“What can I get for your birthday that won’t make you shout at me?” That was what my Mr asked a week ago. He was essaying one of the pillars of the successful relationship – “defuse arguments with humour” – except I was laughing only on the outside. Inside, I was thinking: “It’s my birthday in literally seven days and you’re asking me this now? You haven’t even left yourself time for shipping.”
I am, apparently, a present-buyer’s worst nightmare. It’s not that I want a big thing, but it has to be good. I split up with a guy once because he got me an ice bucket in the shape of a pineapple. Then I wrote about it tons of times and he said on, maybe, occasion six: “I don’t see why I’m still being publicly punished for this – it wasn’t even a big birthday,” and I said: “There’s no way you could be identified – I’ve been out with about 12 people since then; it was a decade ago,” and he said: “Exactly.”
Someone else bought me some shoes and I said: “You seem to have me confused with generic woman.” If memory serves, he dumped me not long after that.
There are no definable criteria for what I consider “good”. I don’t want anything pointless, but there is nothing I need, so everything is, at root, pointless. Then it becomes a more complicated, existential matter – what is the point of the material world? – which, combined with the inexorable march of time, puts me in a ferociously bad mood. All this lands on the head of the person who has just bought me a lamp in the shape of a pirate monkey (which, by the way, is the ugliest thing I have ever seen).
Here are some other things that make me angry. Anything from Oliver Bonas (no one goes to that shop on purpose; you go to it on the way to somewhere else. Most likely, you are on the way to the pub. These are not the conditions under which I want my gift purchased, even if – and this is the height of unreasonable – I like the item itself). Any book that was published in the past 12 months (because of the strong possibility that it was not picked for me, but picked at random from the front bit of Waterstones). Any book that is not good (my first spouse once bought me Rescue Me: My Life With the Battersea Dogs and neighbours could hear the conversation well enough to report it later: “You had the whole bookshop and the whole castle of my mind, with its many, many interests, and you came back with this?” His reply? “To be fair, we did have our second child two days ago.” “But that was me! I did that! You could have used that time to go to more shops!”)
The kids get a pass, being financially dependent, but I have such exacting demands of a homemade card that last year my 10-year-old daughter did one that said: “Why are you so annoying?” My 12-year-old son cracked under the pressure and spelled his own name wrong, while my 12-year-old stepdaughter did me an intricate, life-size pencil drawing of Jeremy Corbyn’s face.
Anyway, with my birthday almost here, I went to see my mother and she told me a story I had never heard about her father. He was famously the most horrible man anyone had ever met. The only story about him that was not about how horrible he was was that he was buried alive for six days during the first world war. I once floated the notion that maybe that was what had turned him horrible; the whole family thought for a minute and said: “Nope – he was always completely horrible.”
He took my mum to Woolworths when she was nine, on Christmas Eve, to help him choose her mother’s Christmas present. This would have been 1945. Who knows what you could even buy in Woolies in those days. They may have sold porcelain. But, of course, I understood his crimes immediately: insufficient planning; lack of personal judgment (who outsources to a nine-year-old?); meanness.
Fifteen or 20 years later, this tragedy replayed itself as farce when my mum discovered late on Christmas Eve that my dad had not bought her a present. She kicked him out of the house, telling him not to come back until he had, only this was 1965 at the latest, so nothing was open. He went from one tube station to another, buying all the chocolate in the vending machines, and came back hours later with 20 KitKats and a Fry’s Turkish Delight.
I suddenly realised: this is not my thing – this is her thing! She is the one who can build a federal case out of gift wrap. I have just borrowed this bit of personality; I can give it back at any time. Maybe I don’t care about presents at all. Maybe a kind word is enough.
This was a fortunate epiphany to have at the time, because she had not got me a present – and got my age wrong on my card.
