You have a point; an idiotic one, but a point.
My brother-in-law sent me two blister-packed toothbrushes and three pairs of blue nylon socks this year. He does all his Christmas shopping at a Wal-Mart somewhere in South Carolina. As November approaches, I think he just scoops things at random from the shelves into a Jiffy bag and posts them to England by surface mail. These are the only truly unguessable gifts I receive. A very small amount of exoticism clings to them, because they come from a different supermarket giant to the ones I know here.
He has led a complicated and troubled life and can be fantastically irritating, what with the merciless Christianity simmering underneath every utterance, but I find myself very drawn to him because he is a tireless searcher. Navy, marriages, the Unification Church, truck driving, school teaching. Last year, for some bogus-sounding reason or other, he was frying chickens at a place called Zaxby’s (where they call the salads Zalads, because “calling them salads would have been an understatement”) and now he is back selling cars again.
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All About Eve at the Duke Of York’s on the evening of the 24th. It was such a pleasure to sit in the dark, cackling with all the people who have no other home town to return to, or no inclination to go there. Then I made my mother update me on her enigmatic, uninventable neighbours. The compromised bigot is now suffering some sort of agoraphobia, and cannot be in any large building without a clear view of the exit at all times. She is despairing, because this rules out almost all her favourite haunts, such as M&S in Western Road. Also, she now goes to great lengths to avoid making left turns when out and about because it makes her “feel sick inside”. A new man has moved in on the top floor. He lives entirely by candlelight to save on his electricity bills and arranges his money on the kitchen table in permanent annotated piles - gas, TV licence, pub. She has her own names for all these people: Stormin' Norman, The Great Raymondo, Ron Moody, Luz Clarita. I keep expecting her to sit me down and tactfully break the news that she's signed a huge book deal or done an awful play for Radio 4.