Presentation is all!

There are some Scrooge like characters who are getting their sneering into match fitness in preparation for the horrors of the forthcoming festive season (Oh cruel adjective!) They will be watching the more obvious manifestations of rampant capitalism with malevolent glee. How much raw material for their contempt is forming around them: fungus like in shop fronts; dripping like slime from supermarket aisles; framing newspaper advertisements like gallows and flooding from radio and television like suppurating wounds? Tasteless, vulgar, cynical, cheap and tawdry – and that’s the quality end of the market. The rest: contemptible and vile. How quaint the word “Humbug!” sounds to the modern Scrooges, hardly conveying the revolted rejection from the lips of the twenty first century reincarnation of the Dickensian ogre!

Let’s be fair, it’s a season which presents too many easy targets for even a lightly ironic personality. To speak of shooting fish in a barrel gives too spacious an image. The eager acceptance of Greed and Excess as honoured companions guiding everyone through the December frivolities has become breathtaking banal. To a modern child a Christmas present not needing an electricity supply is like ice cream without sugar, milk, cream, flavouring, additives and E406 to E511: it’s not a present.

Just imagine a modern version of one of the old Cries of London. Christmas lunch has been attacked and the surfeited stuffers have fallen into various aspects of sodden exhaustion sprawled in attitudes of despair on the sofas. The only activity comes from the pampered youth which turns in desperation to their mountain of toys to avoid the Movie Non-premiere droning interminably in the background. What do they discover as they select a random part of their loot which has cost 40% of the GNP of twelve small countries in equatorial Africa? They discover that they have left the ‘educational’ toy switched on after their cursory ‘playing’ with it for the statutory fifteen seconds. And the batteries are now flat. Horror! The only way to get power is to take batteries from one discarded present and put them in another. Unthinkable! What self respecting child would ever consider doing that, when the far more attractive prospect is to turn on the terrified parents who stare wide eyed at their unsatisfied progeny and are berated by the fruit of their loins for their parental failure exemplified by the complete lack of care by not having a bunker full of batteries stocked for just such an emergency. Cue arguments, recriminations and bitter words: a traditional Christmas afternoon meltdown!

Now imagine, if you will, the magical effect a mellifluous voice from the street outside calling through the stodge filled lazy afternoon with a modern Street Cry, a travelling peddler singing:

Who will buy my alkaline batteries?
Who will pay for some peace of mind?
Who will squander all their spare cash for them?
These little darlings the best you can find?
Who will buy?
They won’t die!
Still that sigh!
Hush that cry!
You know why!
Buy! Buy! Buy!

You could have a mark up of 1000% and you will still find desperate parents prepared to ‘pay for a little peace of mind!’

Of all the aspects of Christmas that have struck me this year the one that most interests me is the ALP approach of so many large stores. ALP, as you probably know, stands for Affordable Little Present: those well packaged gifts which all cost £5 or less and can be given with clear conscience to almost anyone.

I am fascinated by such gifts: you only see them at this time of year. Looking at the percentage of gifts dedicated to the sport, I would estimate that approximately 80% of the population plays golf! The great thing about golf gifts is that a substantial part of them is composed of tees – which are cheap and bulky and look like good value.

The other gifts are masterpieces of packaging where the full fatuity of the gift only becomes apparent when the item is extracted from the wrapping. At their best the gifts are presented in rigid plastic almost like an Airfix model plane with all the little bits ready to be put together. But in the case of the model plane when all the bits are brought together there is something to be proud of, while in the case of the cunningly presented present it is invariably disappointing.

There are also the gifts which only exist to fulfil the gift giving impulse: the seventeen function pocket penknives which are as thick as a double pack of playing cards and just about as useful in ordinary life; anything which is powered from a USB socket other than a printer or a mouse; humorous packs which rely on cheap contents and weak jokes; any drinking aid; all coasters which are not innocuous and, from my own experience, a barometer.

This barometer is actually a multi function piece of equipment, bought three years ago as an emergency present to be used if . . . if . . . Well, who the hell do you give a barometer to? No one. No one at all. I eventually kept it for myself and put it in the entrance porch, and there it has stayed for three years. Sitting there with its three small unreadable dials: temperature, barometric pressure and the time. I can truthfully say I have never actually looked at the dials to register what information they might have been giving until today when, cleaning, as is my wont, I finally noticed that the clock was some four and a bit hours out.

In some ways that barometric time temperature taker or whatever is the perfect gift: always in sight; never needing attention; looking mildly interesting.

Who could ask for more from an ALP?