Surprise presents. God, I hate them. And God, don’t men like giving them? I remember a boyfriend once, after a terrible row, presenting me over dinner with a pair of faux-gold teddy-bear earrings. I can still see his face, etched with the absolute shining certainty that, once the tissue paper came off, I’d just fall into his arms with gratitude and forgiveness. At the other end of the spectrum is the boyfriend who could pick out surprise stuff for me so right that even I wouldn’t have had the brilliance to spot it. And you know what? He ended up gay.
Mr Nick, he likes giving surprise presents, too.
I think he feels, like most men, that if you try, try and try again, eventually you are going to get it right. And you know what, like the monkeys sitting up there in infinity with their laptops tap, tap, tapping away and eventually coming out with the entire works of Shakespeare, on some level he’s probably right. But when time is at such a premium, and we’re not exactly getting any younger, and, let’s face it, we know what we do and don’t like by now, why not exercise a little pragmatism? Realise that, at a certain point, the surprise present, like the bonking holiday, all gets just a little bit ludicrous; that all that energy we’ve expended in the past on our Christmas morning “present faces” could actually have been far more profitably channelled into the clay candle-holders and glittery picture frames we got from the kids.
But, you know, the thing is, after 15 years of “marriage,” he’s clocked this. That phone call from New York — it’s part of our little ritual. This year, we will do what we did last year. A week or so before Christmas,
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I will go out and get exactly, but exactly, what I want, and it will probably be something expensive to wear. Nick will then tell me to put it out of my mind. I will agree to if I can just, pretty please, wear it to this one party first. And that one really, really important dinner. And by the time Christmas morning rolls around, I’ll be so familiar with whatever it is, I’ll be pray, pray, praying that he got me that surprise present as well. Poor men. They just never win, do they?