Is £100 pounds a lot of money? It’s more than I’d bet on a dead cert: you’d really mind if you dropped £100. It’s probably more than you’d slip a favourite godson before he snivels back to school, or the head waiter for getting you a better table. A hundred pounds is more than pocket change. It’s more than an impulse. It’s a ton. A milestone.

If your telephone bill came in under a hundred, you’d be pleased. If your tax is under a hundred, you’re in the wrong job. To make £100 in tips, you need to serve eight tables of two spending £50 each. And I reckon that if I bought someone a present that cost £100, they should be grateful. Very grateful. I imagine a £100 demarcation line through festive gift-giving: up to £100 is everyone you’re not related to, or people you are related to but don’t like, or who always give you soap, and more than £100 is love and propinquity.

But here’s the weird dichotomy of the gifted and the gifting. I’m perfectly happy to give gifts under £100, but I don’t want to receive anything under £100. There is nothing I will wear for less than a C, given that I don’t think socks or underpants are suitable as presents. (By the way, never, ever give a man a tie, unless you’ve made it perfectly clear that you expect him to tie the other end to the bannister and jump.)

So, though I will be grateful for the thought implied by the book, the scented candle, the box of violet creams, and I will thank you warmly and honestly for bothering to pass them on, the truth is I don’t want them. And, at the earliest possible opportunity, they’re going to the daily.

I’ve spent the past week trying to think of things that I would like for under £100, and it’s really difficult. I’d quite like a cap made from a good tweed, size 7½

The Wire. I’d like a hedgehog. I’d like a German vegetable knife. Not for German vegetables, but to turn Germans into vegetables. You can tell I’m struggling here. I’m a man and I’m middle-aged. And those two simple facts make present giving and receiving a terrible early warning of dementia. If I’m asked what I want for Christmas, I go blank and dribble. I have most of the things I’ll ever want and I’m hideously picky about adding to the old curiosity shop that are my goods and chattels. I do like dead things in boxes and skulls, particularly birds.

But worse than thinking about myself — actually, far, far worse than thinking about myself — is thinking about you, and trying to imagine your little stocking of desires. What on earth do you want? A bottle of gin? An electric blanket? A German vegetable knife? My mother, now in her seventies, says she wants an exercise bike. She says there was one for under £100 in Argos. I’ll get her that. I like the enthusiasm and the hope — better than another cashmere scarf. Where are you cycling to, Mother? Eighty, I hope.

Here, I give up and say what we all should do is give £100 to charity. Buy a goat for an Ethiopian. Buy an Ethiopian for a Nigerian. Buy 20 pairs of spectacles for a Bengali. Buy a life jacket for a Maldivian. However, nothing is quite as grittedly infuriating, and murderous of the spirit of charity, as opening a card that smugly informs you that a donation has already been made in your name to buy condoms for Bolivians instead of a gift.

I know what I’m going to give this year: £100 worth of honey. Sweetness for sour times. It’s been a horrible year for apiarists. Far worse than bankers. Beekeepers around the world have found themselves as undertakers to a black death of drones. Bees are dying by their millions from a mysterious illness. How much worse than that is losing mere money? So I shall give the brilliance and symbiotic magic, the sweetness and skill of a hive. A hundred pounds of honey is a gift of renewal, the pollination of the future, a spoonful of funny hope and resurrection.

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