Sometimes the perfect present is a timely reminder that, even when it absolutely seems like it, all is not lost

I discovered the perfect Christmas present at work the other day after eating fish and chips too fast. I was wearing too many layers for the office, where heating is pumped from unusual angles bringing with it the smell of lasagne or sewer, and I was sweating. Partly, it was the layers, partly it was the meeting due in five minutes, which was about the future of our jobs, and I was in a rush to get a seat at our possible execution. By the sinks I removed a jumper and washed my hands, and joined my colleagues in a bright glass room. But, as the meeting began and my hands became fists, I realised something awful. I was missing a ring from my little finger. It was small and silver, in the shape of a tiny safety pin – I’d bought it 20 years ago on my first week at work and worn it every day since. Its loss struck me as ominous.

I am largely anti-Christmas present. I write this as a person who has helped compile numerous magazine gift guides, blithely sticking a cashmere sock beside, perhaps, organic sausages containing the Tibetan goat they were sheared from, beside a coffee table book about fonts, beside a hairclip in the shape of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and, for the dads, a rake. The guides have come to open up for me a crack of dissatisfaction that creaks wider with every caviar cookbook, every feminist earmuff. I write this as a person, too, for whom shopping has come to feel like a treacherous bloodsport, a person who once took shelter in the Greggs concession upstairs at Primark and had to drop a pin so friends could organise a welfare check.