Steve Canavan: Buying presents hardly sets my wheels spinning

Like most fathers around the nation, I have very little to do with buying Christmas presents for the children.

I vividly remember my dad being as surprised as me at the contents of whatever gift I opened as a small child, because he’d had absolutely no input into its purchase. He’d say things like, ‘a new computer? Why, that’s a nice present,’ before pausing, fixing my mother with an icy glare, and adding, ‘that must’ve cost A LOT’.

My mum did all the shopping and from what I can gather this appears to be the case in most relationships.

I don’t know why this happens, but it seems that whereas men have an in-built gift for watching television and sleeping, women have a natural talent for buying gifts and dusting.

Mrs Canavan, however, doesn’t seem put out by the situation. Indeed she seems to actively enjoy being in charge and gets a thrill out of trawling websites.

She’ll occasionally thrust her phone in my direction and say things like, ‘what do you think of this cardigan for Mary?’ and I, without taking my eyes off a rather interesting Guardian article about a guy from California who has entered the Guinness World Records book for having the longest tongue on the planet (10.10cm – he’s one of the few people around who wouldn’t require a spoon to get to the bottom of a yoghurt pot), will reply “oh, that’s lovely, it’ll really suit her”.

‘You’ve not even looked at it,’ Mrs Canavan will bark.

“I have,” I’ll protest. “I love that blue colour.”

‘It’s green,’ she’ll reply.

“Ah, yes,” I’ll say, looking at it for the first time and then, noting the price, add, “actually I’m not sure it’ll suit her. How about that one?” pointing to the cardigan next to it that is absolutely awful but costs 20 quid less.

Anyway, the other day Mrs Canavan phoned me at work to say she’d found a second-hand bike for Mary and asked if I could go and look at it after work.

At first I was a bit cheesed off and was about to chunner – but then realised it added another 50 minutes to my journey, which meant I wouldn’t be home until the kids were in bed, thus getting me out of doing bath-time and reading endless rhyming-couplet stories about various animals (‘Sammy the spider weaved his delicate web, but then fell from the tree and now he is dead’ … that kind of heart-warming stuff).

“Of course I’ll go and see the bike, darling,” I said, trying hard not to sound too keen. “So I just go and pick it up do I? Have you already paid?”

‘No,’ she replied. ‘You’re just going to look at it.’

“What do you mean?” I asked, confused.

She explained she wanted me to go round and look at the bike and check there was nothing wrong with it. She told me she had arranged to actually physically collect it just before Christmas.

“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You want me to go and look at a bike but not actually bring it back with me?”

‘Yes,’ she replied, sighing as if she were dealing with a particularly backward child.

“So, what am I looking at? Is it damaged?”

‘No, of course not,’ my wife half-shouted at me in exasperated fashion. ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. I’ve seen the pictures. They just want someone to go and look at it, so they can show you what good condition it’s in.’

Then before I could say anything more, she muttered something about Bargain Hunt starting – she’s finding working from home tough – and hung up.

And so it was that later that evening I left work and drove 20 minutes in the wrong direction to a rather posh housing estate, and – after a slight mishap where I knocked at the wrong door and asked a rather bemused elderly gentleman that I was here to look at his pink children’s bicycle (he had a Neighbourhood Watch sticker on his porch window and daresay that moments after our meeting, he was penning a group email to local residents warning them to look out for a middle-aged man knocking on doors claiming to be interested in children’s bikes) – located the house Mrs Canavan had instructed me to go to.

I knocked (I find it’s the best way to get someone inside to answer; you can try yodelling but it’s not as effective and can lead to arrest by law enforcement) and a youngish man answered.

‘Here about the bike?’ he asked cheerily.

I briefly considered replying, just to liven things up, ‘no I’m here on behalf of the British Hedgehog Society because a neighbour has reported you for clubbing a hedgehog to death last week with a small plank of wood’, but decided against it and confirmed the reason I was descending on a stranger’s house at 6.20pm on a Friday evening was indeed because of the bike.

He then reached behind him, picked up a bright pink child’s bike and thrust it in my direction.

What happened next is this. I stared at it – trying to give the pretence I was very good at inspecting things and perhaps did it for a living – felt the tyres (not sure why but I hoped it looked professional), and then squeezed the breaks while nodding my head solemnly.

After maybe 12 seconds of this, I said, ”yep, seems fine” and handed it him back.

We then had a pleasant chat and said our farewells.

It was a complete waste of time, but when I walked through my front door an hour later both children were sleeping soundly and I had the rest of the night to myself, so every cloud.