Highs and lows on the laughometer

Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents, by Robin Laurance

What might seem an obviously Christmassy book is Robin Laurance’s Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents (Quercus, £9.99); but it is mainly about birthday presents. One thing that it doesn’t include is a present I saw advertised in Los Angeles when I lived there in the 1980s: a silver dustbin studded with precious stones — ‘for the man who has everything and wants to throw some of it away’.

What the book does have is the things given by X to Y on every day of the year. An odd assortment of people was born on 1 January, including Idi Amin, E. M. Forster and J. Edgar Hoover ‘and a lot of number plates’. The number M1, first used on a 1903 Darracq, was sold at Bonham’s for a record £331,300.