Wrapping up the presents

Present-wrapping requires a range of skills ranging from brute force to the artistic talents of the married artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude and wrap items like the Pont Neuf Bridge in Paris.

The force comes into play as soon as you grasp one of those rolls of nice, shiny gift-wrap. Snip the tough polythene at the top and you'd think the rest would just part easily and waft away from the paper. Wrong. It is bonded to it like a laminated condom and rolling it off requires the skill of a hooker removing a too tight prophylactic from an over-stimulated male member. I am still tugging.

Next comes the really tricky part, which is how to fit a rectangular piece of paper round a non-rectangular object. Take a teddy-bear, for instance. We all know how soft and cuddly teddies are, but is paper soft and cuddly? Not a bit of it. Try and mould the paper round Teddy's legs and ears and that gold foil that appears so tough will rip, leaving you wrapping it around the bear's limbs like a First Aider on Lesson 1.

But teddies are easy compared to hard plastic objects with numerous projections, like a tank or, in the case of my sister's present, a kettle. A teddy can be swathed in layers of tissue paper first, to turn him into a more rounded and wrappable object. But a tank or a kettle? Forget it! Even if they come in a box, the corners will pierce the wrapping, forcing you to apply layers of Sellotape and ruin the prettiness of the parcel. As for the kettle, the spout stuck itself through the paper like the beak of a baby bird pecking its way out of its shell, so I ended up taping Kleenex round it and popping on a condom of extra gift wrap. I once tried to wrap a kite. Christo would not have been proud of me. Or perhaps they would, for my solution was to cut the paper into strips and wind it round and round in a curly-wurly of beheaded and generally dismembered robins and Santas. (Thinks: Christo and J-C wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin. Maybe they'd do us the favour of wrapping the Houses of Parliament - with the MPs inside.)

Mr Grumpy uses newspaper and binbags, an easy if not beautiful solution. The answer is probably to pay the extra £2.50 and get everything gift-wrapped in the store. Then you get it all home and suddenly realise you don't know what it is in each gorgeous parcel and, sadly, scissors in hand, you are forced to snip into each one and peep, and hope to disguise the tear with ribbon and the gift card.

So, if you get something from me that looks aged, ripped and mangled and as if it's been chewed up in and spat out from the steel jaws of the garbage truck, just think: they say pets and their owners often bear a resemblance to one another; maybe the same is true of presents, too.


FOOTNOTE
I nicked the pick from the website of www.the-green-apple.co.uk who specialise in recycled gift wrap. Now, there's a good idea! My daughter and I to and fro with some gold paper in which she wrapped the very first gift she ever gave me, three years ago. My mum and I did the same with a birthday card featuring a happy hedgehog. We used it for Christmas, too. She used to iron paper and re-use it but as I tear into parcels like a dog rooting for a bone, it's generally too tattered to be of use to wrap anything larger than a 50p coin. Or a £50 note, and the more of those, the merrier, please. Cheers!