I've just gotta get myself some children …
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I had a pretty good haul of presents this year, probably my best for some time and almost entirely due to Tracy. My swag bag included …
- The Producers Special Edition
- The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Special Edition - including several lost scenes redubbed by Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach and a Lee Van Cleef impersonator in the 1990s. The deleted scenes are all rubbish but we fans always want more, even if it detracts from the overall quality of the film
- A 600 page book of the best pictures from Life magazine; including some awesome work from the days of Martin Luther King, The Great Depression and The Second World War. Lots of expressive faces of people undergoing real tribulation or doing real things with their lives, all in artistic black and white. Marvellous.
- A tea diffuser
- A bottle of Campari to help me with creative dreams
- An ashtray
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My mother was also in cracking form and was blatantly regifting left and right without the slightest sign of remorse. At one point she handed me a wrapped copy of Apocalypse Now Redux. I opened it and she asked me if I liked my present. I said yes, it was one of my favourite films. She smiled approvingly and said she thought as much. Smelling a rat, I asked her to name any one of my other favourite films, at which point she clammed up. Looking her in the eye, I asked her if she had really bought that DVD with me in mind. She looked back at me squarely and said yes, yes she did.
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She was, of course, lying through her teeth.
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Myself, Tracy, my brother and my sister in law puzzled the night away trying to figure out how a conservative 62 year old woman, who hadn’t been to a cinema since 1963 and never visited a record shop in her life, had come into possession of a still-wrapped, collector's edition DVD of a psychedelic war film. We are still unsure.
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My mother is a good person but the ruthlessness she displays at Christmas would have embarrassed Genghis Khan. In addition to the merciless regifting, she was frantically gathering fragments of discarded Christmas crackers and present wrapping. Somewhere in London she's operating a Christmas present chop-shop, staffed by a team of wetback Mexican mechanics. Right now they're stripping down and modifying this year's presents to such an extent that she'll be able to return them to the people who gave them to her originally without them ever suspecting a thing.
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Anyway, I've got to get myself some kids. They get such interesting presents.
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My brother is 34 and, like me, managed to hack his way into his thirties without assuming any real responsibility whatsoever. Then it all came crashing down. First he got married. The came the baby. As a consequence, he's going the way of all fathers and rapidly losing touch with popular culture. This time next year he'll be wearing a cardigan, dancing like Elaine from Seinfeld and listening to Perry Como LPs.
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How do I know David's losing touch with popular culture? Well, him coming home with a DVD copy of 'Finding Nemo 2' for starters.
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The Chinese have pretty much cornered the pirate DVD market in the UK. When they're not selling them directly, they're supplying them wholesale to other people who do. Product quality is good and surprisingly consistent, as is the price; £5 per DVD.
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However, even though the DVDs are of a pretty high standard, you do not always get quite what you bargained for. So, even though there actually is no sequel to Finding Nemo, my brother found himself buying one as a family treat from a Chinese person for £5. Technically he hasn't really been ripped off though. It's not as if he can say it isn’t a DVD of the real Finding Nemo 2 is it?
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So there I was with my 15 month year old niece on Christmas day watching a Japanese made cartoon about the adventures of a group of fish friends dubbed into Mandarin. My niece loved it.
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But that wasn't the only jealously-inducing present my little niece received this year. She also got a copy of The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business …
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