This year I don’t mind what gift you buy me, as long as it’s not bought from THEM

“Oh don’t get me anything,” my Dad used to say in his gentle manner in the run-up to every Christmas.

You always knew he didn’t really mean it. But what did he mean? When I was a child, I imagined it was one of those adult-to-child euphemisms for “Please go away, I’m busy”, and so I’d buy him a book.

When I became a teenager, I knew better: it was his kindly way of saying he didn’t want to burden my meagre juvenile expenses. So I’d buy him a book.

After I left home and began to perceive reality in a different way, I wondered if “Oh don’t get me anything” actually meant that he didn’t want me to get him anything. So that year I didn’t. Unfortunately, by unfortunate coincidence, the rest of the family independently came to the same conclusion and didn’t get him anything either.

In the New Year, I bought him a book.

If you’re wondering, I want wine and chocolates. Like my Dad, I tell this to everyone. “That’s crazy,” friends wail at me, “what if everyone buys you the same thing?” Then I’ll end up with a lot of wine and chocolates. I fail to see how this could possibly be a problem.

Just don’t get me any bloody Lego.

Lego, according to a RoosterMoney survey, is back big-time. Overhyped Christmas tat has come and gone over the years – Furbys, slinkys, onesies, Tamagotchis, clackers, battling robots, cabbage patch dolls and big mouth Billy Basses – but this year kids have rediscovered Danish plastic bricks.

This is a good thing, of course. It’s just that I’m not really interested on account of the fact that I’m not a 6 year old. Besides, even if someone did buy me the Lego Mos Eisley Cantina, I’d have nowhere to put it, what with every inch of storage space in my home already reserved for wine and chocolates.

If kids can’t get Lego, says RoosterMoney, they’ll make do with the new PlayStation or new Xbox. And of course there are differences in the top-ten wishlists between male small persons and female small persons. Bafflingly, girls are asking for ‘holiday money’. Given that a holiday in 2020-21 means walking to the front gate and back, what on Earth do you think they’ll be spending that money on?

At least money is a sensible choice, alongside such things as ‘clothes’, ‘books and magazines’ and ‘a bike’ in the girls’ top-ten. On the boys’ list at number 9 is ‘Pokémon’, which makes me wonder whether someone should point out to boys that Pokémons are not real. They may as well wish for a unicorn, an invisibility cloak or a Bitcoin.

Personally, I’m holding on to the hope that I will not find myself unwrapping an unbranded portable power bank and be forced to wrench my face into a rictus smile of faux gratitude. I have no wish to add to the European lithium battery mountain. I’ve received one of these power banks every Christmas for a decade and the only one not fit for the bin after three uses was the Anker I purchased for myself. I’ll be honest, I have given a fair few of these away too – typically the ones I received the previous Christmas. One family Yuletide, we all managed to gift a portable power bank to each other. Awks.

Besides, shabbily manufactured lithium-ion batteries are dangerous. Use a cheap one with the wrong cable or device and you risk triggering a fire or even a tiny explosion. While this isn’t too different from what I achieved with the Junior Chemistry Set one of my brothers got on Christmas Day in 1970, I have found that home-ownership tends to change one’s attitude towards domestic pyrotechnics.

I note that the increasing popularity of electric cars has forced researchers into rethinking battery technology for power storage, and as a byproduct one group at Stanford University has come up with a way of reducing the flammability of lithium-ion pouch batteries. They do this by embedding fire retardant in a polymer layer. Should the battery experience combustion issues – even holding a naked flame underneath the battery – the current collector instantly releases the fire retardant to douse the fire.

When they bring this tech to market, I hope its first customer will be Amazon. I hear it has been having problems with its Ring Wi-Fi enabled video doorbell, which doesn’t so much go bzzzzzz as kaboom if you use the wrong installation screws. There has been talk of customers experiencing “minor burns”, although why doorbells should have anything to do with parrots that recite Scottish poetry is beyond me.*

Until flame-retardant batteries are available, Amazon could have a go at marketing its exploding Ring (ouch) as a built-in safety feature.

Ding-dong!

– Hello, can I help you?

– Yes. Your front door’s on fire.

Here in France, the likelihood of community minded consumers buying Rings for their neighbours this Christmas has been seriously dampened because of our bolshy attitude to Amazon and its owner Bezos. Nobody here likes the slapheaded Covid King, and the shunning of the dick-piccing billionaire goes all the way to top levels of government.

During the first lockdown in April, the courts went to far as to shut down Amazon France for a week while it investigated whistleblower claims of unhygienic, non-distanced working conditions in its warehouses. Judges only allowed operations to restart on the condition that they could piss Amazon off by insisting it sold only items deemed to be essential.

With the second lockdown shutting everything except supermarkets leading into Christmas, the public has already had enough of the grating noise caused by Amazon rubbing its metaphoric hands with glee. An open letter was published in the France media with 120 signatories from trade unions, Greenpeace, various NGOs, MPs, senators, mayors, editors, bookshop owners and other influential figures. It was entitled: “Stop Amazon before it’s too late.”

Yeah, right. A letter. Gosh, I bet Jeff’s quaking in his reindeer socks.

Except… the French government is playing mischief with Amazon by setting up an online resource to provide all the nation’s small shops and restaurants with tools to establish their own ecommerce sites quickly and to rally independent delivery services. A nationwide publicity campaign is under way to get everyone to sign up, and all these services and tools are being offered on a free trial basis which, funnily enough, takes us through Christmas and the New Year.

I look forward to seeing the famously tax-shy Amazon try to plead to the courts about unfair government-subsidised competition.

Me, I’d like a book this Christmas, please. You know where not to buy it.

ALISTAIR DABBS is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He hopes that any home delivery drivers servicing these small-time ecommerce pop-ups will be better than Amazon’s courier deadheads at locating his address. You can’t miss it: the front door is on fire. More from me in Something for the Weekend, Sir? every Friday at The Register.

*boom booom tish