Over the last couple of days I’ve been sending or wrapping things to send to people and I’ve received one or two things myself. I don’t know about you, but I’m the sort of person who gets really, REALLY excited about things arriving in the post. Ooooh! Ooooh! New toy! Is it shiny? Where’s it from? What does it look like?

Not just my own parcels either. When parcels arrive for people in my presence I lose all self control and hover round them like a hyperactive vulture with ADD who has just had a gallon of SunnyD.

Don’t ever let me have anything with tartrazine in it, by the way. Just, you know, for the record.

If the person who is the right and proper recipient doesn’t get a damn move on and open that puppy right there and then it’s all I can do to stop myself pouncing on it and opening it myself.

“True to type, dear heart,” says someone on the sidelines.

It’s not just parcels, either. Anything arriving in the post that has my name on it is greeted with the same sense of skittish anticipation. Unless it’s a bill. Or the bank reminding me how much money I don’t have. Or one of those free catalogue things that outdoors shops send you if you ever have the audacity to purchase something from them (although anything with an Ortlieb or MSR catalogue in it is welcome because that stuff is kewl).

Much as I love getting stuff I’ve ordered (“Oh! Cable & Deadpool Vol 6! Be still my beating heart!”) there’s nothing quite so tingly as getting something from someone else. Particularly if it’s a surprise.

Recently I have sent and received items that were shipped directly from the supplier, as well as having sent and received items that involved personal handling. And I discovered something. I like sending stuff to people I care about. It is groovy and it makes me happy — but that’s not the discovery, I’ve always known that. What I discovered was that getting someone else to send something on my behalf doesn’t have quite that same sense of joy.

One year Frood made me a birthday card. It had a pop-up Wolverine on it who said “Snickt, bub,” and his claws came out. Frood made it himself, from scratch, while bored at work and it was the best card I’ve ever had. I’m the sort of person who keeps birthday cards for years, and I keep the envelopes too if they’ve been scribbled on.

When I’m sending something to someone, unless it’s an emergency and I need to get it sent right there and then and don’t have time for any embellishment, I spend a lot of time thinking about it. I think about the packing as well as the content. If there’s a letter involved I’ll write it long-hand, on proper paper, with a proper pen, even if I have to draft it several times and re-write the final version over and over until it doesn’t have any mistakes in it. I’ve been known to completely re-package something because I made a slight mistake in hand-printing the address on the front and it’ll be untidy if I scribble out the error to correct it.

These days we use the interweb for so much: shopping, communication, reference, socialising. Email and IM have revolutionised the way we talk to each other. I can stay in daily, even hourly contact with someone 3000 miles away on the other side of the Atlantic without worrying about peak rate phone bills. The fact that I don’t even know his telephone number has no bearing on my ability to stay in touch. Buying a present for someone can be as simple as firing up Amazon and clicking on something in the wish list. It’s making relationships convenient.

I, for one, don’t want my relationships convenient. I want to make the effort. My friends deserve at least that much from me. Whether they realise it or not, I want to know that when that package turns up in the post it will carry with it the sense that I care.

It’s not just that, either. There’s also something different about touching something that has been handled by someone else. There were occasional moments like that when I was serving time as an archaeologist: picking up a piece of knapped flint and having the awareness that thousands of years previously another living being had held it, had worked it, had shaped and laboured over it. When something arrives in the post that has been wrapped and sealed and deposited with the mail service by the friend who is sending it, there’s a definite sense of my fingers touching the places that friend’s fingers have touched. Maybe it’s a faint scent, or maybe it’s something more ethereal. Maybe it’s just psychosomatic.

But I can’t do without the ability of the internet to track down obscure things that I can’t get anywhere else. So I’m going to have to compromise. In future I’m just going to have to order things sent to me so I can re-wrap them and send them to the ultimate recipient myself.

Oh. But then I have to consider unnecessary mileage and the carbon footprint. Dammit. Hmmm. How many trees do I need to have planted in a year to compensate for my gift habits?