Real stories · The funniest present I've ever bought him

The joke swim shorts that made my husband the star of the campsite — and he refuses to take them off

A present that would actually make my husband laugh out loud — not another pair of socks, not another bottle of something — that's what I'd been hunting for before our caravan holiday. After forty years you run out of ideas, if I'm honest. Malcolm has everything he needs and wants nothing, which is a very annoying quality in a man with a birthday.

What I wanted was something silly enough to make the grandchildren howl, but that he'd genuinely wear — not a novelty thing that goes in a drawer by Boxing Day.

Then I found the Benedict from a British label called York Boutique — and I laughed out loud at the kitchen table before I'd even finished looking at the pictures.

From the front, they're perfectly ordinary red swim shorts. It's the back. Printed across the back, as though his trunks have slipped, is a cheeky little leopard-print number — and it's all just print, nothing actually on show, which is why he can get away with it absolutely anywhere. It genuinely fools people for a second, and that second is the whole joke. They're light and quick-drying with a comfortable elastic waist, so they're proper beach shorts underneath the mischief — he swims in them, sits in them, queues for ice cream in them.

From the front, ordinary red swim shorts. From the back — well. Half the campsite came over to ask where they were from. He's worn them every day since.

He unwrapped them on the first morning of the holiday and I have not seen him laugh like that in years. Then he put them on and walked to the shower block, and by the time he came back he'd made four new friends. A man from Leeds asked where they were from so he could get a pair for his brother. My granddaughter filmed him for whatever the children use these days, and apparently he did numbers.

They were £24.95 in the summer sale, half what they usually are, which for the amount of joy they've produced is the best money I've spent all year. I'd checked before ordering that I could send them back if the sizing was off — you can, within a fortnight, and the delivery's free — but there was never any danger of that. They go from S right up to 5XL.

If there's a man in your life who has everything and finds nothing funnier than himself, do treat yourself to a look. The Benedict is rated 4.7 out of 5 by more than 200 buyers, it's £24.95 in the summer sale instead of £50, and the popular sizes always seem to go first.