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So I got up and walked across the departure lounge to a shop called Ferret, which sells duty-free watches, and I put my watch on the counter, and the Ferretwoman did one of those
eye-rolling-mouth-pursing-tongue-clicking shrugs which the French learn in the womb and said that my watch was up the Swanee, albeit in French. Then, for hers is a race ever on the
qui
vive
to help the afflicted, she offered to sell me a Rolex, an Omega, a Longines, or other fine item much sought after by people wishing to have their forearms chopped off while waiting to
cross a Harlesden zebra, but eventually settled (slightly grudgingly, I sensed) for the cheapest of her stock, a black plastic Swatch hardly larger than a dinner-plate; so I gave her 40 euros, and
hurried back to show it to Mrs Coren, who I’m sure might have brought herself to look up from her Trollope, had my happy cries been audible above the din. For Nice, as I would learn to my
cost, is a very noisy airport indeed.

That cost presented itself, an hour later, at 30,000 feet, the height at which the plane, having depowered to cruising mode, went quiet. And Mrs Coren went pale. ‘Something’s
ticking,’ she said. I cocked an ear. She wasn’t wrong. Somehow, something with an almighty rhythmic clunk had succeeded in getting itself aboard the plane, with the object of blowing us
out of it. It was only as I reached up with my trembling left hand to press the steward’s button that I clocked what it was. I had bought a watch which mice would want to run up; if it had a
chime (I had owned it for only half-an-hour, and didn’t know what else might sit in the huge Swatch works beneath the plate), 80 passengers would turn round, expecting
News At
Ten
.

I didn’t get much sleep last night. Though I put the watch on a far table, not only did its tick rattle the windows, but its luminous hands so set the wallpaper aglow as to leave me lying
there thinking that if Saddam were to start building watches like this, Clare Short would volunteer for Tornado duty. Do you blame me for keeping it under a cushion under a sweater?

O
H
, come on, for pity’s sake: pity the Prince of Wales, it is the least you can do: not only do you know that the
public enquiry into the whereabouts of all the gifts presented to him over the years could not have come at a worse time, you know he knows it, too, because he has a snazzy monogrammed Rolex with
the date on it. Indeed, he has a dozen of them, somewhere, each snazzier than the last – though not, perhaps, as snazzy as the two hundred he used to have, before they all went walkabout
– so it can hardly have escaped him that there remain very few shopping days to Christmas. We should therefore not be at all surprised if, even as he crawls around on all fours this morning,
he finds himelf muttering, like an earlier melancholy prince, ‘The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!’

The all fours, of course, are not strictly speaking his. He does not crawl around on his own all fours, any more than he squirts his own toothpaste onto his own toothbrush or holds his own
jam-jar for his own widdle; he has people who crawl around for him on their all fours. There will be several of them up in the royal loft right now, crawling fit to bust, seeking the bits and bobs
that, with any luck, might have fallen behind the tanks or between the joists, groping under this and that, getting filthy, getting splinters, while he stands in the middle with his enormous
hand-tooled gilt-edged crested clipboard, ticking things off. The first thing he ticked off, by the way, was the clipboard. It was a present from the Akond of Swat. Fortunately, it was for his
birthday, only last Thursday; that is why he has still got it.

He has not, as the harrowing cries from the four far corners of the huge loft keep informing him, got much else. He has, for example, just discovered that he has no longer got either the
life-size clockwork moose presented to him by the Saskatchewan Rotary Club to celebrate his first tooth, or the solid gold cricket bat given to him by the Sultan of Brunei on the occasion of his
woodwork O-level. Coming, as these two grievous buffets did, hard upon the news that his graduation ermine duvet and matching bathmat from US Ambassador Annenberg was no less missing than the
266-piece Limoges mah jong set gifted by Emperor Bokassu for Chanukkah 1983, they have not surprisingly cast the stricken heir into even glummer depths.

The fact that the Keeper of the Loose Floorboard now lopes across the loft to inform the Prince that the return on three of these items was £768.20, less 40 per cent commission to the
Highgrove window-cleaner, is scant consolation; especially as, pressed sotto voce, Floorboard is compelled to inform the Prince that the fourth, unsold, item is currently in the possession of a
former Miss South Uzeira, whom Prince Andrew once invited up to the loft to inspect his etchings: determined not to leave empty-handed after terminally holing her sateen basque on the outstretched
finger of an alabaster cherub presented to the Duke of Edinburgh by the 2 Para sergeants’ mess, she might well turn nasty, murmurs Floorboard, should Sir Michael Peat apply for a warrant to
search her dressing-room at the Stoke-on-Trent Peppermint Rhino. Glancing at his clipboard, however, HRH is unable to identify the etchings in question; upon fraught enquiry, he is told that they
were a complete series of Piranesi’s
Vedute
, first examples off the plate and signed by the artist, and had recently raised almost £90, which Prince Andrew had said was bloody
fantastic, considering they weren’t even in colour.

Since, at this news, the Prince of Wales gives out a low whimper and has to be helped onto a fortuitously unsellable skunkskin ottoman (a Thanksgiving gift of the Arkansas DAR) while Kleenex
Poursuivant mops his gracious brow, let us take on him a little of the pity I besought at the beginning of all this, and tiptoe from the dreadful loft to muster the remainder of it. Why, you ask,
did I say that this was the worst possible time for HRH to be forced to compile a list of all the presents he was once given? Because it is also the time when the rest of us are forced to compile
lists of all the presents we are about to give. And the last fear of which any of us needs to be reminded as Christmas looms is the annually recurring one that whatever we give, the recipient
won’t want; a fear fully justified by the latest national statistics on which I have been able to lay my hands, which show that 31 per cent of gifts end up in lofts, 22 per cent find their
way into car-boot sales, 19 per cent go to charity shops to ensure that African tribesmen will all have the same stripey tie, and 16 per cent are passed on next year to daily helps, milkmen,
paperboys, and Rumanian hawkers unable to fathom a country which leaves you standing on a front step with more bathfoam than you came to sell.

Consider, then, how the sensitive Sage of Highgrove must be feeling, thrust willy-nilly into his public role as lowerer of the national morale. He has binned the gift of the Magi, and a cold
coming he has had of it.

H
OW
can I bring myself to buy duct tape? How can I walk into my local hardware shop and look Albert in the eye and say I
want duct tape? How do I reply when he says, no problem, Mr Coren, what kind of duct tape, bog standard, de luxe, ultra, state-of-the-art, what’s it for? I shall have to reply that it’s
for ducts. He will say what kind of duct, and I shall begin sweating, because I do not know what a duct is. I shall not be able to tell him it’s for windows, even though he knows it’s
for windows, and I know that he knows. I shall have to say duct tape, duct tape, what am I thinking of, what has got into me, Albert, why did I say duct tape, what I meant was a hammer, have you
got a nice one? I shall then buy a hammer, and go home again. Provided my home is still where I left it.

Bottled water? How can I bring myself to buy three months’ supply of bottled water? That is 1000 bottles, even if you wash sparingly. The Waitrose girl will say are you sure, Mr Coren,
it’s usually two, and I will have to say we are throwing this big party for teetotallers, we have 300 of them coming over next Sunday, they can’t half shift it, but she will know, and I
will know that she knows, especially after I ask her for 1000 candles because I want the garden to look magic, teetotallers don’t have much in their lives, candlelit Evian is as good as it
gets. Oh, and it’s a baked bean and sardine party, by the way, so can I have five crates of each?

Have you, too, read
Preparing For The Unexpected
? It is an Australian emergency manual, but the British Cabinet Office has suggested we download it from the the UK Resilience website,
because their own pamphlet isn’t ready yet, and the days grow short as you reach whenever it is. Yes, you are dead right, pardon the expression, it is a flummoxing title, since if something
is unexpected, you cannot by definition prepare for it, and what is unexpected to an Australian, anyway? A slow left-arm terrorist with an unspottable googly pitching anthrax grenades outside
off-stump? A suicide kangaroo with a gas-filled pouch? A nuclear dunny? I spotted none of these, I discovered merely that what is unexpected in Oz, no doubt because it is an upside-down spot, is
what is all too expected everywhere else, and you prepare for it with, ho-hum, duct tape, plastic sheeting, candles, mineral water, tinned tucker, and a portable stove or barbecue – all
pretty useless, of course, unless you happen to own a supermarket. But the truly unsettling thing is that they become even more useless the further on you read.

For example, you are advised not only to hermetically seal your premises in the event of anything (un)expected happening, you are also advised to be prepared to evacuate those premises
immediately it happens. Now, though I am not perhaps a household word where civil defence experts foregather, I nevertheless feel entitled to be a mite confused by this: just suppose I do become
scared enough to handle the embarrassment of showing how scared I have become, how will I know when to tear off all the duct tape and sheeting which have made my newly sealed premises
unevacuatable? Oh look, at the end of my street furthest from the (un)expected, neighbours are frantically sealing themselves in, but at the end nearest to it, neighbours are frantically tearing
down everything they have just finished sealing themselves in with. Any second now, they will be running out carrying crates of tinnies and cartons of candles, pushing handcarts full of water,
portable barbecues on their shoulders, and trailing duct tape behind them like Andrex labradors, but where will they be running?

Towards the (un)expected is where. I bet you didn’t expect that, but it’s what the Australians advise: ‘In the event of an incident, move to an upwind location to avoid
contamination.’ Oh, really? If you are downwind of something nasty, surely the only way to get upwind of it is to run towards it and come out the other side? That is how wind works. If, that
is, you can tell if it’s working at all: I have never been any good at assessing wind-direction, I cannot count the number of occasions upon which I have licked a forefinger and stuck it up
in the air to discover only that I had absolutely no idea which side of it was being blown on.

Let us instead look on a brighter side. Might there not be a touch of good old-fashioned Australian attitude behind this patently daft suggestion? Might it not really be about the best place to
light a barbecue when the wind is up, and to hell with the risk of contamination? I offer this not merely as the only sensible explanation, but also because it gives me no small pleasure, amid all
the current hysteria, to wonder whether the truth is that the Australians really don’t give a stuff.

T
HE
Rev. Lee Rayfield having told his Maidenhead flock that Father Christmas could not exist because his reindeer would
have to gallop at the speed of light to get two billion sacks emptied in the time allotted, and the Bishop of Lichfield having described Jesus as an asylum-seeker and the Three Wise Men as hitmen
sent by Herod to knock him off, you may be wondering what else you need to tell your children this Christmas, should they enquire.

Here, then, is a short list.

WHAT ARE GLASS BALLS ALL ABOUT?

A long time ago, questioned by nasty Bethlehem media over the paternity of her little baby, a young woman admitted the possibility that the father might not have been Almighty
God, she could have been the victim of a conman she might or might not have met once or twice, she couldn’t be expected to remember all the details, it wasn’t easy pursuing a career as
a pioneer Christian aid worker while at the same time being the wife of a prominent cabinet-maker who expected a hot meal on the table every night; she was juggling a lot of balls and it was
inevitable that, occasionally, one of them fell to the ground.

In this year’s performances of Peter Pan, children will be told that every time a glass ball falls off the tree and shatters, somewhere a lady finds herself up the duff.

WHAT DO SPROUTS COMMEMORATE?

In biblical times, whenever there was a shortage of stones as the result of an unusually large number of women being taken in adultery and unable to think up a plausible
defence, the magistrates permitted the use of raw sprouts. Indeed, since the Aramaic words for the two missiles are very similar, several commentators believe that what Jesus actually said was:
‘Let him who is without sin cast the first sprout.’

WHY TURKEYS?

Turkeys were first discovered by the Pilgrim Fathers, who, noticing they wore feathers, believed them to be native Americans and therefore heathens, and understandably burnt
them at the stake. Food, however, was terribly short that first winter, and since the grilling turkeys smelt jolly appetising, the pilgrims asked God for guidance and were given the all-clear,
although stuffing was not mentioned. The Rev. Hector Flynn noted in his diary for December 25, 1621: ‘The heathen was really moist.’ The December 31 entry reads: ‘Heathen risotto
again.’