It was Chris’s birthday yesterday and it got some rather cool presents. OK, a few cool presents. When you get to 50+ you don’t tend to get buried in goodies!

I’ve been a Gelaskins fan since the kids gave me one for my Kindle 18 months ago. Gelaskins are silicon skins for your electronic gadget – from phones to tablets to computers. You can choose from loads of designs or – here’s the really good part – customise one with a photo.

Here’s the one I did for Chris since he’s very fond of Oberon, our Berkshire boar.

Chris also got mushroom spore for golden chanterelles and black oyster mushrooms. These were surprisingly hard to track down. I could have got no end of packets of magic mushroom spores for him for next to nothing too – everything’s out there on the Net! – but I wasn’t after the psychedelic sort. I ended up getting these from Lithuania! I hadn’t thought ahead far enough to realise the growing instructions would also be in Lithuanian but YouTube is a wonderful place and Chris has found non-Lithuanian videos to explain what to do.

Add a card game and a fully fledged Dagg birthday tea and it was a good day.