YOU may think buying a Christmas gift for your nearest and dearest is as easy as A, B, C, but you would be wrong. It is in fact as easy as T+G+S+V+B.

Confused? You will be. But then again, confusion is a pleasant change of pace for those of us who normally spend the run-up to the festive season in a heightened state of pure panic.

We run from shop to shop like a herd of startled gazelles buying armfuls of useless bits of nonsense for people we don't particularly like, who we like but never see, or who we like and see but can't really afford to splash out on.

We spend hours searching for just the right gift for everyone, from our beloved grandmother down to the window cleaner, a man we care about as much as a recurring verruca, only to rush into The Body Shop on Christmas Eve and buy everyone identical gift sets.

If only someone would come up with a simple calculation to make sure we buy the right gift for the right person at the right price. If only.

In the meantime, we will have to get our permanently befuddled heads around the devilishly difficult algebraic equation T+G+S+V+B, devised by those sadistic little Santa's helpers at the online bank Cahoot.

To get the right gift for your friends, family and numerous unwanted hangers-on, all you have to do apparently is take T (time spent looking for the gift, with 0 for no effort and 5 for the maximum possible) and add it to G (how close you are to the person receiving the gift, with 0 for a distant friend or relative and 4 for someone close), S (how suitable the gift is in relation to the recipient's interests, with 0 meaning no real connection and 3 for a spot-on choice), V (the value of the gift, with 0 for cheap and 1 for expensive) and B (the "boomerang factor", or whether the present can be taken back for a refund, with 0 for no and 1 for yes).

If you are still with me - if indeed you are still conscious - now may be a good time to eat a banana and do some half-time stretches because there is still plenty of work to do before you can sit back on the sofa with an eggnog in one hand and an After Eight mint in the other while watching Del Boy/Towering Inferno/Wallace & Gromit (delete as applicable).

If your choice of gift scores four or less, it's going to be about as welcome as a Satanist on Songs of Praise so get your coat on, you're going back to the shops. If it falls somewhere between five and 11, your gift is going to attract more yawns than yahoos so get your coat on, the shops shut at 5pm. And in the unlikely event your score hits 12 or more, get your coat on anyway and go to the pub to celebrate.

Which is probably where you will find the man in your life, if a separate survey commissioned by the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent is anything to go by.

It found that 17 per cent of men spend less than an hour on their Christmas shopping. Not an hour every day for a month, or even an hour per present, but one single, solitary hour for absolutely everything. This compares with 58 per cent of women who spend - wait for it - an entire week choosing gifts.

Much as it galls me to admit it, I think the fellas have got it sussed on this one. They know that whatever they buy, whether it's a bag of humbugs or the Hope diamond, we will take it straight back to the shop on Boxing Day and swap it for something else. So they just buy us the humbugs and go to the pub. Job's done; mine's a pint.

I just hope the man in my life buys me a calculator to go with my humbugs this year. Mine must be faulty: I've just added together my Ts, Gs, Ss, Vs and Bs and have got -42. That can't be right can it?

I was sure Grandma Madge would love those hang-gliding lessons.

Updated: 12:04 Monday, December 08, 2003