The perfect Christmas present is a cow, it will do a multiplicity of good

THERE are three great things about receiving a cow for Christmas.

The first is the feeling of referred virtue.

This cow will, it is promised, do some good for someone, somewhere.

It will, in fact, do a multiplicity of good. Whether it will do it in an environmentally-friendly way is unclear.

I just hope the location to which the beast is taken has lots of coconut palms, since it’s now clear that feeding cows coconut oil radically reduces their emissions of methane.

I would like my particular cow not to suffer from bad breath or any other toxic emission likely to contribute to further global warming and maybe create floods that would drown it.

The second benefit of this cow is that it isn’t a goat.

Particularly not the goat in the radio ad which has been driving everybody nuts for weeks demanding to know “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”

Or — to achieve parity of linguistic esteem — “An bfhuilimíd ann fós?”

A special place in hell has been reserved for whoever dreamed up this ad campaign.

Every parent has at some stage been infuriated by that repeated question from a child, which, no doubt, was the creative spark behind the dialogue in the commercial.

But, just as it’s nearly impossible to write an interesting novel about a boring person, it’s equally difficult to make an irritating habit into something endearing, particularly when the irritating habit is projected onto a goat.

I have problems with goats. I once served on the Council of the Dublin Zoo, and got on the wrong side of a large goat as I left an evening meeting in Phoenix park.

He charged me and I belted him with my briefcase.

It’s amazing the damage goat-horns can do to a new briefcase and how difficult it is to explain it when people notice it.

If you tell the truth, they don’t believe you, because most people think of goats as about the size of a cat, only taller and skinnier.

The zoo goat was the size of a Shetland pony.

(I resigned from the council over the goat. Belting the animals with brief-cases did not seem appropriate for a council member, even in self-defence).

The final advantage of remote control bovine donation is that the animal requires no ongoing maintenance and is at a safe distance from me.

Any gift with life in it, I can extinguish. It’s not a skill of which I’m proud, it’s just a fact.

Goldfish wither on the fin at the very sight of me.

When a friend gave me one of those little globes where everything is sealed for safety, including the tiny shrimp in the water at the bottom, it turned, overnight, into a transparent spherical coffin.

A decent backyard burial did not assuage the guilt.

Even supposedly bullet-proof plants keel over and die within days of arriving in our house. One was a tiny ornament of a little cat surrounded by lichen.

Now, lichen is as primeval and hardy as a cockroach.

It grows where no reasonable plant would want to grow.

You can put it in the darkest, dampest, coldest regions and it flourishes.

Put it on a surface in our house and in three weeks, it has turned into a rusted Brillo pad.

The same applies to other hardy plants.

Last year, my mother gave me an aloe vera.

This is a clever bit of vegetation for someone who burns, cuts or scalds themselves constantly: they can break off a leaf and spread healing gel from it onto the wound.

The aloe is a small, hardy tropical plant requiring little more than moisture and an occasional ray of sunshine. Mine bolted like a lettuce. It’s four feet tall, has strange shedding flowers on it, and if I brought it to Gerry Daly, he’d recommend I have it put to sleep.

I think myself the mistake is investing faith and hope in Christmas presents, instead of just money.

My mother always did that. Down through the years, she gave me a recorder, a clarinet and a zither. Can I play an instrument? No. I did manage to learn The Minstrel Boy on the zither.

Now, THERE’S a crowd-pleaser: a spectacularly dreary song, the opening line of which announces that the hero is dead, played on an instrument that looks like a harp and a school desk were mated in dubious circumstances.

Sometimes, of course, the faith and hope are my own. When I was about eleven, the comic to which we were all addicted at the time, called Judy, had a series running about a girl who defeated evil-doers every week by the power of her pogo stick.

This girl would leap fearlessly from rooftop to rooftop on her pogo stick.

She could bounce from river-bank to river-bank, even if the intervening stream was the Mississippi.

Under duress and if you gave her a good run at it, she could jump over an elephant.

As a result, we all wanted pogo sticks. I actually got one for Christmas.

All my schoolmates hated me and waited enviously for me to leap rivers and go flying over Labradors, elephants being thin on the ground in our suburb.

Now, a pogo stick is a pole with two sticking-out bits about a foot from the bottom on which you stand, below which is a spring.

It’s not much of a spring. In fact, as springs go, it’s a complete waste of bend.

Never mind rooftop to rooftop travel, I couldn’t get the thing to jump from the road up to the path, and I never managed to get more than three bounces in a row out of it before ending up in A&E.

The dentist did well out of the pogo stick, though.

Half my fillings fell out as a result of its use.

This year, the gift that will be most frequently given in misplaced faith is the pasta maker.

It will be given to women (and a few new men) in the belief that, because they are foodies, they will be flattered to receive a metal yoke which, when fed gunge at one end and cranked at the other, will produce home-made sheets of lasagna, or equally authentic strands of spaghetti.

Here’s what will happen those machines.

They will be mis-used once, producing caked dribbles of flour-paste because the user didn’t have the time to get precisely the right ingredients or spend long enough reading the instructions.

After that, they will be cleaned punctiliously, using a great deal of hot water, detergent and a toothbrush.

The hot water will cook the remaining flourpaste, necessitating the toothbrush to get the gummy gloop out of the hidden areas within the shiny innards of the contraption.

Thereafter, it will be put away, with a mixture of good intentions and bad thoughts directed at the giver.

Compare that hassle with an anonymous distant charitable cow needing neither practice nor cleaning.

Way to go, Daisy.