PICTURE the scene: Barack Obama is sorting through the many thousands of congratulatory letters and parcels he's received from well-wishers following his election.
There are, to be honest, some odd artefacts from all over the world, from all (and how often do you see this mathematical impossibility written down?) corners of the globe.
His daughters have pulled open one of the big Jiffy bags and they're play
ing happily on the White House lawn with a pale and slightly floppy Frisbee: it arcs and twists in the Washington air, looking like a full moon on an autumn night.
Except it isn't a Frisbee. It's a Yorkshire pudding. And before
you think that I'm constructing some kind of flat cap/baseball cap fantasy around Obama's mythical distant Yorkshire ancestry, then let me tell you that I'm not making it up.
Well, I am making up the bit about the Frisbee flinging, but I read the other day that, on hearing of his elevation to high office, the Yorkshire Tourist Board had sent the President-elect a congratulatory parcel of Yorkshire delicacies. Parkin in the West Wing! Fat Rascals in the Oval Office!
It's a publicity wheeze, of course, and it's succeeded because here I am giving it a few column inches. It won't be the only parcel of that type that's whizzed across the Atlantic either, in the last few heady days. I have no proof, but I bet there may have been tea-towels from Lowestoft and light-up golf balls from St Andrews and the odd deep-frozen Lancashire Hotpot in the cargo hold of the same plane that the Yorkshire hamper went in. Except that the Yorkshire delights would have gone first class, naturally.
These kinds of corporate gifts are strange things, part of a world that's a mixture of etiquette and opportunism and one-upmanship and genuine philanthropy.
What about those pennants and presents that football teams exchange before international matches? Who gets to keep the flag? On the team bus, who shares out the local delicacy based on fish and dark chocolate? I bet that more than once the pennant has been left in the far recesses of a local bar, to be found early the next morning by a bemused cleaner who shrugged and then used it to shine the windows.
I've never really had a job, for which I'm very grateful, but I was once in an office just before Christmas, and a man from a firm of suppliers was going round giving out gifts; he went to each desk and solemnly brought out a bottle of wine from a big Santa-style sack, which he placed on the desk.
He didn't speak, as though, in a David Brent kind of way, it was part of a silent ritual he did every year.
The recipients didn't speak either, and I felt like I'd stumbled in on a tradition like a mummers' play or a village song that only got sung once a decade when the river was up and the cows all faced the same way in the field at the edge of the copse.
The oddest thing was that the bottles of wine were wrapped up in Christmas wrapping paper, but they still looked exactly like bottles of wine. Nobody would open it on Christmas morning and gasp and say "Oh! A bottle of wine! I thought it was a saxophone or a pot plant!"
I guess he'd got the work-experience girl to wrap up the bottles and stick the tags on and then he signed the tags before he loaded them up into his car. As he no doubt explained to her at the office Christmas party later that week, just before he photocopied his bum and fell asleep by the watercooler: "You've got to wrap them up or it wouldn't be Christmas, would it?"
I once had a corporate gift of this kind; I'd written a piece for a magazine about drinking a bottle of Canadian wine and the effect it had on me.
I speculated that I knew nothing about Canadian wine and, until I'd spotted the bottle in the supermarket, had no idea that such a thing existed. The piece was published and then, a couple of weeks later, the postman brought a parcel. As it happened, a tinkling and damp parcel. Inside were half-a-dozen bottles of Canadian wine.
Four intact, one cracked, one shattered; it was just the strength of the packaging that was holding the liquid in. There was a note from a PR company thanking me.
I felt like a centre forward at the start of a game holding a flag, or Barack Obama turning and turning a curd tart, examining it from all angles, trying to work out whether to eat it, plant things in it or stand a cup on it.
I drank the wine. It seemed churlish not to.
Enjoy the Yorkshire pudding, Barack.
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