Buy a Uniqlo T-Shirt and save Japan (well, you might need to buy a few to save them entirely, but it’s still a good thing to do)

A Birthday card appeared on my desk for me to sign the other day so I wrote in it the generic “Happy Birthday, rave it up” message I write in all whip round work related cards. The only thing is it was actually a leaving card. I felt soooo lame, I used to be the queen of writing individual, personal, funny messages and have been known to spend hours hand crafting said cards. When did I become such a…. well, a boy about it?

We’ve all heard guys say “cards are a waste of time” or “they’re just folded pieces of paper”. I know one who was given a Christmas card by a colleague who told him he could reciprocate with a card for her whenever. He then, in front of her, opened the card, scribbled out the names, swapped them around and handed it back to her proclaiming “THERE”. Another guy (unremorsefully)told me about the time he had made his cleaner cry when she found the birthday card she had just given him in the bin.

I love getting cards with meaningful inscriptions or cards that have been handmade with me in mind. I keep them forever in a box which contains my shirt that all my school friends wrote on during our last ever day of term. It has messages from friends I still see saying things like “Let’s open our GCSE results together and get really, very drunk” (we did); “I hope you continue to annoy me for the rest of our lives” (I still am) and “I’ll look out for you backing dancing on TOTP” (they’re still waiting. And it just took me a while to remember that ‘TOTP’ meant ‘Top of the Pops’). So I declare from this day on I will only write in cards things that are personal and meaningful. Unless I really can’t stand that person.

Also, I will take note of Uniqlo and The Conde Nast Group who have nailed the act of writing heart felt messages on shirts by enlisting the help of 10 celebrities to design T-Shirts emblazoned with personal messages of encouragement to the victims of Japan’s March earthquake. Choose from Lady Gaga, Nicole Kidman, Victoria Beckham, Karl Lagerfeld, Blake Lively, Cindi Lauper, Orlando Bloom, Charlize Theron, Alber Elbaz and Gwyneth Paltrow. At £12.90 each Uniqlo will donate approximately 100 million yen which is around £750,000 from sales to The Japanese Red Cross Society.