EVERY year at about this time all sorts of catalogues fall out of newspapers and magazines.

Nothing unusual about that, it happens all year round, but usually they are just another pile of irritating junk mail to be got rid of.

But around Christmas there are some little gems.

Take the one I got this morning. It's a bit of a cheat really because it's the usual catalogue with just a merry group of people on the front waving Christmas parcels about accompanied by the odd reindeer and a snowy Christmas tree. Inside are a selection of items which one would presume were meant as Christmas gifts.

Now if you suffered from what must be a fairly embarrassing condition, ie incontinence, the last thing you would want was a gift wrapped contraption which looks like a small portable loo. Nor would most women be very pleased with a handy little blackhead remover or a nose hair remover.

Mummy

In fact there is an item for every part of your body if you look hard enough, so much so that sufferers from unfortunate multi-conditions could end up looking like an extra in the Curse of the Mummy. You could be wrapped from head to toe, starting with the bunion guard and toe straightener and moving upwards.

Among some of the other little gems - the handy shower cover for broken legs or arms, the kit to vacuum up live insects, the car dent puller-out next to the wrinkle remover (they look very similar), the old favourite giant gloves for taking things out of the oven, and the waterless dog grooming kit is my favourite.

It's a strange implement which looks like a giant clothes peg which you put between your thighs and, well there's no other word for it, clench.

Midwives

It is a 'gentle pelvic exerciser' which will tighten up all those unseen bits which can, so the hype says, cause no end of problems. Including many of those for which the catalogue offers other handy little gadgets to bring relief.

All of us who have given birth in the past 30 or so years will probably remember lectures from our midwives on improving the tone of our pelvic floors. Until then, we probably didn't know we had a pelvic floor and certainly, after giving birth to an eight and a half pound baby, I wasn't contemplating doing any exercising below the waist for a good few weeks to come.

Now all you need is £20 and, presumably, somewhere fairly private to clench your buttocks for half an hour or more without the family finding out and falling about laughing.

On one page, close to a gadget which repels moles but which isn't a bazooka, is the improved deluxe revolving car seat which lets you twist round to get out of the car without straining anything and thus needing a hernia support. My worry would be that it might twist round while you were driving and you'd find your nose pressed up against the driver door window but I presume it has a safety device.

Also in the catalogue is a black metal 'scare cat' which, it says, keeps unwanted cats off your garden. Oh yeah! I can't say it actually doesn't work, because I haven't tried it.

Glass eyes

But I like to think that my two have a bit more catsperience to recognise that an inanimate bit of black metal with two glowing glass eyes is not a rival model staking out their territory.

One sniff of the air should tell them that the said object has not left its usual liquid marker on any of their favourite plants.

It might, however, fool humans, especially someone, me, who came home fairly tired the other night and reaching the door said a cheery good evening to what I thought were the two cats, only to find when I looked further that they were my son-in-law's work boots.

Perhaps I need the giant magnifier featured in the catalogue.

I shouldn't be mocking such items really. After all I am the one who has all the kitchen gadgets and is likely to fall for new ones any day now. Who says an implement which shaves the hair off peaches won't come in handy one day? And who is the person who has a large green pottery woodpecker which is supposed to be a plant waterer but which I find extremely handy for filling my steam iron? Anyone catching sight of me stuffing the beak of a china woodpecker into a small hole in an iron could be forgiven for thinking I had gone mad, but I always lose the little plastic filler cup and besides the woodpecker is more accurate.

I forgot to update readers on my sojourn to talk to Pelynt WI, which went very well and I was given a lovely welcome and not thrown out at the end, which to me counts as a success and I enjoyed it.