Dialogue: Now a man can face Christmas in a league of his own

By JOE BENNETT

Are you a bloke? And around this time of the year do you grow gloomy? And do you have any idea why this is? Do you imagine it's the male menopause, or poverty, or the end of the rugby season, or inherited male guilt?

Wrong on all counts. But relax. You are not alone. And besides, help is at hand.

For most of the year I am a byword for bonhomie. People remark on it. "Look at his bonhomie," they remark.

But then late November rolls around and people pass me by on the other side of the road remarking on nothing. For around this time of the year I pack a big fat sad. My demeanour alters from the frontispiece of the Bumper Book of Merriment to Act 5 of Hamlet with a double portion of grief.

I sink into a Stygian sorrow, inhabiting the Tartarean depths of misery with only a few classical adjectives for company.

My baboonish grin lapses into a coathanger. Shoulders hunched, tongue spotted, brow liverish, liver brownish, I earn a little miserable bread from posing for the before shots in Viagra ads.

Until today I had not known why this was so. There I sat this morning at my usual table at The Elbow - a greasy little joint in downtown Lyttelton - moping over a glass of breakfast and thumbing idly through a second-hand copy of the local rag. Then I turned to the advertising feature on page 28 and the world changed.

To say the scales fell from my eyes would be to say that Phar Lap was a horse. Those scales hit the floor with a tinkle that turned heads.

"Keep that tinkling down," bellowed The Elbow's wizened proprietor, "there's blokes here trying to be miserable." But I barely heard him. I was transfixed.

To gain a sense of how I felt, imagine Marie Curie first dipping a finger into a test tube, withdrawing it, licking it, and realising that here at last was radium. Then add the delight of Einstein fooling around with M, idly squaring C on his calculator and suddenly discovering E.

And multiply that yet again by the feeling that swept through Rutherford when he brought his tiny cleaver down and saw in front of him, like a neatly halved apple, the split atom.

"Hiroshima," exclaimed Rutherford in his excitement, and so, when I saw page 28, did I.

"Men, " announced page 28 "are difficult to buy for, right?" And suddenly the universal male misery made sense. Up looms the great religious bash of Christmas when the developed world does one-third of its annual retail spending, and we men just aren't up to it. We stick in its festive craw.

Right this moment, women intent on adding to the sum of human happiness are scouring the shelves for things to buy us and coming up with nothing. We've already got a whip and a wetsuit and brace of inflatables and we think the world has nothing more to offer. No wonder we feel miserable. No wonder the end of the year sees us knocking back the Prozac.

We are Camus' Outsider, Dickens' Scrooge, Notre Dame's Hunchback all in one, excluded from the boundless joys of yuletide consumption.

But all that's about to end. Never again need we fear the matching tie and handkerchief set, the cordless drill or the herbicidal aftershave. It was all laid out on page 28. The missionaries have landed and brought with them a store devoted to gifts for men. They call it a "centralised and specialist gift-purchasing solution".

And they've done their homework. There are, it seems, only six varieties of men, and the store is divided accordingly into sections, one for each of the six. From Action Man ("fit, healthy, risky, a gym monkey, an adrenalin junkie") to Style Merchant ("relaxed, confident, frequent flyer and gadget geek") they've got us men speared and sprawling on a pin.

Did you think you just watched a lot of rugby on TV? Pick that chin up. You're a King of the Castle - "armchair sportsman, handyman and happy homebody, KC says 'chuck it on the barbie'."

Did you picture yourself as a grumpy old sod who likes silence. Think again. You're a Lone Ranger - "thinker, strategist, LR says 'hmmmm'."

Or do you, as I do, see yourself as a being unique unto himself, an embracer of multitudes, contradictory, enigmatic, someone who defies categorisation. Well, we can forget it. In a League of His Own defines us to the last syllable.

So be gone dull care. Christmas is coming and it's time for us men to cheer up and join in. And if you want to know what to buy for the woman in your life, why not a Mills and Boon? Inside its pink covers she'll find just the men she'd like to buy for.