24 November 2016
Rather A Jumble
Are Christmas presents the front line in the struggle between the sexes?
By Chin Chin
The last thirty years have seen women burst into areas which were traditionally reserved for men: the military front line; the boardrooms of industry; the public bars of pubs. Now they kill, make decisions and throw up with the panache normally associated with the uglier sex. There are places where it has worked the other way. I know men who can rustle up a dessert soufflé within minutes, who can knit with an efficiency worthy of their grandmothers and who remember to get someone to feed the cat if they’re going away for a weekend. What I don’t know, however, is men who excel at Christmas shopping.
That isn’t lack of generosity. Many a man will wander down Bond Street, credit card in hand, his little face aglow with pleasure at the thought of how pleased his wife will be with her present. Yes, there is enthusiasm there, yes, there is often cash, but so often the leverage these things should import into the process is sadly diluted by lack of technique.
It isn’t so bad if the man is a bachelor. Then little is expected and people forgive the odd error as being a sad consequence of the unpartnered state. The occasional gift of a bottle to a tea totaller or of an inappropriate book, can be put down to lack of concentration (“I am so sorry Grandmother. I thought that Fifty Shades of Grey was about interior decoration”). From married men more is expected.
Actually there is a very good technique which I can recommend to bachelors. You go to the nearest good quality department store on Christmas Eve with a list of the people to whom you need to give presents, together with descriptions. So far, so orthodox, you might think. Even the most sophisticated female uber shopper will often make a list of what she is hoping to buy. But you didn’t read what I said carefully enough. The description is not a description of the proposed present. No, it is a description of the proposed recipient. You give the list to an intelligent looking assistant (by Christmas Eve the rush is over so they will have time on their hands) and ask them to select the presents from stock. If it is a long list you go and have tea whilst they do so.
It is an extreme form of delegation but in practical terms it makes obvious sense. Someone who has been working at a store will know the stock much better than you do and is in a far better position to come up with ideas. Also they are less restricted by preconceptions. Whereas you cannot think of a particular god child without wondering if they are running out of hyperdermics, your shop assistant might read the word “cokehead” differently and choose a history of the South Wales coalfields. Who knows, it might be a success? Certainly it will be different.
A really confident user of the system does not look at the choices the sales assistant has made, but asks for them to be gift wrapped and labelled in accordance with the list. “What a surprise!” exclaims the recipient on Christmas day. Well, yes, it is: for both of you.
Once you are married, the game changes. Most wives will put up with their husbands misjudging their Christmas present but they may be less forgiving if they realise that it was selected by a shop assistant whilst he was having a cup of tea. That alters the balance between upfront efficiency savings and later repercussions, so you cannot use the system to buy your wife’s gift. Actually it ruins the system altogether since, as a husband, you are likely to be asked what presents you bought for everyone else. Most of us would find that sort of questioning hard enough when we had actually chosen the presents. It becomes quite impossible if we have never even seen them. No, once you are married, that sort of thing is distinctly over. A more responsible and orthodox approach is required.
The big danger here is the risk of repetition. Let us suppose you have a whole lot of godchildren around the age of nine. You may think that Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda would be just the sort of rip roaring yarn that would appeal to them. You are probably right. The trouble is that there is a limit to how many copies a child actually needs. Next year they will all be around ten and The Prisoner of Zenda is a good book for ten year olds too. By then you have forgotten what you sent in the first year, so out go the second copies. Well, that is quite useful as many families have second homes in Norfolk. Now the child can have a copy of its favourite book in each place. The third copy received the following year is more of a problem and when children start sending back their fourth and fifth copies (“so kind of you to remember me, dear Godfather, but you have sent me this book before”), a pile of them begins to accumulate on the drawing room floor. That brings a change of tune. Now it is no longer “I’ll see if Amazon has copies of The Prisoner of Zenda but “I’m sure they would like The Prisoner of Zenda and, by great good luck, I seem to have a number of copies lying about. Brilliant. Problem solved.” The volumes go out for one more rotation.
Books often travel around in this manner. When I was young, we lived in a country village opposite a very distinguished Cambridge Professor of anthropology. She had an interesting library and, there being rather too many volumes for her cottage, would put a number of them into the village jumble sale each year. They were good books and we bought them, putting them in pride of place on the bookshelf so that people would be impressed at our anthropological knowledge. Six months later, going through the bookshelf, we would come across the books again and see the anthropologist’s name on the flyleaf. “Oh dear,” one of us would say, forgetting the jumble sale. “We seem to have borrowed these books and not returned them.” The books would then travel back across the road to their original owner who, when the season came, would put them into the village jumble sale again. By now we would have forgotten about returning them and, as they seemed interesting books…
Actually jumble sales are always rather a risk. I used to know a couple of brothers who shared a house. One of them was engaged in local politics. He made a stack in the hallway of things which could go to his party’s local jumble sale. His brother had always wanted a suit from Savile Row and had at last managed to save up for one. The suit arrived and he hung it on the picture rail exactly above the boxes. The jumble sale team were told that the stuff had all been left for them in the hall. It was not a high class sale and I like to think that somewhere in London there was a tramp cutting a considerable dash in the brand new Savile Row suit which he had bought for £5.
At the risk of being thought sexist, I’m going to make an observation. Most of the real disasters in the Christmas present/jumble sale area happen to men. That could be coincidence of course but, statistically, it is far more likely that, over thousands of years of evolution, a gap has opened up between the competence of the sexes in these areas. Fair enough, but where are the compensating things that men do best? We now know at they do not lie in the military or the boardroom, nor even in the public houses either. What about physical tasks such as shovelling snow, cutting lawns, mending roads? Perhaps, but with the advent of new machines any superiority there will be very short lived. It is hard to think of anything isn’t it? Oh well, keep working on the dessert soufflés and the knitting, chaps. If nothing else, remember to get someone to feed the cat.
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