I have a relative who is famous – OK, infamous – for their terrible gift-giving. Now, I don’t think that being poor at presents discounts you from being considered a generous, kind, altruistic person. There are many people in this world, I’m sure, who make good meals, listen sympathetically and remember important dates, but when confronted with a range of gifts will scream, fill their knickers and dive headfirst into a skip, only to emerge two hours later with the collected chunks of your present that year. I’m almost certainly one of them. That doesn’t make us bad people. It just makes us a somewhat spicy addition to any big day.
One rather memorable Christmas, when I was a large and rather lumpy 10-year-old, this relative gave me a pair of white woollen tights in a size XS. They barely reached my knees. So what, I hear you say. And exactly. So what? Kids grow so fast these days. White is a very flattering and easy-to-wear colour. It’s actually quite nice to look as if you’ve wrapped both legs in a set of poorly fitting bandages and just needed somewhere in the middle to store your bricks. A low-hanging, white woollen gusset that almost cuts off the blood supply to your thighs is a nice present and a nice thought.
Don’t let me give the impression of meanness. That wasn’t my only present that year. I was also lucky enough to receive a paperback copy of The Jungle Book with “Sketchley” written across the cover. Because I think it’s actually very nice to know that your Christmas has in some small way helped another person achieve their dry cleaning.
And did they stop at two presents? Not on your Nelly. The pièce de résistance, the candle on my stollen, was a large sample jar (they had, I believe, once worked at a hospital) decorated with pictures of sunflowers, done in glass paint. Yum yum yum yum yum.
That same year, my mother received something called a potato jar – a jar specifically for storing potatoes. I haven’t seen many since, and that is truly my loss, because this little fella was fairly large, made of terracotta and had a face like a gargoyle on one side. If anything, it made me like potatoes even more.
As unlikely as it seems, a year or two later my parents bettered this selection. I woke up on Christmas morning at my grandmother’s house and found the end of a long rope on my bed. I had read enough Greek myths not to just sit on my arse and coil this thing up neatly for another day. This was a quest. And so I followed the rope – all the way along the landing, down the stairs, through the downstairs hallway, past the dog bowls and coat hooks, to the back yard. And there I saw it: a two-tone purple bike. They’d taken the whole thing apart and spray-painted it themselves. Pale violet merging into aubergine. I was absolutely delighted. At the time – I must have been about 11 or 12 – I had a secondhand faux fur white coat and a pair of purple DMs. Riding around town on that thing I must have looked like a moon-faced caucasian female Prince lookalike for the niche under-16s market. But, my God, I felt cool.
I have had many much-loved bikes ever since. Like lovers, homes and jobs, they have characterised certain periods of my life. There was the green drop-handled Raleigh that my ex’s dad found while working on someone’s garage. It was designed for a 6ft 3in man and I rode it for years. I rode it to Hastings, despite the derailleur essentially eating itself halfway up a hill covered in Ukip posters. Then there was a sleek racing bike I nicknamed Eric the Red and that saw more action between my thighs during my early 30s than any man. I was riding Eric the Red the day I smashed through the windscreen of an undercover police car – but that is a story for another day. Today, I am riding a black 1970s Raleigh – with a basket and baby seat – that my boyfriend (now my husband) built me as a wedding present. But that two-tone purple Christmas bike, the one that arrived in my life in the perfect way at the perfect moment, was unforgettable.
As I confront the thankless task of trying to find something to give my five-year-old this Christmas, I’m tempted to take inspiration from my forefathers. That’s right: a two-tone potato storage unit, decorated with hospital-grade glass paint and stuffed with a pair of XS white cycling shorts. He’ll love it.
