Ah
aunties. Had one who cleaned out the duff presents cupboard one year and unloaded a lot of it onto my family. That year I got a Daffy Duck nightshirt (two sizes too small) and a shaving kit (I hadn't shaved in something like four years at this point); my sisters got leather key-fobs and, I'm almost certain, car air-fresheners. Another more distant relative once gave all three of us a copy each of the same cassette compilation of Scottish fairy-tales and nursery rhymes when the youngest of us would have been about twenty.

/edit - and let's not forget the sublime horrors of the almost right present. "Wong likes films/music/books," they say. "Let's get him a video/record/book for Xmas/his birthday, but completely fail to take into account the possibility that important qualitative distinctions might exist between different films, different books or different albums."

Which is how I came to own a surprisingly large collection of Alan Parker films, despite the fact I think he should be killed, eviscerated and then killed again just to be on the safe side; seven copies of the "Live Aid" single despite hating it with a vengeance; and - a fairly recent one - numerous copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, despite being an actual sub-editor, a profession which would seem to me at least to imply an above-average working knowledge of punctuation, grammar, etc.

And don't start me on 'things you could really do with, but in a form so sub-standard as to be useless' - duff blank CD-Rs, random photo paper that physically cannot be used with your printer... I've had to argue my old man out of buying me a £100 digital camera on many, many occasions.
(Wong Fei-Hung - now with added flickr.com (see profile), Thu 23 Sep 2004, 14:54, Reply)