A letter from a reader

At 62, I finally found something to buy the man who says he does not want anything

I have never written anything like this before, and I should say at the start that I am not a writer and I am not in the habit of telling other women what to buy.

But three different women have asked me where I got my husband's hat in the last fortnight, and every one of them asked in the same slightly desperate way, because every one of them has the same man at home. So it seemed easier to sit down and write it out properly.

My husband is called Derek. He is 68, and he has spent the whole of our marriage saying the same sentence every October.

Do not get me anything, love. I have got everything I need.

And he means it. That is the maddening part. He is not fishing and he is not being difficult. He genuinely cannot think of a single thing he wants, and he has been that way since about 1985.

So every year I go out and find something anyway, because you cannot hand a man nothing on his birthday. And every year it ends up here.

How it happens

Nobody sets out to fill a drawer like that. It happens one well meant purchase at a time.

He says he does not want anything. You cannot give him nothing. So you go into town in the last week of October and you look at what is on offer, and what is on offer is gift sets. Boxed aftershave, boxed socks, boxed pens, a boxed gadget for the car. All of it made for exactly this moment, and all of it made for the person buying rather than the person receiving.

You bring it home, you wrap it, he is genuinely pleased and says thank you properly, and then it goes in the drawer. Not out of ingratitude. He simply already had aftershave.

And then it is his birthday again, and you have not solved anything, and you do the same thing. I did that for the best part of thirty years without ever once stopping to ask what was going wrong.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I think a lot of us have it wrong.

I thought the job was to find him something special. Something he would not have thought of. Something with a bit of an occasion about it, because it was an occasion.

But look at what a man like Derek actually uses. His gardening gloves. The same jumper four days a week. A torch he keeps in the car. None of it is special. All of it is ordinary, and all of it is a bit past its best, and he will not replace any of it because he cannot see the point of spending money on himself.

That is the gap, and it had been sat in front of me for three decades. Not something special that he would never expect. Something ordinary that he uses every single day, in a better version than the one he has got, because he is never going to buy it for himself.

Special and actually used were not a choice of one. Not for a man like mine.

So I bought him a hat

It is from Nottingham Boutique, a small boutique that has been quietly dressing us for a few years now, and they have their autumn sale on at the moment.

It is called the Benten. I got the brown one, which is a proper deep coffee brown rather than anything loud. And I want to be honest that I bought it with very low expectations, because Derek has opinions about hats.

Three things about it have turned out to matter.

The first is what is inside it. It is lined right through with a thick soft fleece, deep enough to push your thumb into, so it is warm the moment it goes on his head rather than after ten minutes of walking. He noticed that on the first morning and said so, which for Derek is practically a review.

The second is the shape of it. It sits close and slouches a little at the back rather than standing up on top of his head, so he does not look like a man in a novelty hat, which is the thing he has always objected to. He will not wear anything with a bobble on it and he never will.

The third is that it is soft and fine rather than thick and scratchy, in a dark two tone knit that honestly looks a good deal more expensive than it was.

The two drawers

I took these two photographs a few weeks apart, and putting them next to each other is what made me want to write this down.

Thirty years of thoughtful, expensive, carefully chosen presents in a drawer upstairs. And a hat that cost less than any of them, hanging by the door because it never gets put away, because it never stops being needed.

He has it on to put the bins out, to walk down for the paper, and every Saturday when he goes to watch our grandson play football and stands on the touchline for two hours in the wind. Which, now I think about it, is what I had been trying to buy him for thirty years.

Three things I have learned since

One. The test is whether he would replace it. Not whether he will like it. Ask yourself whether he would go out and buy another one if he lost it. If the answer is yes, you have found the right thing, and if it is no, it is going in the drawer whatever it cost.

Two. It has to be an upgrade on something, not an addition. Everything in that drawer was a new category of object he had no room for in his life. The hat replaced a horrible old thing he had been wearing since the nineties, and that is the entire difference.

Three. He asked for a second one. In a different colour, to keep in the car. Derek has not asked me for anything in about fifteen years, so I wrote the date down.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because the price is part of why it worked.

The Benten is £22.95. It was £46.00.

I have spent a great deal more than that on boxed sets that were opened politely and never opened again. Measured against what is in that drawer, it is the cheapest thing I have bought him in years and comfortably the most used.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, without a shop on a high street to pay for, which is where the difference goes.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. Real people, mixed opinions, mostly very good.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in my kitchen with a pot of tea and you asked me what to get him, this is what I would say.

Stop looking for something special. It is not going to be there, and it never was. Instead go and look at the thing he wears or uses every single day, the one that has gone tired and that he has never once thought about replacing, and get him a better one of exactly that.

It will feel like a disappointing present when you wrap it. It will be the one he still has in five years.

Two practical things. The autumn sale is on now, and the mornings have already turned, so he will get the use of it straight away rather than it sitting in a cupboard until his birthday. And do have a look at all five colours before you choose, because the brown and the grey are the ones a man will actually put on.

He has worn it every day since it arrived. Nothing I have ever spent five times as much on has managed a fortnight.

Caroline