Er, Thanks Very Much

Certain presents are fated just to Do The Rounds, their life spent being wrapped, unwrapped, witness to a false smile, shoved in a drawer, grabbed at in desperation, re-wrapped, off-loaded. Phew.

I’m talking here of:
jewellery rolls (we all have several, the churl advises: we don’t need another, be they everso beautiful)
scented candles in whacky flavours
ditto soaps reeking fit to freak the kiddies
amusing socks in a fridge-shaped tin
necklaces – have none of my friends noticed I’m blighted by a metal allergy?

(However, let it be said that bizarre items – flat, light, soft – therefore with the tempting property of being easy to post are excused. They fall foul of no rule, needing zilch further function beyond the practical.)

It’s the receiving of odd presents which truly exposes the inner ingrate lurking within my otherwise fully-rounded Friend To All persona. In fact, it runs around naked, screaming and also means that I have a drawerful of weirdo objects, where candles jostle with necklaces, the lot rubbing shoulders with earrings I can’t wear and all smelling of mango.
And come my birthday, with a sullen flick of the wrist and spoilt toss of my curls, I chuck a whole shed load more in, ready to be handed on down the line to someone else as and when. Naturally, I gush charmingly, fling my arms round necks and am smiley in thanks. What do you think I am? Horrid? No, merely 2-faced.
Go on … we all do it.

And the same applies to boxes of chocolate brought by friends over to supper. Just the one box gets eaten that night so you are left with two or three more which, not being blessed with a particularly active chocolate gene (although I can do swift and permanent damage to a bag of decent fudge), it seems odd to sit on the sofas of a Tuesday, say, and eat à deux. Or maybe I presume. You might be a truly professional porker.

But these swishy boxes do need company, to be among flushed faces, and to be passed around, peered into without much in the way of hope, and plucked from dutifully.

Recently, an extremely odd box of chocolates made its way into the house. I was able, with the cunning waste of half an hour, to work out which of my friends had left it and she is not a natural purchaser of such stuff. Her face is quite well-scrubbed and her demeanour no-nonsense. My suspicions were raised, moreover, by it not having been handed over with any sense of obvious transference of ownership, no fanfare which, given that it was well within the sell-by date, and flash-looking, would seem that something was afoot.
Being a past master, I was quick to spot the Passing On of a Dud at play.

It was a silvery box possibly hailing from France, by one Anthony Berg, containing individually wrapped discs of dark chocolate. Encouraging a brief surge of hope, was the word “marzipan,” a beacon in an otherwise confusing explanation, but also was there the phrase Muscat grape jelly: hmmm, bad, surely? Jelly?? Not unlike tea-flavoured chocolate, or carrot and radish chocolate. Quite the wrong meeting of parts. I shuddered. Greed squashed by reality.

My heart felt heavy about these chocolates. They were clearly deeply disgusting but there again pretty expensive going by the flourishy writing. Having an empty little life, this is the sort of thing I fret about. The snob in me suffered a swift fisticuffs courtesy of the parsimonious in me.
I was ashamed of them.
And mean.
They had to be eaten.
They had to go.
Dinner party on Saturday.
Feck it. Perfect.

So we turned up, the basket bulging with Mr Berg’s creation, 2 bottles of wine (one decent and showily presented, one a dodgy Chardonnay on serious off-load), and a present for one of our number. Ahem, being temporarily shy a jewellery roll I was proffering the third book in a 3-4-2 when a book is bought not with wisdom but the desire to cash in on an offer. It was wrapped truly beautifully.

Chatting with the magician’s art of feint and bluff, I slid our bottles onto the table, and the box of chocs, which were immediately noticed.
“Top chocs, Milla,” S boomed with pantomime conviction.
“Oh, well, not sure what they’re like, probably disgusting,” I muttered, embarrassed, but sufficiently sussed to prepare the ground for later disappointment and disassociation.

The evening passed in the predictable blur of jollity and alcohol until coffee time when S bustled back, spoiling things by waving a familiar box in the air, the silver flashing ostentatiously amid candle light.
Fiddlesticks. Bastard things stalking me.

“Thanks, Milla, darling!” she cooed at maximum volume.
Cow.
Did the room hush? I fear it might have done.
Really, she must have had these before AND hates me, I thought, hunched like my avatar, and cringing while still alive to a certain flicker of relief that at least the chocs had reached the end of their road. No more busy drawer work for them, I was shot of the brutes.

Paws dipped into the box, there was bemused and noisy merriment at the pantypad/ladywipe nature of the individual wrapping, drawing more and more unnecessary attention to the chocolates. And then there was endless chomping. I frowned. The script was deviating. Fearful of missing out, I took one too and popped it in my pocket, sat on it all the way home and encountered it next morning, cracked and crumpled.
I slid it in my mouth.
And really rather delicious it was.
I sensed an immediate involuntary gnashing of the teeth at my failure to take full credit for these beauteous beasts, kings of chocolate, and a greater rage at not having snarfed several more the night before.

My only worry is now that I will have to reassess, on a serious basis, jewellery rolls, soaps and strange necklaces.