A mail order catalogue with its heart in the right place has the perfect gifts for those who already have everything they need.

FED up with buying socks, chocolates or Marks & Spencer vouchers - then why not buy a camel instead? Not exactly for your Aunty Betty, perhaps, but for nomads in Ethiopia and Somalia, where camels are transport and income, shrug off drought, plod through sandstorms, live for years. At £100, a camel is a lot cheaper than a four-wheel drive and much more valuable.

And if you buy it for her, your Aunty Betty wouldn't get the camel - to her relief no doubt - but a card saying what you'd done in her name.

And at least she wouldn't have to join the New Year queue to change it, or find space for it, or get it out each time you visit. Instead, she'd have the rosy glow of virtue and the thought of her camel working hard for its new owners.

Or how about an acre of rainforest for £25, a music workshop for children at £15, football boots to get the homeless off the streets, or a kitchen kit for when they get their first home?

All these gifts and many more are offered via the Good Gifts catalogue - a fun way of giving to charity and a breath of fresh air in the middle of the Christmas shopping excesses. Their catalogue alone is a great read - funny and factual and also a nice contrast to the relentless worthiness of so much charity giving. It actually makes you WANT to give.

All the gifts you buy are then delivered through recognised charities. And with great success - £30 buys a bike for a midwife, enabling her to get to many more mothers more quickly. Already so many good gifters have paid for bikes that nearly all the midwives in Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone are pedalling away. But that still leaves Ethiopia and others.

Prices in the catalogue range from £10 - herbs for zoo lions to roll in - to £2,500 which is 100 acres of rainforest which you can then name.

In between, you can choose gifts for people in this country or abroad, for people or places, help communities struggling to survive or improve bits of the natural world.

£25 buys an orphan's dowry - two goats that makes it easier for African families to take in orphans; £50 saves a bluebell wood; £80 buys some extra warmth for old people in this country; £165 buys a school in a trunk for children in the aftermath of disasters; £185 buys a cow which can help communities survive; £225 buys a drift of daffodils for a roadside verge; £1,750 buys the gift of sight for 100 people.

Most of the gifts are under £100, many are under £50.

People at Good Gifts are keen to help, make suggestions for suitable gifts for various occasions. They do wedding lists too for those lucky couples who have everything so can turn their happy day into something cheering for someone else. They even do partybags if you have the sort of children who would be so thrilled at the thought of helping other people that they would happily do without their own bag of loot.

All are well thought out so the one-off gift will have a long term impact. After all, a camel is not just for Christmas...

* www.goodgifts.org. For catalogue (02076) 794 8000.