BEACHCOMBER

100 YEARS OLD AND STILL AS SLIPPERY AS EVER...

THIS Christmas business is so difficult to come to terms with. I have solved the Christmas card problem, I just recycle all the cards I receive by adding the words “and Beachcomber” to the name of the sender inside the card and forward it to someone else of my choice. But presents pose a bigger challenge, especially now that the people at Marmite have added to my confusion.

They have done a survey, you see, to find out what presents people most dislike, and slippers comes out top. Personally I can hardly think of anything I’d like more (size nine, please; leather ideally but I’d settle for almost anything as long as it doesn’t light up or look like a dog or penguin or something equally twee).

Anyway, as I was saying, this survey by Marmite says that the British accept on average three gifts they hate every Christmas and that 35 per cent of us admit re-gifting rubbish presents to others, while 34 per cent have given unwanted gifts straight to a charity shop.

This ties in well with my collection of reports from other surveys this year, for 35 per cent of workers who have had a fling with a colleague say it ended badly and 34 per cent of people are uncertain about recycling plastic. Presumably it’s all those plastic gifts being taken to charity shops because the recipients are too uncertain about them to recycle them to other people. Meanwhile 35 per cent of people have had relationships wrecked when they’ve been discovered sending their former lovers’ gifts to someone else.

Apart from slippers, the most unwanted gift is said to be “secondhand clothing” but does it count as “second-hand” if it has been passed on as a recycled present or bought at a charity shop when it has not even been opened. I suppose that’s the problem with “accepting” three unwanted gifts a year as the survey said. It would surely be prudent not to accept them until one sees what they are. Accepting them will make oneself their legal owner which will render them secondhand if one passes them on.

The most worrying revelations of all in the new survey, however, come in their examples of some of the most disappointing gifts people say they have received. These include a tax disc holder and “unwrapped breast-firming cream from their gran”.

I have been worrying about that last item a great deal. Surely unwrapped breast-firming cream is more likely to be appreciated than wrapped breast-firming cream. I must confess that I do not really understand these things but it seems to me that it would be much easier and more effective to apply such cream to an unwrapped breast than a wrapped one. If it works, it may then render the breast so firm that it does not require wrapping at all.

One can, incidentally, buy a present of a personalised jar of Marmite with the intended recipient’s name on it from social.marmite.co.uk which should at least make it difficult for them to pass it on to anyone else, unless they have a very common name.

Much as I like Marmite, though, I think I’d prefer slippers.