ego.istic.org

Once again, the horse chestnuts start making the roads hazardous. The winds come in. I start putting my bike lights on to go out of an evening. I start removing the piles of books from atop my storage heater. foyle.aut.istic.org starts running below body temperature and I consider overclocking it more. The evenings smell of bonfire night.

But as I pass the Milton Arms on the way to work in the morning, a sign outside urges me to book early. It can't be the only such sign, for the day after it goes up, Mum asks me what I would like for Christmas.

A vacancy of ideas swallows me whole. Modern Britain is affluent. I live well within my means, so within reason, to want is to have. Anything outside my means is also beyond the limits of Christmas present spending. I wouldn't say no to a nice house in Cambridge, or to a second LaCie monitor, but I would be somewhat surprised to be offered either of those things, so I'll just keep saving up for them, and in a few years, they'll be among the things I can buy without worrying about the cost.

The “to want is to have” guide does have some exceptions. I maintain that the best present is something you don't realise you want: something it wouldn't occur to you to buy for yourself. For givers, though, it's hard to tell the difference between such a present and a present you don't want at all, so this course of action is pretty risky. Like many, Mum prefers to avoid having to guess.

The other exception I can think of is that buying something is just too much effort, in one of two ways. I would like another bookcase, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say I need another bookcase. Bookcases are quite cheap: I'd be satisfied with a flat-packed unit from Staples or Ikea. But as I don't drive, buying a bookcase means not only measuring the available space and finding a suitable case to fit in it, but also getting it delivered here, which in turn means taking a day off work or trying to find somewhere that delivers on Saturdays. This is not an insurmountable problem, but I just can't raise the activation energy. It would be a great Christmas present for me to just arrive home one day and find a new bookcase in the corner, waiting to be piled high with the artefacts of knowledge, but in reality I'd still have to get it here.

I also would like a high-end sound-card. Even the most expensive ones are reasonably priced now, and I've been thinking about getting one for ages. What's put me off buying is manufacturers' poor support for Linux. Even though many manufacturers are now supplying Linux drivers, and ever more hardware has third-party drivers available, retailers and manufacturers still don't supply definitive information on what is supported. Often all the information I can find is that a driver exists that is known to maybe work with a particular chipset, but there is no master list that maps chipsets to drivers, or even model names/numbers to chipsets. I don't want to spend, say, £100 on a piece of hardware unless I know it is going to work. So I don't, and the manufacturers lose a sale. Maybe I could work out a safe bet by iterating over all sound cards and checking all drivers for support for that card, but that's way too high an activation energy. My parents are not compscis, electronic engineers, mathematicians, or even advanced hobbyists, so to get them to buy me hardware, I would have to give exact details, and probably tell them where to buy it from too, so no help there.

By now, at least one of you is thinking that this is a symptom of the materialism of the modern age: I have so many things that all I can think about is getting more things. You may even go on to suggest that in this case a good present would be a family day out, or a photograph, or something hand-made. If you were thinking this, own up by posting a comment, because you have it the wrong way about. I'm pretty close to my family, even though I now live nearly 200mi from them. If I'm looking forward to getting my Christmas present, it's not because of the present itself, but because I'll be receiving it, and giving others in turn, in person. A family day out would not be a good present, not because it would not be feasible, but because it would not be special. I anticipate that this as every Christmas we will freeze our sit-upons off walking around Delamere. You might even say it's gone too far the other way: presents being a token of our love for each other, choosing the right thing to give becomes a very serious matter, no festival of frivolity.

As for materialism, I'm sure nobody who has seen das Sonnensystem would think to accuse me of that. There's nothing in here that isn't here for a reason, either from practicality or because it means something about me. This is true of even the pictures on the walls and the ornaments: the framed Excalibur chip I worked on in an internship at the end of my second undergrad year, the Sheila attack penguin I bought on a family holiday in St. Malo, the elaborate tea-making apparatus in the kitchen. The only purely ornamental thing I can think of is Ethelred, my dragon-tree plant. (I call it Ethelred because ⒜ it is a handsome name, and ⒝ it is shorter than “that plant in the corner.”) Ethelred was a present from Mum for Christmas '04 or '05, and she bought it for £little from Tesco because I hinted broadly (that being the only effective way to hint at Mum) that I would like a house plant.

But this reminder of the past only brings us back to our starting point, of Christmas '07. I am confident that I will effectively use the available time to come up with unexpected gift ideas for everyone else, but not for me. Mum says she is nostalgic for when she could fob us off with a trip to town to see the lights and the nativity, a visit to Santa's grotto, and a few trinkets from the 50p shop, and reciprocally, I remember when I would be pleased with myself for giving her a Chocolate Orange. These days the trip to town involves a vague grunt in the direction of the lights and a sharp turn towards the electronics shops, also taking in some clothes shopping. (No matter how well we get on, three boys and their parents shopping for clothes together is not compatible with peace on Earth and goodwill to men.)

Children never grow up; they just get harder to impress.