WHO would want to be Father Christmas? I have been supervising wish list letters to the jolly bearded man in the red suit for 19 years now and it doesn’t get any easier.

For a start, there is always the must-have toy that it is almost impossible to get hold of. It’s as if children are all on some strange telepathic wavelength that we adults can’t tune into.

Suddenly, just weeks before the big day, millions of them, from all corners of the globe, inexplicably decide that they all want the same gadget or toy.

One year, everyone wants a Buzz Lightyear doll, the next a toy Meerkat, then a robotic hamster.

This year, shops started to run out of one particular electronic gadget one of our boys wanted early on.

Santa, of course, can’t possibly cope.

So I always insist on some Plan B reserve items.

We usually end up with lists so long, we may as well put the whole Argos catalogue on the fire and waft all 1,814 pages up the chimney.

Eight-year-old Albert, though, is proving to be difficult for Santa to satisfy for very different reasons.

Clearly ignoring any telepathic messages coming his way, he always asks for something no-one else has dreamt of.

Last year he designed a life-sized robot with a special button on its tummy. “Look,” he said, showing me a picture he had drawn. “When you press the button, the tummy opens and any toy you wish for pops out.”

I struggled to manage his expectations: “I don’t think the technology has yet been invented to create a robot like that,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter. Santa’s magic,” he replied confidently.

Santa must have used up all his magic zooming around the world in one night, I told him last Christmas morning when he awoke to his Plan B present, a red Nintendo DS Lite, instead.

This year, he has asked Santa to arrange for Sir Alex Ferguson to turn up at his school assembly with two bodyguards and call him up on stage in front of the whole school before announcing that he wants him to play for Manchester United.

“Then he and the bodyguards will take me away in their big car parked outside and drive me to Old Trafford,”

says Albert.

He has been talking to me about this for months now and I’ve tried to explain that I don’t think Santa can arrange things like this. “If I’m really good, I think he will,” he has insisted.

Eventually, I came up with a getout clause. “But Santa can only bring presents for Christmas morning.

You would have to be back at school for this one, so it wouldn’t be a proper Christmas present.”

A few days later, he came back with an answer: “I’m going to ask Santa to bring me my wish come true in a jar and I’ll open the lid and release it when I get back to school,” he said.

I thought it best to check out that his main Plan B present – a Manchester United away kit with Chicharito on the back – would still be available.

But the shop that puts the lettering on the back told me they didn’t have any “r”s and wouldn’t be getting them in before Christmas. The only other shop that does lettering didn’t have any “a”s. And because these shops use different lettering and different machines, you can’t buy a letter from one to use at the other.

“I could do a Chichaito if you want,” one assistant told me. “I can do a Chichrito” offered the other.

Who would want to be Father Christmas?

YOUNG children sometimes have such a charming take on spelling and grammar that it seems a shame to force them to do it our way. Seven-year-old Laura came out of school the other day waving a handwritten note at her mum.

“We had to write a note to tell you what time to come to the Nativity play tonight,” she said. “But I think I’ve spelt the time wrong.”

“Play tonight,” she’d written.

“Come at cwater past six.” So much more expressive than “quarter”, don’t you think?