Insider Trading: Christmas at Oliver Brown

Here’s a fact. ‘Factoids’ aren’t true. Honestly, you can look it up. ‘An item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact’ it will say. (Unless you look in an American dictionary - whereupon you will find that factoids are indeed facts, which would explains rather a lot, an uncharitable mind might conclude).

Here’s another fact: of all the people in all the world (with the Right Honourables being the Right Honourable exceptions) no class of individual is more full of untruths than schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. There can be few of us who have not been told some absolute whoppers by members of staff - although, granted, it seems unlikely given the average adult’s grasp of calculus or cellular biology that many of us were paying much attention at the time.

Like the one about ‘something-something-something being equal to the square of the other two sides’. Or the idea that people who work in chocolate factories get so fed up with chocolate that they can’t stand it any more. That last one’s the most errant nonsense. Why, one might by that logic conclude that bar-staff are misanthropic tee-totallers rather than the gregarious, happily dissolute band of brothers and sisters that they, in reality, are.

Or, for that matter, that the staff at Oliver Brown aren’t itching to get their hands on some of the shop’s supply. So by way of inspiration for anybody who is having a bit of a blank when it comes to Christmas shopping, here is what each of us would like to find under the tree – and why.