Chicks and gifts

View from the Pew
BY JAKE THACKRAY
I HAVE ALWAYS given my sons socks and underpants, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. There was one year when I gave them a bicycle each and another year when they got a car to share.
I always include an extra to make them laugh: a pink teddy, say, or a revolving owl. But when it comes to buying presents for the people I love
I am an infrastructure man. Socks and underpants and books. These things are dull and they do not get a very big "O000h! Lovely!"
How do you buy presents for people you are close to? Or even people you are far from? I recommend socks and underpants and reference books. The worst present I ever heard of was when a pal of mine, Desmond Macy, got a box of fluffy yellow chicks on Easter Sunday for his seven children. This was from a French aunty of his who was very sweet but bloody daft.
Mulloy is a Professor of philosophy in a city in the south of France. The very beautiful and very sensible
Madame Francine Molloy said that the sept enfants would like these little cheeping things for a while and then would tire of them when they and the chicks started growing up. Give them to a farmer friend, she said. Mulloy refused. He said he had moral responsibilities to the children, the aunty and the poultry. Down the Faculth de Philosophie they debated all this and even published a paper. For a while, Mulloy's Chickens ranked with Occam's Razor in the late night philosophical discussions. What do you do with presents that you do not want but feel you ought to keep? The pragmatists said chuck them in the bin. The post-deconstructionalists said give them to other people for their birthday and they can solve the problem. Mulloy
said, I'm going to keep these chickens. And he did.
Chez Molloy there is no garden so he brought them up in his attic. As they grew he gave them corn and water twice a day and swept up the droppings. He took them in his van to the jardin des Plants where they could walk around and scratch and go pawk pawk. They became very fond of Desmond. They thought he was their mother. By the midsummer they were fully grown and they were all cockerels. They strutted about in the attic and scratched and crowed. His children were bored with the birds but Desmond was loyal to the gift he had been given from his French aunty.
He believed, you see, that he had a duty. They went to daily Mass with him in the
back of his van, they went to the Philosophy Department when he was lecturing, they went to the beach at Cannes on the summer family holidays. They followed him everywhere, pawk, pawk! Toward the end of their lives, Mulloy, who has a huge conscience, let them perch on the back of the sofa and watch him watching television. But Francine, who is every bit as conscientious as her husband, is not that sort of a philosopher. She is a woman with a house to run and seven children.
So Madame Mulloy went up to the attic one evening and killed all the cockerels. Then she made a delicious chicken pie which she sent to the French aunty at Christmas as a present.
Presents. I have personally learned not to give my loved ones presents I think they ought to like just to make them like me. I am a socks and underpants man with maybe a reference book. t