The Intimate Gift Debacle

Apologies - you're not going nuts, Disappearing-readers, there was no post last night. Didn't get in till nearly midnight, and was dragging my ass along by that point.

The night before, I didn't actually think I'd be going out last night at all - I was still wallowing in Man-Flu Hell. But after a night of being slathered in "Vick's", my fever broke and the mucusfest in my head dripped down from my brain to sit mainly in my throat and nose and chest - all of which I could cope with. Which was just as well - after posting the last entry, my friend and sometime banker Sue responded:
"Glad you're not sitting next to me tomorrow night!"
"What's happening tomorrow?" I said, sniffing.
"Rhod Gilbert, stupid," she reminded me.

Ohhhhh yeah. That.
There will be those amongst you who don't know who Rhod Gilbert is. To you I say - YouTube is your friend. Go there, now, type in Rhod Gilbert - yes, really, spelled like that - and then proceed to laugh your ass off. He's a successful Welsh stand-up comedian, on a par with Lewis Black for the demented rages into which he works himself onstage. Sue had booked tickets to go and see him, with her daughter, a while back, and I'd paid her to get me and Lee tickets too.

Yesterday morning arrived with a clearer head.
"I should probably find the tickets for tonight," I said to d.
"Yeah, probably. Where are they?"
Rhod would probably have answered that if he'd known where they were, he wouldn't have to find them, but I was in no state to be authentically Gilbertian.
"Last I knew, they were on the seat in the hall," I sniffed. I went to look. They weren't there. I checked through the pile of papers on the kitchen table. Not there either. Checked the pile of papers on the living room pouffe...Nope.
This was getting serious. I moved upstairs to the office. There are three pile-locations in the office too. Went through all of them, and no tickets could I find. I was freaking out by this point. It had taken us three and a half hours, by now, of turning the flat upside down. I'd texted Sue to reprint the tickets, maybe, and texted Lee to ask if I'd somewhere along the line given them to him instead. I was pretty much calling off the trip...when d found them, underneath a pile of clothes on the stairs, waiting for one of us to take them upstairs.

So we were back on. Fantastic show, essentially - if you get a chance to go see Rhod in action, take it. Turn your house upside down if you need to, force down Man-Flu if you have to. Go do it.

The rant that closed the first half though sent me whirling back to a personal memory from a couple of years ago. It was about a toothbrush. An expensive, electric, state-of-the-art toothbrush that his then-girlfriend got him for Christmas last year. I'm not going to steal the man's jokes, I'm going to force you to GO HERE and laugh your ass off at his original delivery of them. Suffice it to say, he proposed the idea that an expensive, electric, state-of-the-art toothbrush was pretty much the shittiest Christmas present it is possible to buy someone you ever expect to be nice to you again.

Spooooooool back with me a couple of years. Times were hard, the economy was pretty much teetering on the event horizon of the toilet bowl, and d sat me down to make a speech.
"Times are tough, honey," she said. "So this year, you're only getting one real, intimate present, and a couple of little things, OK?"
I perked up quite considerably, having my own ideas about what a "real, intimate present" could involve. Christmas breakfast served by a d dressed entirely in ribbon and gift tags, I'm not entirely ashamed to say, sprang to what passed at that moment for my mind. But I nodded sombrely and continued in my then-spendthrift ways, trying to think of more and other ridiculous things to buy her that she didn't want and didn't need.

Come Christmas Day, she handed me a package with batting eyes. "Here's your special, intimate gift baby," she said. I was slightly worried. It was a longish, thinnish box. What, I wondered, had she done?

She'd bought me an expensive, electric, state-of-the-art toothbrush.
"Ah," I said. "Thanks, baby...erm...cool..."

It was actually about a month later when, tidying away some papers from a pile, I came across a receipt.
"Erm...baby?" I asked. "I don't think I was meant to see this, was I?"
She looked. Then a million-piece jigsaw in her mind all fell into focus.
"Oh," she said. "Fuck!" Then she got up and dashed off into another room, coming back with a tallish, widish box, beautifully gift-wrapped.
"I've just worked something out," she said, handing over the gift.
"What's that?" I asked.
"The look on your face on Christmas Day," she explained. "I forgot all about this!"
It was the box set of MASH, the American sitcom which I'd watched as a kid with my gran, and which d herself had watched occasionally own-jawed for its moments of body-slamming pathos.
"Ah!" I said. "So this would be-"
"Your special, intimate gift, yeah," she agreed. "Can't believe I didn't remember that!"
"I did wonder," I admitted. "Where did you think I'd be using the toothbrush?"
"Shurrup, ya dolt," she laughed, nudging me, and I kissed her. With perfectly clean teeth, incidentally...
What I love about this story is that she'd given it some real thought, got me something that connected me to a loved, but now deceased relative, and connected us, and also happened to be incredibly funny. She'd wrapped it beautifully, tied it with a bow, written a very sweet tag, hidden it safely where I'd never find it...and then forgotten all about it! Even when on Christmas Day, she'd introduced what must, on some level have registered as "one of the small things" as the intimate gift, the existence of the gift she'd actually found, and wrapped, and dedicated, didn't pop up in the back of her brain and ring its little bell of recognition.

That's my girl, and I love her.


To be fair, having revealed what was probably d's biggest Christmas faux-pas, I should share my own. I think it was the year before the Intimate Gift Debacle.

Thing is, that year, everything I knew d wanted was more than I could get, and everything I could get, I knew she didn't particularly care about. I took a desperate, blokish stab in the dark, and ordered her a spa day online.

The voucher for the spa day was supposed to have arrived long before Christmas, but hadn't. In a doubling-down of desperation, I hand-wrote some riddling love notes, and hid them on all three floors - count them, one, two, three - of Ma's house, where we habitually spent Christmas. So on Christmas morning, my beloved wife went up and down and up and up and up and down and up and frigging up again those stairs, chasing clue after clue after clue, that ultimately led her to...

Precisely buggerall.
Pink-faced at the end of it, she asked what it was all about.
"It's a spa day, baby!" I explained, practically doing jazz-hands and ta-dahing..

"Oh," she said. "OK..."

The next day I was ringing up the spa day people to say that not only had the voucher for the spa day not arrived, but now I didn't want it, and could I just have the money back...like, right freakin' now please...

So, much as Rhod's rant was funny, it's my contention that there is a worse gift than an expensive, electric toothbrush (mine still works, by the way, and I use it daily!). For truly fucked-up Christmas ideas, a three-story guessing game, leading to buggerall, followed by an explanation of a gift that the recipient will never, ever use, and which moderately creeps them out and reveals to them that you have no real idea of their inner soul, despite having been married for a couple of years...yeah, that's worse.

Hmm...Toothbrushes...
Amazon.co.uk, here we come...