I always find Christmas Day challenging in many respects but never more so than who will come up with the quirkiest present of the festive season and just what this says about you the recipient of yet one more example of China’s world domination. Normally my Mother wins hands down and I suspect her choices over the years will be replicated by mothers up and down the country desperate to avoid buying their sons slippers at least for a few more years to avoid endless comparisons across the generations . Thank God for the decline in home knitting over the years as at least there are no more baggy sweaters to endure walking around like a knitted tent.
As a child the offering one year of an Airfix WW2 fighter plane was simply adding to my already acknowledged technical inadequacies having already been proven useless at jigsaws. So I was about to demonstrate how equally ineffective I was at gluing together carefully numbered bits of grey plastic. I was equally crap at painting the thing as well and so sadly there was to be no maiden flight here and it stayed rooted in its box for days as my confusion over what seemed to be an encyclopedia of instructions grew and grew. There would have to be better ways of earning a future living than anything constructive but at least I got a trip out of the glue and paint set eventually having to be prised from my bedroom still high on Boxing Day.
Its been a few years now since a classic offering I thought would never be beaten that being my Mother’s choice one year of a giant furry ice-scraping glove, a kind of Muppet with fangs. I admit it had its practical side but it was a touch unfortunate that the company car had a heated front screen at the time and global warming was just taking off. Imagine being stopped by the cops and having the car searched only for them to find a furry glove with a sharp plastic weapon attached? Explain that one sat in a cell as you wish she had plumped for the M&S slippers instead.
This year however my Dad hit the heights although I suspect the lack of wrapping paper indicated that Christmas Day had caught him out and he needed to offer a quick response for the mandatory slippers he had just unwrapped gallantly claiming these were “just what he had always wanted” thereby ignoring the fact that they were his 23rd consecutive pair. And so I am now in the proud possession of a nesting box – not for me unless I became a tit – but for the birds. I now have to climb a ladder to screw this to the tree to enable nesting and breeding in my back garden. It struck me that as the old man had given up on any nesting in the house he thought the garden should not suffer as well.
So, at the risk of breaking my neck soon I will be up that tree fixing up what will doubtless be a cacophony of mating induced tweeting guaranteed to get Billy from next door out with his air rifle. From the tit inside the house an advance warm welcome for the tits about to become my new soul mates. With the deckchair already perched in the greenhouse it promises to be a summer of tit watching…oh happy days.
Bill Oddie
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