My card

Because I’m relentlessly cheap, I’ve always favoured hand-made greetings cards, even more so now that the advent of the internet has made it possible to get just the right pornographic image for just about any occasion. ‘Congratulations on your promotion - here’s a picture of a dwarf taking a really fat bird up the wrong ‘un - like you, he’s on the ladder to success’. That sort of thing.

Obviously, I’m not the only one. In my local stationers the craft section is growing, with more and more card crafting kits going on sale. To a certain extent this mystifies me, surely the point of a hand made card is that is unique, rather than assembled from a ready-made kit. Also, they don’t make porn kits. I think what’s driving the whole business is that people go into a card shop, see a hand made card, think ‘nice’, pick it up and say ‘three quid? I’ll make one myself!’, then go out and spend a tenner on the kit, but it’s the thought that counts. My response is closer to ‘three fucking quid! They must be kidding’ and on to the bargain section.

The hardest thing about making cards is actually having an idea but once you do, you start noticing all these gaps in the market that are being generated by the rapid pace of modern life - ‘congratulations on your coming out, you big gay man you’, or ‘congratulations on your ASBO’.

I prefer to recycle stuff around the house or garden to really make an effort with hand-made cards. For instance, for Easter I’m toying pop-up crosses.

Shame to say that in a moment of madness I attended a craft fair at the weekend. These are excellent opportunities for middle-aged men to behave like petulant teens, sulking, being dragged from stall to stall and bickering. It did give me a chance to scope out the card competition though - ha, no competition! A bloke manning a stall was flogging kit-made cards for two-fifty a pop. Sorry, but for two-fifty I expect a bit more than a folded bit of card with a silver dolphin on it, I want ribbon, feathers and inside a token for a pint.

There is a big big difference between hand made and home made. Hand made results in something you can sell. Home made is something that is usually put together by a child, features bold designs in finger-paint and biscuit crumbs and is only loved by parents or grandparents - those members of the family that have shut down certain sections of their brain to allow them to live with children - basically the section that tells you it’s wrong to talk about poo at the dinner table. This same section is responsible for the parent thinking their child is a virtuoso on the recorder, while any sane visitor to the house thinks a cat is being buggered in a nearby room.