Strange Conversations: The Holiday Edition

After Nick finished some secret, post-work shopping:

ME: So have you cunningly hidden my Christmas presents?
NICK: Under the bed.
ME: Don’t tell me where they are!
NICK: Well, I don’t want you scrounging around.
ME: But scrounging around is what Christmas is all about!
NICK: Oh, well, if I’d known that . . .
ME: “If you known that” what?
NICK: I probably still would have told you.

Nick never seems to get into the proper spirit of Christmas: that is, he has no cunning whatsoever. My family—led by my Machiavellian mother—is full of gift-giving cunning, so this is always a source of amusement to me.

A couple of years ago, he unwittingly revealed the genre of one of my Christmas presents, by loudly answering the phone to my sister and then saying, “I don’t know: I’ll just check” before ostentatiously wandering up and down the bookcases.

(But, then, who objects to getting books for Christmas? Apart from Albus Dumbledore.)

But my favourite was the birthday-present spoliation from last year:

NICK: Oh, it’s an SMS from your sister. “Hi, Nick: do you think Treen would like Kylie Kwong’s Simple Chinese Cooking for her birthday? Don’t read this out” . . . oh.