I'm Loving... Time Zone Clocks

My husband, God love him, needs a good whack with the Gift Stick every birthday, Christmas, Mother's Day and wedding anniversary. It's a very long stick with lots of sharp spikes, yet it still doesn't seem to make a dent.

He IS good at other things, but when it comes to gift-giving, my husband is definitely and absolutely a little bit challenged.

For my Big Birthday in February last year, I told him I wanted a set of clocks in five time zones. I gave him implicit instructions on how this could be done, including where to get the clocks, for goodness sake. I also told him what cities I'd wanted represented.

The gift never happened.

I was told to go and buy myself a present instead (same thing every year but it would have been nice to have a surprise for my Big Birthday), so just to spite him I did go and buy a present. A Nikon D60 digital SLR camera with extra lens

That showed him.

Well, he didn't say how much I could spend...

Last Christmas, however, before we left Beijing, my husband did surprise me. He got the clocks organised and laid them out on the bed awaiting my entrance and subsequent squeal.

I got such a surprise, it was like he had even thought up the entire gift all by himself, from concept to execution. Of course, the clocks themselves were a wonderful surprise, but then there was the double whammy surprise of him actually doing this.

Double surprises are really really reeeeallly great! Highly recommend you organising someone to organise one for you.

So - I have my gorgeous clocks and we have them up in the new house and every time I glance at them, I'm transported to a café in Paris, MoMA in New York, Hou Hai Lake in Beijing and Regent Street, London. When I think of Melbourne, I'm always sipping a chardy at my mother-in-law's house - one of my favourite places to be.

It's lovely to look at my clocks and be transported around the world in an instant.