On the matter of quite terrible gifts

I am not great at gift buying, a fact to which my wife will surely attest. She, on the other hand, always absolutely nails it which seems to further accentuate my inabilities. And whilst I have yet to plunge to the levels of service station flowers, socket sets or head torches I have a record of missing the mark on birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas’.

It is not a recent thing though. Only recently my mother reminded me of the time that I was given money by my dad to buy her something nice for Christmas. The story goes that I spend the majority of the money of books or comics and with what I had leftover bought her a lime green shower curtain.

Apparently she feigned some sort of appreciation as any good mother will do but thirty five years later she still recalls the event and retells the story without a great deal of mirth. She is just probably worried about what level of support she will get in her golden years from a child so wholly selfish and beastly.

When it comes to Mrs Michael, I admit that too often in the past have I resorted to the old staples of books, CD’s, jewellery etc so two years ago I figured I would try to make up for it and buy her something both practical, fabulous and unique at the same time.

Mindful of how regularly I am still regularly reminded of the time I bought her a number of vegetarian cook books I headed to Kick Starter to find her something no one else would have. For those not familiar Kick Starter is all about investing in the ideas of people and helping them bring something to market.

So after some browsing and thorough investigations I invested in YECUP, a picture of which you can see below. Given how much she enjoys a cup of tea, and how much of the winter she spends standing on the touch line of a rugby pitch in winter I figured it would be perfect.

So what is it I hear you ask? Well, the Yecup is a thermos cup that had a built in heating and cooling element so can warm or cool your beverage. How amazing is that! No? Yeah you see this is where it all started to go wrong because I said it was and she seemed wholly underwhelmed. It might have been because I insisted she needed to be careful to not get it wet because of the built in electrics and we live in the third wettest part of the UK. Maybe.

All hope wasn’t lost though and I informed her that not only would it keep here warm drinks warm it also had a port to enable her to charge her phone. She asked whether it needed a cable to do that and I explained yes of course. The idea of sheltering her mug from the rain whilst plugging it into her phone was, I admit, not a great selling point. Neither was the fact that it can be charged wirelessly which I thought was quite fabulous.

(You know, the more I write about this the more I realise just how shit I am at gifts.)

Buy now my hopes that there will be fabulous grateful birthday sex is fast waning so I decide to play my last card in the hope of recovering the situation but it turns out that she was less enamoured than I had expected by the idea of it also having an App that could be installed on her phone to allow her to control the temperature or change the colour of the build in LED lights.

Oh, I forgot but there was also the small matter of the item not actually being available due to delays in China so it arrived over a year late in the middle of the summer. Also turns out it is absolutely massive and quite thin so has a rather phallic feel to it. No one wants to be know as that woman who always looks like she’s eagerly guzzling latte from a big silver cock.

You know, thinking about it, this might be why, no matter how early I think about gifts for whichever special occasion it is, she always seems to have just ordered something from me and it’s always just what she wanted.

Still, I absolutely love it and I got a nice cup out of it in the end so happy days 😉