LEAVING GIFTS

I've waxed lyrically about Christmas, Birthday, Holiday and Sickness gifts many times on Moonbase.

These events injected important new stock into our toy cupboards when we were kids. Many still do.

But there is another day when we usually receive presents.

When we leave a job.

I have left many jobs over the years. Some have been short jobs and some long. My longest, part of an environmental career that I left behind in 2005, was for 19 years. After so long in the same office I was showered with stuff: a photo album of the past two decades at work, a Marvel Heroes framed print and a stack of DVDs including Ghost in the Shell.

But it's three particular gifts that I got that emotional September day 14 years ago that I clearly remember: a ceramic Tardis, which had been on a colleague's desk for years and after much coveting by yours truly, it was presented to me on my final day! I

I also got a golden lion statue for good luck from a conservation volunteer and most typical of all I suppose, a Company pen in its own presentation box.

I still have all three of these things. I suppose they have that indefinable quality imbued into inanimate objects at emotional times, sentimental value.

Most of my past leaving gifts have vanished in the mists of time and space but I have managed to keep hold of the leaving cards I got, which go back to my very first job in 1977 with General Accident. It was a typical Seventies card, large and of a green fuzzy creature holding a horse shoe. I was a mass of hair and beard in those days, all patchouli and cheesecloth and one colleague called me Inri [no offence to anyone]. I wouldn't have remembered but its in the card as is another odd name I picked up there in my late teens, Chavvers, for which I have no explanation!

I left my first job in 1980 in a controlled fit of hippydom and escaped the rat race to live on a bird reserve in the deepest Fens. I still have the presents the wardens got me when I left there after an incredible 12 months on the land, a huge tin of colouring pencils and a gorgeous drawing of a reed warbler.

Leaving gifts are a strange thing. Momentos of work done and in some cases of a lifetime of work when we retire.

They are seldom vintage toys though. Not in my case anyway!

Have you had many leaving presents and do you remember them?