Pleb and Celeb! Keira, Phil and the Waitrose Fantasy...

Foreword: I'd planned to tell you one last story about fate, destiny, Buffy and free will. However, fate itself intervened with this Waitrose advert about some pleb called Phil getting involved with Keira Knightley at Christmas and cooking her a pie to cement their love...

I believe it's called The Perfect Gift.

But of course it's fantasy. Nothing like that could ever happen in real life. It's impossible.

Impossible.

I got a present for someone in 2010, and I wrote this article for an autism magazine in 2011. I called it A Christmas Gift.

I'll let you guess who the girl was.

Glasgow. Winter 2010

As I’m both autistic and grumpy, it would be easy to fall into cliché and call Christmas a soulless masquerade of empty commerce, fake cheer and religious hypocrisy; and to say that, faced with tinsel, Santas, elves, a pile of cards I have to send to people I scarcely even know and who might be dead, I feel like taking a midnight plane to Vegas and staying in a sleazy motel for two weeks, listening to Dean Martin and drinking wine. At least Las Vegas knows it’s an empty soulless machine designed surgically to separate suckers from their money and leave them walking stoned down the Strip at three in the morning...

 But there’s always some little something which stops that rush to self-destruction (at least so far), and I guess for me there was the tale of the figurine I found for a girl, which called to me like a beautiful smile which entrances a child when first he beholds it.

 The story starts with this girl who always seemed to love getting presents and treats. She wasn’t a young girl, not ten or even twelve, but there was a part of her which seemed as shy and sweet as a child, easily hurt and so very pleased to find that someone cared.

 It was Glasgow, it was Christmas and it was wet. I wasn’t supposed to be empathic and I wasn’t supposed to care, but I did. I looked for a glass rose at first, but found the store which might have furnished such a treasure had closed long before. I’d walked for two hours and felt like calling it quits. The slush was trying to get between my toes and my socks were sodden. In no way was it a day you’d call fun, but I decided I’d go on a little longer.

So I slopped on for a while, and came to the gift section of a large department store.

Sometimes the right present will present itself to you, and such was the case when I saw the figurine in its glass case, standing there. Like a princess bathed in aspic, waiting for her knight to come.

I’d like to say I grabbed it without a moment’s hesitation, but the price of the princess was a king’s ransom and made me pause awhile.

But only a little while.

I remember the shop assistant who said, “it’s beautiful,” and I’m glad to say I got the figurine to that girl, though the tale of how I did so would take too long to tell. It’s on a shelf or a mantelpiece or a dresser now, in a house far away I shall never see. But I got the figurine to the girl, and that’s what Christmas means to me.