The Guide to Good Present Buying

One of my son’s mates has invited him to a birthday party next week and I have the perfect present already in mind – a 1kg block of cheese!

At $15 a kg that’s edible gold - and the minimum going rate for a present for a 10 year old - so either way he’s a winner. Now my only concern is do I get this kid Mild or Colby cause kids can be fussy with cheese. Man he’s going to have so much fun with it and if he’s smart he’ll make that block last a whole week, so long as he doesn’t whip up a quiche over the weekend or something. I get these little individually wrapped blocks of cheese with morning and afternoon teas here in hozzie and I for one am not eating them. No, I’m saving them for the day when cheese is like smokes in prison – a cold hard currency.

My mother was shit at present giving incidentally so I was determined that I would be an ace present giver when I grew up. I still have nightmares over the time she sent me to Kenny Wrigley’s 10th birthday party with a matching set of undies and a singlet wrapped up to resemble an Action Man. I didn’t know what was in the present so any initial thoughts I might of had of Kenny joining me in the Matching Grundy Club as the package was ripped open were quickly dispelled when a hushed silence fell upon the party at the sight of them. The membership of that particular club was to remain at one for some time I can tell you.

My shame was not confined to just the party either. The following Monday Kenny was called up at the full school assembly and asked what he got for his birthday. Whether he had a memory like an elephant is a moot point because he was hardly going to forget my gift in a hurry and neither was the school once he’d told them. Needless to say the list of birthday parties where my attendance was required was pretty small after that, I wonder why?

How long is it before people start giving flagons of gas as a present? I mean really. I don’t want to start being one of those bloggers that rolls out all these facts and figures that he’s pinched off someone else’s page because we all know that shit is boring to read and 47% of all percentages are made up. But bear with me just this one time:

Remember when the price of petrol was $1.68 a litre? The Government take on that was 50.54 cents, plus the GST on the retail price, a further 18.77 cents, all adding up to a total of 69.3 cents. 41% of that $1.68 went to Aunty Helen. But wait there’s more – let’s not forget that as wage earners you and I also pay 23 cents of every dollar we make so that meant back then we were effectively paying $1.08 for a litre of the devils semen.

What that equates to now with Lucifer’s jizz prices now around $2.12 a litre I don’t know. No really I don’t. I pinched those figures from an old car mag I was given to read. I tried working it out but math was never my forte at school. Art was though, particularly anatomical drawings. Why even today I can still draw a pretty good cock, as DG Macca can attest after having found the A3 rendition I left for him in his top draw one time whilst he was away on leave. It was a scale drawing too.

It’s a lot of wedge, whatever the figure is and not surprisingly the Government has a huge surplus stuffed under the mattress, but they’re not about to cut the levy on gas anytime soon so I’m picking that the top choice of pressie for Secret Santas this year will be $5 worth of gas – not that that is going to be a huge present the way the cost of oil is rising. As a result, death by accidental inflammation of Secret Santa pressies by intoxicated staff after the office Chrissie party will skyrocket. You don’t get a lot of that happening presently, because KY – the ultimate in Secret Santa pressies - is not flammable. A pack of nudie playing cards is, but thankfully everyone has grabbed and kept their favourite shaven haven by evenings end, thus nullifying the chance of an accidental incineration.

A matching set of y-fronts and singlet are flammable incidentally, but only when set alight by a 10 year old boy who was given them by somebody else’s mother.