’s not just the cold; it’s the sideways rain and hip-breaking conditions underfoot. Historically, aside from the Jesus’ birthday deal, it is reckoned the celebration took place in sync with the winter solstice to lift spirits because everyone was miserable due to the short days, crappy weather and that there was little agricultural work to be done. Sensible? Maybe, but sensible never went hand-in-hand with a cracking celebration. Let’s go outside and party like it’s Christmas in June and pushing 100 Fahrenheit. Oh hang on, it is!

    5.  No More Mulled Wine. “Hot wine?! No thanks, you’re mad.” This is the correct response when someone offers you mulled wine, except if it is Christmas when you smile and swallow it down as if hot wine if the norm. It isn’t, but seemingly it is only brought out due to the fact it’s December and we’re all freezing. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather sit outside in June’s summer sun and celebrate my Christmas by reaching in to a bucket of ice for a chilled beer.

    6.  I Wouldn’t Get Combined Birthday And Christmas Presents. I’m not an ungrateful sort, but for the best part of quarter of a century I’ve been the receiver of combined Christmas and birthday presents due to my parents bad planning. Yes, I have an early January birthday. Switching to June would give all those suffering the same fate a taste of two awesome gift receiving occasions that are nicely spaced throughout the year.

    7.  Why Not? Why not indeed? I can’t think of a reason. And as they say, a change is as good as rest. Besides when we switch we’ll be getting two Christmas celebrations within 12 months, how cool is that?! It’ll boost the economy and raise public moral. I know I’ve criticised certain elements of the December-based festivity, but it is the most wonderful time of the year. In fact, are there any negatives to just adding another Christmas in June? If we do that every one’s happy. What could be more Christmas spirited than that?!

    Sam C campaigns by night for the redistribution of national holidays, whilst by day contributing to the e-commerce site, Find Me A Gift.

  • Guest Post: 7 Reasons The Holiday Season Sucks

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons The Holiday Season Sucks

    If you’re feeling really festive, we mean really festive, then today’s guest post from Louise Tillotson probably isn’t the kind of thing you wanted to read over your lunch break. On the other hand, though, if you bat for Team Scrooge this is the kind of thing you’ll want to read and share and read and share and read and share… (repeat to fade).

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons The Holiday Season Sucks

    I like Christmas as much as the next person. Provided that person is, in fact, Scrooge. Bah humbug and all that…

    But honestly, I do enjoy the festive period to an extent. The act of going out in the cold, wrapped up warmly, spending my hard-earned savings on things I don’t have to find space for in my already cluttered home is, to me, one of the joys of Christmas.

    When you’re a grown-up, Christmas does kind of lose its appeal. But when you have kids of your own and see it through their eyes, it seems magical all over again.

    Sadly, what those little eyes don’t see are the niggly little annoyances that now seem to ruin the season just that little bit more each year. I’m talking about…

    1.  Christmas Cards. Every year we send flimsy bits of cardboard with awful pictures on them to people we never see or speak to throughout the year. And every year we get flimsy bits of cardboard with awful pictures on them given to us which we then have to display in our homes in case the giver happens to drop by. Which is unlikely seeing as we haven’t seen or spoken to them all year…

    2.  The Weather. Do a Google image search for ‘Christmas’ and you immediately get thousands of pictures containing snow-covered cottages, trees festooned with lights, and jolly-looking snowmen made out of the purest white snow. Now look out of your window. See the grey slush laying forlornly in the gutter, the crumpled lump of grey and yellow matter with a single carrot poking out at an odd angle, the few dimly lit bulbs hanging on for dear life to a wilting bush…Doesn’t the sight just fill your heart with winter joy? No, I didn’t think so.

    3.  Strange Bearded Men. I am of course referring to Santa Claus, Father Christmas or whatever you call him in your family. There’s just something vaguely creepy about taking your beloved little one to sit on the knee of a strange man and confide in him all their secret wishes for the season. Or more realistically; start to cry hysterically, scream for mummy and wet themselves.

    4.  Cold Food. Maybe it was just the way my mother cooked it, but I always think of Christmas dinner as being a lot of cold stuff covered with thick gravy. There’s obviously an art to getting four types of vegetable, three types of potato, turkey and stuffing to the same hot temperature at the same time…and my mother never mastered it. Our turkey dinners always consisted of freezing cold meat, red hot gravy and tepid everything else. Which probably wouldn’t be so bad but the turkey is always far too large and you end up having it with every meal for a week afterwards.

    5.  Mandatory Alcohol. And when I say alcohol I don’t mean the tasty stuff that you’d choose to drink if you were at the pub. I’m talking about stuff like Babycham, the “wine” parents buy when they want to get their offspring amusingly drunk; and Advocaat, which looks like runny custard and smells like it’s been drunk already. And woe betide you if you don’t want to drink – you’ll have a glass of this cheap plonk out of a box and damn well enjoy it!

    6.  Decorations. I don’t mind what people have inside their homes, as I don’t have to look at it. I’m talking about the stuff people decorate the outside of their homes with. As far as I can tell, there are two rules every outside decorator thinks they must obey: the lights must be the brightest you can find, and if they don’t flash and/or cause a hazardous distraction to drivers, you’ve not used enough. For preference, you should also create your own Nativity/Farm/North Pole with brightly lit animal structures too, for that added tackiness.

    7.  Presents. Last but not least, we come to the gifts. Your granny is probably delegated to trot out the old adage “giving is better than receiving” but honestly, I think it’s true. Only by not receiving gifts can we avoid having to pretend to love the hideous pair of socks a lazy uncle has bought you, or the bath salts which you just know will make you smell like the inside of a pensioner’s handbag. There’s only so long you can wear a fake smile and feign delightedness so as not to offend your well-meaning but utterly clueless relatives.

  • Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Make Sure You Buy The Right Christmas Present

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Make Sure You Buy The Right Christmas Present

    Some years (Radley) I get it right, some years (B&Q) I get it wrong. Yet I never seem to learn. I still make the same mistakes and I suspect I shall continue to do so until I’ve got rid of all these spirit levels. (I thought they measured gin. They don’t.) Perhaps I can learn something from today’s guest post, though. Because today Leo Parker tells us why buying the correct gift is so important. There’s also a picture of Bill Murray being scared by a pile of coats which quite frankly makes this the most awesome guest post ever.

    ***

    To be honest, Christmas sucks – it’s impossible to buy presents for people and you seldom receive what you really want (jet-pack) so this list of seven reasons to make sure you buy the right Christmas present is, for all intents and purposes, moot from the outset….

    ….so, let’s get started.

    1.  You’ll Feel All Warm Inside. This is patently untrue, but we’re led to believe via movies and such like that we should feel good about getting people the things that they want. But, truth be told, most people (male people) will merely pick up the nearest Christmas gift guide and purchase the first thing they come across regardless of who the recipient is to be. Ergo, you will see a mother unwrapping a remote control hovercraft and a young niece opening a Top Gear DVD come Christmas morning. Result of this – tension filled Christmas lunch.

    2.  Karma. If you buy good gifts at Christmas, you’ll bag yourself some quality karma. Dish out luxury Swiss watches to your friends and family on Christmas Day, for example, and you’ll be lucky for ages afterwards. Or they’ll think you’ve turned to a life of crime and disown you.

    3.  Revenge. Perhaps an odd emotion to go for on the day of Jesus’ birth but, if you think about it, buying a good Christmas present for someone can be the perfect act of revenge. Someone give you a terrible gift last year? Give them a bloody Tag Heuer watch for Christmas! That’ll make them feel guilty. Revenge…..ACCOMPLISHED. No, wait!

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Make Sure You Buy The Right Christmas Present
    Sweet revenge in the form of Tag Heuer Watches

    4.  A Peaceful Life. When buying Christmas gifts for girlfriends, wives, mistresses et al, special dispensation must be made from your normal poor gift buying endeavours if you hold out any hope of a peaceful life. Buy the wrong gift for your girlfriend (after she’s repeatedly told you what she wants, to the point of writing on your phone, computer, iPod and arm) and you are opening yourself up to a world of pain. You won’t hear the end of it and any hope you had of watching Boxing Day’s set of Premiership football fixtures…..well, you can kiss that goodbye.

    5.  Give The Impression Of Normality. It is generally expected of people to find simple tasks easy and what could be easier than buying a gift for someone – especially when you’ve explicit instructions as to what the gift should be? Well, if you want to appear normal, then you should make buying gifts look simple and whether you’re looking for men’s watches or Power Rangers action figure, you’ve no excuse for messing it up. Unless, of course, you leave all of your shopping until Christmas Eve – in which case, welcome to my world.

    6.  Avoid Ghosts. If you plan on living into your later years and have never given good presents, then you’re in for a ghostly surprise a la Ebenezer Scrooge. Give crap presents for decades then don’t be surprised if you’re visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future asking what the deal is.

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Make Sure You Buy The Right Christmas Present
    I think that’s the Ghost of Christmas Future….or Death

    7.  It’s Christmas. What are you doing reading this? You should be out panic buying presents for your loved ones! No matter how difficult it is buying Christmas presents, there’s no excuse for not trying so get online (if you’re lazy) or on the high street (if you’re resilient to cold) and give that debit or credit (are you sure?) card a work out.

  • Guest Post: 7 Reasons My Wife Buys The Best Presents

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons My Wife Buys The Best Presents

    Just supposing, for instance, that this was the last Guest Post we ever published. Who would you like it to be written by? I suspect at least 26% of you would choose Richard O’Hagan. Like Dr Simon Percy Jennifer Best who posted last week and Liz Gregory who posted a few weeks ago, Richard is a 7 Reasons stalwart. He’s the author of The Memory Blog, the face behind @theskiver and he likes marmite. That, we think, is all you need to know.

    7 Reasons My Wife Buys The Best Presents
    Crisps!

    It recently came to my attention that there are people out there who make a career of going shopping for other people. Now, personally, I cannot think of anything worse than going shopping for other people. I mean, going shopping for myself is stressful enough. Going shopping for presents doubly so. Why on earth would you want to make a career out of it*?

    Fortunately**, I am married to a woman who also hates shopping. Which therefore makes it even more surprising that she is the best present buyer ever. I don’t just mean by comparison with me, either, because I am completely rubbish at it (one year I gave her a cheese grater as a gift). Just consider this: The People Who Buy Presents For Other People need you to give them some sort of a list, so that they know roughly what to get. I have a wish list on Amazon – two of them, in fact – and my wife almost never uses it. Instead, she uses her initiative to come up with wonderful gifts such as this:

    1.  A Box of Seabrook’s Tomato Ketchup Crisps. My life is an endless quest for ketchup flavoured crisps, and has been ever since I first tried them on our honeymoon. Since when I have rarely seen them in the shops, not even in the USA where, frankly, you’d expect the locals to be munching them down for breakfast lunch and dinner. It had never occurred to me to simply see if you could buy them off the internet, but my wife did.

    2.  A Cross Pen. No, not an angry writing implement. I once commented to my wife that my Tombo fountain pen seemed to be nearing the end of its life. I then thought no more of it until, approximately three months later, I received a beautiful Cross pen as a Christmas present. A pen of such high quality that I’ve had to learn how to write with it. And I didn’t even ask for it.

    3.  A Book About Scriptwriting. For almost two years now (or over two years, depending upon when this gets published) I have been labouring over a script for a television comedy. It is very hard to get a script commissioned if you are not either an established writer, or related to one, or both. It hadn’t even occurred to me that there are books that I could consult about the subject, but this one now nestles in my bedside cabinet where I can dip into it whenever I want. So far, it has been invaluable.

    4.  A Letter Opener. I don’t get much mail, and most of what I do get is either bills that I have already received online and magazines that I subscribe to. But every now and then I get a proper letter, in a proper envelope, and I need to open it. My fingers are not only large, but they are often in a state of mangledness after a close encounter with a cricket ball or a rugby boot. I have always wanted a letter opener and was therefore extremely pleased when my wife gave me one as a Christmas present, even though I still cannot recall mentioning to her that I wanted one.

    5.  Marmite Spoons. That’s right, spoons for scooping the yummy delight that it Marmite out of the jar and onto your bread, toast or whatever. Each has a different Marmite jar on the top. You can’t beat being able to offer your guests Marmite with a special spoon. Words cannot describe the envious looks that I get.

    6.  A CD Subscription. Did you know that Rough Trade Records have a subscription service? I didn’t. My wife did. It is a very simple plan. You give them money and each month they choose a new CD and send it to you. You discover music that you might not listen to otherwise. It is like the Olympics ticket lottery, only you actually get something at the end of it. A brilliant idea, and a brilliant gift

    7.  Cricket. Not a gift that you can easily giftwrap, I’ll admit. Cricket may be the best game on the planet, but even I have to admit that it can take a little while to play. Despite this, my wife has never once tried to stop me playing it, or going to watch it, and lumbering her with our exuberant child to look after. There are not many better gifts that selflessly letting someone do something they love.

    All of which means that you can forget using any of these services, because they will never be as inventive at gift buying as my wife is. Now, where did I put that cheese grater?

    *Unless you are my mother, who would regard this as a dream job.

    **For me, not necessarily for her.

  • 7 Reasons That I’ve Been Baffled By Something That Isn’t A Doormat

    7 Reasons That I’ve Been Baffled By Something That Isn’t A Doormat

    “What do you think?” My wife enquired, prompting the man-klaxon to sound in my head. Alarmed by the…er…alarm, I took heed. The warning message of the man-klaxon was clear. It was telling me that under no circumstance should I say anything. Nor should I make any noise at all. It would also be prudent not to make any facial expression or move my hands, in case that could be interpreted as a gesture. Then she handed me this:

    7 Reasons That I've Been Baffled By Something That Isn't A Doormat
    What is it?

    1.  What Is It? “What the buggery-bollocks is this?!” I didn’t say, thanks to the man-klaxon. What is this thing? I’ve seen many things before, but nothing that resembles this. It’s large and square at one end and tapers to a point at the other, could it be a mouse?

    2.  Technology Was Baffled Too. Breaking one of the rules of the man-klaxon, I feigned interest by means of a slight facial expression and pulled out my phone to photograph it, hoping that this would demonstrate some enthusiasm for the wonky mouse. What I was actually doing was using Google Goggles, a handy app that, if you photograph anything in the world, will tell you what it is. It didn’t know. Google Goggles was boggled. Bugger.

    3.  What Does It Do? Having been failed by the internet, it dawned on me that I was on my own. Why do babies never wake up screaming when you want them to? I was going to have to work it out by myself. Having failed to ascertain what the thing was by trying to interpret its form, I attempted to identify its function. The most functional looking part of it was a button on the front. But the button wouldn’t unbutton. It was just sewn on with nothing to attach it to. Perhaps it was an eye. Was this some sort of weird fish? A sea monster? Why would my wife make a sea monster? I couldn’t recall her bemoaning our lack of a sea monster at any point recently, so it seemed unlikely that she’d just make one on the spur of the moment.

    4.  What Does It Mean? There was a strange symbol in the middle, so I decided to concentrate on that. It clearly wasn’t a swastika, which was good (though if it had been second world war-related I would have fared far better at identifying it), but what was it? It looked like a snowflake, but the other thing that you may notice about it is that it is green. There’s a wise old saying that warns people never to eat yellow snow. It goes something like this: “Never eat yellow snow”. Well surely green snow must be even more fearsome than yellow snow! How the hell do you get green snow? What’s in that?!

    5.  Wait! A snowflake! A green snowflake and the majority of the thing’s red. Red and Green! Red and green should never be seen! It’s a Christmas thing! The only time of year that anyone with eyes would conceivably use red and green at the same time. It’s a Christmas…er…um…pencil?

    6.  A New Approach. Trying to work out what this thing was wasn’t going well. After all, I’d been regarding the seasonal pointy thing for ten minutes and my lack of any sort of response to her question might – if left for many more minutes – have raised suspicion. I decided to try another approach to working out what it was. An approach that I usually reserve for dire emergencies. I decided to try talking. “What the buggery-bollocks is this?!” I asked.

    7.  It’s A What?! The response was surprising. After my wife had struck me several times with the (surprisingly hard) Christmas thing, she blurted out, “It’s a house!” She then turned the object ninety degrees to the right. And that’s what it is. It’s obvious, really. It’s one of those traditional tree decorations, a Christmas house. Because no Christmas is ever complete without a Christmas house on the tree. It’s clearly the house of a person that lives in a Cath Kidston designed traffic cone, but it’s a house nonetheless. A Christmas house. For the tree.

    7 Reasons I've Been Baffled By Something That Isn't A Doormat
    Aaarrrrggghhhh!!!!

    There’s only eleven weeks to go, so don’t forget to get your Christmas houses ready. I know I’ll be enjoying mine. In the shed, probably.*

    *Note to self: Must build shed.

  • 7 Reasons That This Is The Worst Present Ever

    7 Reasons That This Is The Worst Present Ever

    Okay, 7 Reasons readers.  It’s September, so there’s only one thing we can possibly write about today.  That’s right, Christmas.  Because – strange as it may seem – there are people out there that are actually planning their Christmas and buying presents right now.  I, of course, will be leaving my shopping until the last possible moment, as usual, but I feel I should issue a cautionary tale to those of you that may be contemplating buying presents.  For, if it prevents anyone else having an experience quite like this one, I feel I will have done the world a great service.  This may make me appear to be an ungrateful man and a bad brother but that’s okay, because I’m an ungrateful man and a bad brother.  So, present-buyers: Don’t buy this!  Here are seven reasons that it’s the worst present ever.  I have obscured the name of the sender to protect her identity.

    This is not the actual gift. This is a far more tastefully coloured version of it.

    1.  It Created Expectation.  It was Christmas morning.  My wife and I had finished the croissants and were sipping our second glasses of bucks fizz while, in the background, Frank Sinatra gently exhorted us to have ourselves a merry little Christmas.  It was time to open the presents.  My wife pulled the many gifts out from under the tree and divided them into four piles: presents for her; presents for me; presents for us and presents for the cat (the largest pile).  We took it in turns to unwrap them (and to help the cat) and fairly soon the floor was a gaudy collage of discarded paper.  Then it was my turn again.  It was a small, rectangular present.  It was tastefully wrapped and surprisingly weighty.  A glance at the tag revealed that it was a gift from my s*ster.  “Who’s it from?” my wife asked.  “It’s from my only s*ster.”  I replied.  Expectantly, I tore the paper away, to reveal a narrow blue gift box about six inches long.  Wow!  This looks great, I thought as I unwrapped the box.  Then I opened it.

    2.  My Eyes!  My life prior to opening the box had been a poor preparation for that moment.  My life had been one of carefully and tastefully matched colours and textures.  Of aesthetical sobriety and decorousness.  I was fundamentally ill-equipped for the spectre that cruelly and aggressively assaulted my retinas.  What greeted me was the sight of a glass object consisting of a conical frosted glass stem tapering up toward a rounded top that was made up of most of the colours in the world – minus all of the nice ones and the ones that go together – encased in glass that was partially frosted and liberally spattered with gold leaf.  It was the single most hideous thing that I have ever seen.  And I’ve seen the Lidl in Scunthorpe.

    3.  It Caused Bafflement.  What is it?  What is this glassy-horror?  Why has my s*ster sent me this?  Why is it covered in gold leaf?  Is the glass frosted to obscure the thing, like a toilet window?  Why does it have a stem? Why does it have a bulb?  Why does it have a rim?  What the buggery-bollocks is this thing?!  “What is it, darling?” My wife enquired.

    4.  It Caused Speculation.  Putting all aesthetic squeamishness aside, I coolly regarded the gaudy object in as objective a manner as I could.  It had a tapering stem.  It had a bulb at the end.  It was simultaneously shiny and frosted.  It was a myriad of lurid colours and was festooned with gold leaf.  “It’s…it’s…(got it!)…Liberace’s butt-plug!”

    5.  It Caused…The Pause.  “Don’t be silly,” my wife said, snatching Liberace’s butt-plug from me to regard it more closely.  “It’s…(there then followed a long pause.  A pregnant pause so long it seemed that an elephant could have been brought from conception to gestation during it.  In fact, it was merely a pause of several minutes)…a wine-stopper!”  “A what?” I enquired.  “It’s a wine-stopper.  It stops wine.”

    6.  It Caused Incredulity.  It does what?!  Of all the things one could conceivably want to stop why in the hell would anyone pick wine?!  I like wine.  Why not send a gift that stops something more objectionable, like fascism or tennis?  Wine is fun!  Sending something that stops it is like giving the gift of abstinence.  For Christmas!

    7.  It Caused Me To Lie On The Telephone.  “Thanks for the…um…thing.”

    “We got it in South Africa.”

    “It’s…come a long way.”

    “It took us ages to choose that one.”

    “Really?”

    “Yes.  There were so many different coloured ones.  Have you used it yet?”

    “No, but I will.”

    And that was a lie.  Until now!  Because now – five years later – I’ve finally found a use for it, even if it is as a cautionary tale.  A gentle reminder for 7 Reasons readers to choose their Christmas presents carefully.  And, even if you don’t, you could at least get it in a colour that matches the recipient’s loft because that’s where it is.  Or rather, where it was, because earlier today when I went up there to relive the horror and to photograph it in all its sickening hideousness for you, the reader, I discovered that it had disappeared.  My investigations have revealed that it may have been placed in a charity bag by my w*fe during some sort of cull-of-the-horrid.  With some irony, it may well have been a bag from the RNIB.  I can only offer our apologies to them.

    *For fans of gifts like this, this is the place to find them.

  • 7 Reasons That Men Shouldn’t Wrap Birthday Presents

    7 Reasons That Men Shouldn’t Wrap Birthday Presents

    Did I give this the title 7 Reasons That Men Shouldn’t Wrap Birthday Presents?  I didn’t really mean that.  I meant 7 Reasons That Me Shouldn’t Wrap Birthday Presents.  Or I, to be correct about it.  Because I’m sure that there are some men out there that are good at wrapping presents.  Neat, methodical men that actually welcome the task; men that positively enjoy it, in fact.  The thing is though, that I’m definitely not one of them.  And I’m sure that somewhere there must be other people (most likely men) who are as ill-suited to wrapping gifts as I am.  Possibly.  Here are seven reasons I shouldn’t be allowed to wrap stuff.

    Finished! At last!

    1.  Loathing.  I fundamentally dislike wrapping gifts.  I’m not good at it and I don’t enjoy it; much like dancing a ballet or sketching a bowl of fruit, I’m temperamentally unsuited to it and it’s much better when done by others.  This affects my whole approach to the burden of having to wrap presents.  I will procrastinate; I will obfuscate; I will participate in the most mundane or bizarre displacement activities to avoid it.  I would literally rather do anything (photograph my belly-button fluff; listen to Jedward; fellate a baboon) than wrap a present.  This leads to problems.

    2.  Delay.  It means that I will leave performing the odious task until the last possible moment.  And then, when that arrives, I’ll leave it for an hour or two more.  Then I’ll have a beer or two, which I may follow with some gin or – as preceded one spectacularly disastrous present-wrapping session – absinthe.  I will not wrap a single birthday present until I am so tired that I absolutely have to go to bed on the eve of the birthday.  Only then is it time to start wrapping.

    3.  Practice Makes Perfect.  It’s then of course, that I am reminded of how epically, stupendously, mind-bogglingly bad I am at wrapping presents.  It’s something I get to do so rarely (thankfully) that I believe I may be getting worse at it with every passing year.  I only do it rarely, not because I am ungenerous, but because I am forbidden to do so.  My wife – having seen many examples of my wrapping – would rather allow Prince Phillip and Pete Doherty to mind our baby for a weekend than let me wrap a gift that anyone will see (feel, or even be within the same postcode as).  This division of labour suits me fine as it leaves me in charge of hammering stuff and assembling things, but it leaves me ill-equipped for the four occasions per year on which I am called to wrap presents.

    4.  Wrapping Is Dull.  There are few tasks duller than wrapping presents.  Probably.  I’ve been trying to think about something duller than wrapping a present for several minutes now and have so far failed to come up with anything that tops the unremitting tediousness that is covering things for other people in paper.  So I would be better off if I had a distraction from the wrapping.  But I can’t watch television or listen to music while I’m wrapping because of the hour and because rustling wrapping paper is the loudest sound known to humankind outside of Muse and Vanessa Feltz being sucked into a jet engine.  When you are wrapping presents, you are wrapping presents.  There.  Are.  No.  Distractions.

    5.  Sellotape.  But there is Sellotape.  There’s a fundamental flaw with Sellotape; one that renders it almost all but unusable to me.  It has two sides; one of which is smooth and presents me with no problem, and then there’s the other side, which is sticky.  The sticky side adheres to everything:  It sticks to me, it sticks to itself, it sticks to the table, it sticks to the floor, it sticks to anything that has fallen from the table to floor and retains it in the form of a visible mass of crumbs, dust, fluff and (always) a single pubic hair stuck between the Sellotape and the wrapping paper.  The only thing that Sellotape does not do – in my hands – is affix neatly and evenly to the edges of wrapping paper.  One birthday, I got this reaction: “Thank you for the present, Darling.  Why is there a tortilla chip stuck to it?”

    6.  Paper.  Because I am emphatically not in charge of wrapping anything ever, I am often presented with a problem when it comes to paper.  I buy wrapping paper all the time.  Lots of paper.  Because of this, I always expect to find an abundance of wrapping paper when I – with heavy heart – am obliged to wrap a present.  But because my wife spends her entire year wrapping presents in my absence, by the time I need wrapping paper, there’s none left.  Things I have been forced to resort to using in the past include: tissue paper, newspaper, plain brown paper, white A4 paper and lined A4 paper.  I have also given the gift of a small and delicate bracelet presented in a large metallic red bottle bag.  Last night I had to resort to using Christmas wrapping paper to wrap my wife’s birthday presents.  Fortunately I was able to talk my way out of the situation this morning: “Those?  Those are birthday trees, Darling…Merry Birthday!”

    7.  Apology.  There are also many apologies involved in wrapping presents:  Apologies for waking the household up by bellowing obscenities at an odd-shaped overnight bag (or Sellotape, we can’t be certain) at 0330 in the morning; apologies for affixing a dead woodlouse to the wrapping of a tub of handcream that bore the words “Be My Valentine”; apologies for the (unaccountably) ginger pubic hair that was stuck to the tube of Pringles; apologies for the “Birthday” trees line that seemed certain to work and apologies for arriving in bed with a ball of Sellotape stuck to my arm which eventually transferred to my wife’s back when she rolled over.  It turns out that wrapping birthday presents is a sorry affair, as well as a messy one.

    *I would, of course, like to wish my wife a very happy birthday (if not a well wrapped one).  Happy Birthday, Darling.

     

     

  • 7 Reasons it Must Have Been Terrible to Celebrate Your Wedding Anniversary in the 1930s

    7 Reasons it Must Have Been Terrible to Celebrate Your Wedding Anniversary in the 1930s

    In the 1930s it was decided (presumably by purveyors of gifts) that there weren’t enough things associated with anniversaries and a more comprehensive anniversary gift list was created.  Fortunately for contemporary celebrants of anniversaries, since then the list has been modernised.  This is no bad thing as I’ve seen a copy of the original list.  Here are seven reasons that it must have been terrible to celebrate your anniversary in the 1930s.

    1.  Wood.  On the original list, the fifth anniversary is wood.   This is rather fitting for the era because, after five long years of marriage, the celebration of their fifth wedding anniversary may well have been one of the last occasions that a married couple got wood.  Rather mean to remind them of that though.

    2.  Willow/Copper.  The ninth anniversary is a terrifying prospect.  According to the BBC (they who must be believed), after nine years you get the willow/copper anniversary.  The only feasible combination of willow and copper that comes to my mind is a policeman with a cane.  Imagine your surprise and delight when you sit down with your wife and she says, “Happy anniversary darling, here’s a rozzer to beat you with a stick.”  That doesn’t sound like too much fun to me.  Perhaps it was more fun back then.

    3.  Aluminium/Tin.  Times were clearly hard in the ‘30s and though your tenth anniversary present would be an improvement on the previous year’s beating, it wouldn’t be much of one as you’re likely to be presented with something in a tin or in an aluminium can.  This can mean only one thing: food.  But in the 1930s people didn’t have normal food, they had weird food: tins of tongue; tins of luncheon meat; tins of potatoes.  Is being presented with a tin of tongue even any better than being beaten by a policeman?  Well, should you have had your anniversary in the 1930s, you’d be in a great position to judge.

    4.  Ivory.  After fourteen years of wedded bliss – assuming you’d recuperated from your beating by the forces of law and order five years previously and eating your tongue the following year – it was time for the real presents to begin.  For your fourteenth anniversary, you could have expected to receive something without which no home is complete; a bit of an elephant.  Obviously your gift wouldn’t be in the form of a bit of an elephant, it would be a bit of one of those useless lumbering creatures from the other side of the world turned into something far more practical, like a letter-opener or a cruet set.

    5.  China.  For your twentieth anniversary you would have received the best gift of all, after which all other anniversary presents would come as an anticlimax.   For your twentieth anniversary you could expect to receive the nation of China.  Now China back then was war-ravaged and in the economic doldrums, rather than being the titan that it is now, but still, a whole country is an impressive gift.  All anniversaries after the twentieth would be a huge disappointment.

    6.  Pearl/Ivory.  After thirty years, while modern couples are receiving their first diamonds, couples using the traditional anniversary list are in for a rare treat.  They can expect to relive that fondly remembered fourteenth anniversary on which they received a bit of an elephant only now, as if the bit of an elephant weren’t enough of a treat, they can expect it to be augmented by a bit of calcium carbonate that had been stolen from a fish.  Yay!

    7.  Blue Sapphire.  After sixty-five years of marriage, the compilers of the list clearly believe that senility will have kicked in because you’re going to get a sapphire again, but this time it’s going to be a blue one (which will be so much better than the beige one you got for your 45th).  “Look darling”, your husband will bellow into your ear trumpet, “I bought you a blue sapphire…it’s blue!”.  “Well, fancy” you’ll respond, “a blue sapphire.  Well I never!  Are these my feet?”

     

    And now, I have a confession to make: tomorrow is my wedding anniversary (and my wife’s).  I’m not going to tell you which one, but you might be able to guess, as this is what I’ve got her.  Feel free to wish me luck!

    SPAM in a can