The gifts that keep on giving

Harry Hampson is a lucky man. I have never met him, but I believe that he now owns some champagne that by rights should be sitting in Observant Olivia’s Battersea flat. Alas, a few seconds of lost concentration means that six very fine magnums apparently went off into the night, rather than to my excellent former PA’s new home.

I had taken a table at the London Wine Auction Dinner, an event attended by the great and the good from London’s capital markets to raise money for the Countryside Alliance. The UK government, few members of which actually partake in country pursuits, has had a habit of interfering, and the Countryside Alliance exists to put the other side of the story.

Among my guests were my Most Successful Girlfriend and her husband, the Northern Irish Fund Manager. I sat NIFM next to me so that I could observe his bidding strategy during the silent, electronic auction. The names of the current highest bidders were displayed on screens around the room. This really spurred his competitive juices – every time the name of an investment banker whom he knew well appeared next to a particular lot, NIFM put in a higher bid.

The dinner took place in W1, very near my office, so I walked to the venue. Not an option later in the week though, when I visited E3, for east London is somewhat further away, not to mention rather unfamiliar to me.

The Christmas special of my TV show was being filmed in E3, hence my foray east to within striking distance of the main Olympic site. We took over the offices of Bywaters, a 50-year-old family-owned recycling company, which, as you can well imagine, has grown during the past decade. The staff were very accommodating, given how disrupting it can be to have a TV production company hanging about.

At one point I stopped the filming because I spotted something I really wanted in my own office: a locked bin marked “confidential”. The contents are collected from the workplace and transported to E3 for shredding on site. My business handles a lot of confidential information and currently we shred stuff ourselves, and then bag it for collection. The whole process takes time, is noisy and is typically handed to work experience people, who probably should not be placed in charge of looking after confidential information, even if it is about to be destroyed. A service that allows us to shred securely off site excited me somewhat more than having repeatedly to walk up and down past a Christmas tree.

I was filming a piece on re-gifting, something I regularly practise myself. There are after all only so many scented candles a girl can use. The champagne at the Countryside Alliance auction was re-gifted by me, to the dinner. I had acquired it earlier this year after the organisers of the annual meeting of a group of financiers sent me six magnums of champagne. It was very nice, but I thought it would be even more greatly appreciated if I could turn it into cash for the Countryside Alliance – that way it would be appreciated three times; by me, by them and by whoever drinks it.

I had told NIFM this, and he decided to buy it back as a present for OO, whom he believes I have not thanked often enough for her good grace, or at least not often enough considering how often I have written about her. He thought the champagne would make a nice gift to mark OO’s transition from being my PA to her new role in our company. He therefore dutifully bid through the evening and, as his name was on the leader board in the closing minutes, he assumed that he had been successful. But when he went to pay for and collect the champagne, he discovered that in the final few seconds, when he hadn’t been looking, he had apparently been outbid. Poor OO, but at least the thought was there. She will be top of my next re-gifting exercise.

mrsmoneypenny@ft.com

To comment, please email magazineletters@ft.com