An early Christmas present... (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

An early Christmas present...

4:31pm Friday 9th December 2005 in Sue Pycroft Column

I DON'T know about you, but I was not exactly gobsmacked to learn from Woolworths that boys tend to have almost twice as much money spent on them as girls at Christmas.

I suspect that's especially true of boys aged 51, and particularly those who began building themselves a dark room in 2003 and have been equipping it out of birthday and Christmas money ever since, but find the costs have spiralled out of control at a similar level to the Bath Spa project, though without the recourse to the courts.

I step over the huge plank of wood that has been lying in our hallway since October 23rd 2003, not that I'm counting, and go upstairs to knock on the dark room door.

From deep within comes the thud, thud of Led Zeppelin II, and a middle-aged man's voice whining "whole lotta love" a bar or two behind Robert Plant. I knock again.

"What?" shouts Plant's chorus.

"A parcel has arrived for you," I shout back.

"What? I can't hear you!" he shouts.

"Can I come in?" I try.

"What? Don't come in," he shouts, so I duly wait on the landing until there are a few clicks and pings from inside the room and the enlarger finishes enlarging or the developer develops. The door opens. I try not to look irritated.

"Another parcel has come," I tell my husband, pointing downstairs.

He does look irritated.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he says, rushing past in his excitement to see what eBay has thrown in our direction this week.

He carefully opens the parcel downstairs, looks pleased with it, and then lays the contents down carefully next to the plank.

I ask him what it is. He looks slightly perplexed that I could possibly not recognise what looks like just another pile of wood.

"It's a drying cabinet," he says and goes back to the darkroom.

He pokes his head back out of the door and looks a bit sheepish.

"It's my Christmas present."

The dark room is the closest thing to a tardis you could imagine. But even I, with all my tireless optimism and utter lack of spatial skills, can see that it is a tardis filled to capacity.

You couldn't get another beaker in there and still be able to draw breath, let alone instal a cabinet in it. I gently point this out, using only one or two swear words to a sentence.

He rolls his eyes until I've finished and then shrugs. "I'll fix it to the wall," he explains, throwing aside my suggestion that I've seen more spare room in a sardine can.

He closes the door carefully, and there's a bang from inside as a 1970s prog rock group collectively hits the floor, almost certainly knocked off the purpose-built wall-mounted shelf by my husband's elbow or shoulder.

"Damn," I hear him mutter, and this is followed by other four-letter words as he knocks something bigger over while presumably trying to pick up the CD player.

The phone rings, and it's my mum asking what we would like for Christmas.

I tell her I'd like some smellies. But not from Woolworth. And he's got pretty well everything he needs, really. Just send him a nice, empty gift box.

My mum asks if I've taken leave of my senses.

No, honestly, I tell her, sighing. He could really do with the space.