I was eight and in the car with my teenage cousins, one redhead, one blonde, one brunette. We had spent a lovely holiday together. They had allowed me to stay up late for a party with their almost grown-up friends in their garden. As the sun went down I had found a grassy corner and chatted to a teenage boy about what we were reading. I was wearing my blue-and-white kilt and sipping a tin of Tab which was hot pink. At the end of the conversation he produced a family-size packet of wine gums, tore down the seam to open it out, and shared them with me. That kind of thing is not nothing when you are eight.

In the car I wanted to thank my cousins for the stay. I had bought them each a small tartan box, with a handle, a sort of miniature cardboard handbag, and each bag was filled with brightly coloured one-inch lengths of Edinburgh rock. As we approached the train station I readied myself for a short presentation speech. I would give thanks, not quite in the fashion of an Oscar winner, but there was a little of that effusiveness bubbling away in my heart. I couldn’t find any words. Instead I smiled and held out the tartan package to the biggest cousin, to get the ball rolling. She looked at the offering and smiled at me. “No thanks,” she said.

OUCH.

Why I remember things like this, so vividly, when the mental and emotional space they take up in my brain could better be spent on, say, memorising ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ in its entirety, I do not know.

Ever since that fateful car ride, when I give a gift I always try to make it clear that it’s an open-and-shut transaction. I give and you receive. There is no wriggle room. It’s not like coming at someone with a quivering pudding on a pedestalled stand and saying, “May I interest you in my famous raspberry, lychee and rose-petal pavlova?” and they then have the choice of shaking the head and saying, “No, I’m good, thanks.” (If they dare.) No, when I give a gift, saying no is not an option. I am sorry if that sounds a bit like a threat. THAT IS HOW IT WORKS.

Where am I going with this? Oh yes. I made the mistake of offering rather than giving a gift this week. No one did anything wrong, but it occasioned all sorts of misgivings. How I wished I had just sent it round.

I had been researching coffee-makers for young friends who have flown their parental nests and moved into their minute first home together. These friends over-enjoy coffee as I do and we often chat about it. They feel daring and flagrant and half-hysterical with glee as I feel too when a cup is put in front of me. They share the sense of fetish and transgression. (It’s strong drugs! I get to have them every morning! It has proven links to anxiety and insomnia! I don’t care!)

Their current coffee-maker is all right — I believe it was won in a school raffle years ago by one of their mums — but I thought a new one would be the perfect gift, for who would drink all-right coffee when delicious coffee is to hand? Plus, think of all the money it would save them, for they are not averse to walking the six minutes required to hunt and gather a “shop-bought” a few times a week, and these things add up. And the machine was very handsome, too. It was strong, almost silent, and Italian.

I imagined them taking Sunday morning coffees together, looking out through the window at the hesitant sunshine and thinking and even perhaps saying out loud, “you know, old Susie is a fine friend”.

They might murmur into the gathering dusk after a hard week at work, “where would we be without Susie at the end of the day?” I would be part of the fabric of their lives. I would love that. You don’t have to be dead to want people to remember you fondly.

“That’s so kind but we are attached to our old machine,” they said. “It’s not brilliant, but it’s been through a lot, and we’re all used to each other now.”

“Oh sure, I see.”

“We don’t want loads of new stuff as we’re kind of trying to simplify things.”

“Of course.”

“We’re trying to drink a bit less coffee as well is the truth.”

“Absolutely.”

I once asked a Russian friend why he was smiling and he said, “You cannot ask me that. To ask why a man is smiling is like trying to look inside his bones.”

Well, if it made me feel a tiny bit like that, it’s hardly the end of the world.

— Financial Times