Bevis Hillier

Highs and lows on the laughometer

Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents, by Robin Laurance

Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents, by Robin Laurance

What might seem an obviously Christmassy book is Robin Laurance’s Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents (Quercus, £9.99); but it is mainly about birthday presents. One thing that it doesn’t include is a present I saw advertised in Los Angeles when I lived there in the 1980s: a silver dustbin studded with precious stones — ‘for the man who has everything and wants to throw some of it away’.

What the book does have is the things given by X to Y on every day of the year. An odd assortment of people was born on 1 January, including Idi Amin, E. M. Forster and J. Edgar Hoover ‘and a lot of number plates’. The number M1, first used on a 1903 Darracq, was sold at Bonham’s for a record £331,300. The bidder remains anonymous, but he told the auctioneers he had bought the number as a birthday present for his son, aged six.

The photographer, David Bailey, was born on 2 January. Guess what his wife, Catherine, gives him for his birthday to compensate for his gift-starved childhood. Fossilised dinosaur eggs. As the author comments, ‘not just any old eggs’. Free-range Fabergé for me, thank you.

Willhelm Pieck, a founder-member of the Communist Party of Germany and president of East Germany from 1949 to 1960, was born on 3 January 1876. During his exile in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Comrade Pieck received some fancy presentation ballbearings from the First State Ballbearing Works. A just reward, one feels.

I looked up my own birthday, 28 March (it is also that of Sir Michael Parkinson and the deputy literary editor of this magazine, Clare Asquith). I knew we shared our day with Neil Kinnock, born on the day the British sensationally raided Saint-Nazaire and I became two.

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