The Presents

This year’s pressies were on the whole a lot more imaginative than previous years. DBF and I had already decided to splurge on a new TV as our main ‘gift’ this year so we decided to restrict ourselves to spending £20 on each other. This made things a lot more difficult than you would think but I have to say that DBF did a far better job of it than I was expecting.

I got:
5 Happy Flowers (comment: don’t say I never get you flowers)
Fluxx
Kenny Everett DVD
My Cat Hates You – a book (comment: See they are evil!)
Full length poster of Orlando Bloom from POTC – drool
A Slinky

While all of these were wonderful gifts the one I really want to mention is the slinky. Just before christmas, Rob at A View from the Bleachers wrote this post. Read the whole post, Rob is a great writer. The gist of it was that for people of a certain age, a great fun gift is to buy them a toy from their childhood. I agreed with him then and having had just such a gift I agree with him even more.

What can I say about the slinky? I had a couple of these as a kid and I loved them. The first one went the way of the overstretch and after a while it just refused to slink any more. So I got another one and treated it with more love and care than the first. Unfortunately that one bit the carpet in a three-slinky pile up whilst slinky racing with my two cousins down the stairs at their house.

So there I was this christmas day, three sheets to the wind on Baileys, on my hands and knees at the top of the stairs trying to remember how to get the little blighter started. After a few false starts I managed to get it halfway down the stairs, while DBF stood at the bottom and sniggered. I few more failed attempts later machismo kicked in and he strode up the stairs making comments about women drivers.

After several more attempts, more sniggering from me and the deflation of his ego we came to the conclusion that stair treads are deeper front to back than they used to be when we were kids. I suppose we’ll just have to resort to building stairs out of video boxes, or dvd boxes, or maybe even Lego.