Christmas shopping is rubbish. I found my best gift in the bin

I discovered the perfect Christmas present at work the other day after eating fish and chips too fast. I was wearing too many layers for the office, where heating is pumped from unusual angles bringing with it the smell of lasagne or sewer, and I was sweating. Partly, it was the layers, partly it was the meeting due in five minutes, which was about the future of our jobs, and I was in a rush to get a seat at our possible execution. By the sinks I removed a jumper and washed my hands, and joined my colleagues in a bright glass room. But, as the meeting began and my hands became fists, I realised something awful. I was missing a ring from my little finger. It was small and silver, in the shape of a tiny safety pin – I’d bought it 20 years ago on my first week at work and worn it every day since. Its loss struck me as ominous.

I am largely anti-Christmas present. I write this as a person who has helped compile numerous magazine gift guides, blithely sticking a cashmere sock beside, perhaps, organic sausages containing the Tibetan goat they were sheared from, beside a coffee table book about fonts, beside a hairclip in the shape of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and, for the dads, a rake. The guides have come to open up for me a crack of dissatisfaction that creaks wider with every caviar cookbook, every feminist earmuff. I write this as a person, too, for whom shopping has come to feel like a treacherous bloodsport, a person who once took shelter in the Greggs concession upstairs at Primark and had to drop a pin so friends could organise a welfare check.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been Christmas toy shopping with kids, but let me tell you, the experience is wild – today the stores are guarded by creatures that are half-human, half-toy soldier, who appear to be just awakening to this fact, live in front of you, by the bears. They present themselves to be photographed with your children whether your children like it or not, a chance for these half-soldiers to be witnessed in transition between worlds perhaps, a sign to the gods that cursed them. At Selfridges last weekend, we emerged from a screening of Wicked into a Christmas-shopping performance that was just as beautifully produced as the film. My entire family was overwhelmed in different directions, my daughter with want, the desire to purchase every single bloody thing, regardless of use or price – in the space of 10 minutes she picked up a) a £70 Tamagotchi, b) a can of novelty Coke and c) a glittery handbag in the shape of salad. My son collapsed in tears when prevented from climbing a Christmas tree, and my partner, ha, holding this crying pink boy amid a crowd of people admiring wallets, suddenly shouted “ARSENAL” very loudly, and punched the air.

We all turned to look at him. He’s not the type of man, usually, who shouts “ARSENAL” and punches the air in public – he is a composed man, who stands politely in his nice jacket mutely accommodating our various tantrums, but something had shifted. What was it? “Are you OK, Daddy?” asked our daughter, quietly. On his shoulder, our son stopped crying, scared. Mark’s mouth remained open, his cheeks slightly flushed. He seemed more surprised even than us at his outburst, as if the Christmas shopping spirit had entered him uninvited and dragged an exclamation up from his stomach. He stumbled, explaining slowly that the man who had just limped past (“Heyhowareyou”) was a football defender called Riccardo Calafiori and this was how his body, apparently, had reacted to the experience. We watched the young man walk towards the beauty hall – he was leaning heavily on a small bald friend (“Groin injury,” Mark croaked) and looked back at Mark with wonder. He looked confused, as if he had just woken up on a beautiful beach at the end of the world. We floated out into the drizzle having bought nothing.

In the office, back at our desks, my colleagues digested the meeting and I told them about my ring which, annoyingly, had all of our jobs tied up in its fate. Well, you must go and find it, they exclaimed, stupidly. A tiny ring, I said! The size of a well-sucked Polo? You’re mad, I said, before sighing, and, for them, solemnly retracing my steps. It wasn’t outside the meeting room. It wasn’t on the floor where I removed my jumper. It wasn’t in the sink, or by the soap, or anywhere normal at all. So I opened the bin, and took its bag back to my desk, and carefully decanted its contents. It wasn’t in the Tesco porridge pot, or the chewed Pret coffee cup, or in any of the wet plaits of blue paper towel, some stained with pudding. But then I saw a glint of silver. At the bottom of the sour binbag, there it was, my tiny ring, and hope, and I shouted and punched the air.

This was it, this was the perfect present. Something loved and lost, and found again, at the bottom of someone else’s rubbish covered in unidentifiable yoghurt. Merry Christmas x

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk