When it comes to the great outdoors I have delusions of grandeur. In my own mind the SAS should be coming to me for survival advice, uh-huh. It's a true story.

One of the lessons I'd teach those roughty-toughtys is that the absence of two things in both the winter and great outdoors can make your life a ruddy great misery.
The lack of light and the lack of fire.

Blah.

However, along came the Original Gift Company and offered up a solution to all us GI Jane types.

One Windproof Lighter and Torch.
Cool!

And it is genuinely cool - if you're a real geek fiend like me.
Aluminium cased and feeling as solid as a rock and a nifty belt clip on the side, this gadget feels like it's worth a great deal more than the RRP of £9.95 (I was genuinely surprised when I checked out the price)

One end has the torch. Bright and functional although I am tempted to give the glass front a good prod because I am not too sure about the strength of that. The batteries are built in on this so the package automatically contains two detachable LEDs torch heads (and instructions about what to do - very clear) With the two heads maybe I should risk prodding the glass... Tap. Tap. Knock. Drop. Bang on desk. Nope, it's doing fine. Bonus points.

2 ¾ of an inch down the other end and you find a flip top lighter that is completely impervious to wind and rain. I'll spare you the description of what I did to it to test that. However I will say that the flame changes from a lovely blue to a fabulous green when it's battling strong winds! Very pretty (although I may not bother to share that with the SAS)

Sturdy, strong, functional and if purchased from the Original Gift Company it can be personalised with up to eight letters "Who dare"... I do.

The only single let down about this product is the rather cheap packaging - bleugh. For a gadget that looks and feels and works really well, the packaging sucks. Personally if I were giving this as a gift I'd definitely buy it, chuck away the box it came in and pop it into something sourced from a gift shop. Other than that niggle, it's well worth the RRP.

By the way, the Original Gift Company is another of those websites that's probably worth a look at if you're struggling for gift ideas - there's some real gems tucked away on their cyber pages and a very easy to use category search facility. (I've just found the Windproof Lighter Toolkit on there *drool* )