Go on, Gordon
OMEWHERE in a cupboard lies the forgotten breadmaking machine that was only used once.
It’s probably sitting alongside the electric mixer that was going to turn out lots of cevapcici – spicy little Serbian minced sausages.
They never got made either.
Both these expensive devices were Christmas presents – from whom I can’t remember – of some years ago.
They must have seemed a good idea at the time. Not mine, it is true, but “worth having a go”.
The givers obviously had more generous ideas about my ability to have a go with domestic devices than I have myself.
The electric toaster is about my technical limit, and that is sometimes exceeded, as past evidence of activated smoke alarms amply demonstrates.
One day, I will have to accept defeat and take breadmaker and mixer to the charity shop, if they will take them.
Too much trouble, and besides the Co-op has a wide range of bread and I can make cevapcici by hand.
I’m not alone in this seasonal fix. Every year, we waste £1.4 billion on Christmas presents that are never used. That’s three each, worth an average of £25.
It ranges from sexy underwear that the wife never wears (guilty, but only once) to costly foot spas (what- One day, I will have to accept defeat and take breadmaker and mixer to the charity shop, if they will take them. ever they are). Not long ago, it was “onesies”, now hopelessly out of fashion. The average Brit plans to spend £113.20 on gifts for friends and family this year, a tidy sum in anxious Brexitmas.
Yet more than half of us receive gifts that we never take out of the wrapping, according to research. Maybe that’s because we’re defeated by the plastic packaging.
This doesn’t feel like a year to splash out. It feels like a year to stop and think about the needless spending that puts the nation into debt, that then takes eight months to pay off. In any case, the most memorable gifts don’t cost much.
Like the slim metal box on the window-sill next to my desk which carries a quotation from Irish writer George Moore saying “A man travels the world in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it”.
No prizes for guessing from whom that came. And unlike the bread machine, it works. GORDON Brown’s Christmas present is a campaign to save the over 75s’ free TV licence, which he gave us 20 years ago.
I have a dog in this fight, so I hope he wins it.