Retail Therapy: Good home for unwanted hedgehog: Julie Aschkenasy suggests what to do with Christmas presents you don't want and discovers some good replacements (CORRECTED)

CORRECTION (PUBLISHED 16 JANUARY 1993) APPENDED TO THIS ARTICLE

Look at all those Christmas presents lying around the house. Are you really going to wear that pink nylon dressing- gown? Will the kids ever tire of Sonic the Hedgehog and turn to the sew-it-yourself penguin kit?

If the answer is no, you can help the British Heart Foundation: it has a scheme for dealing with unwanted presents. You can take your dressing-gown, penguin kit or any unwanted gift - or good-quality clothing, or bric-a-brac - to one of its 138 shops before 30 January and you will get a voucher entitling you to 25 per cent off your next purchase from the BHF chain. The vouchers are valid until the end of February (though not for the range of chain-store

IN AN exhibition opening on Thursday, the Crafts Council aims to show the best of small-scale and domestic glass-making from the last 25 years. The Glass Show is the first of two linked exhibitions; Part II (scheduled for 1995) will deal with larger works.

In Part I, 40 leading glass-makers are showing single pieces and small-batch production items. On display are a variety of techniques and styles such as the pate-de-verre bowls by Diana Hobson, etched and sand-blasted figurative designs on plates by Steven Newell, and iridescent scent bottles by Catherine Hough. Some of the exhibits will be for sale, and the Gallery Shop will stock lower-priced batch-production pieces by many of the exhibitors, priced from pounds 18.

The Crafts Council is at 44a Pentonville Road, London N1 (071-278 7700), and The Glass Show is open Tuesday- Saturday, 11am-6pm, Sundays 2-6pm. Admission is free. The show will later tour the following venues: the Castle Museum, Norwich (20 March-2 May); The Friary, Cardiff (8 May-12 June); Cartwright Hall, Bradford (26 June-8 August); Tullie House, Carlisle (14 August-26 September); Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead (2 October-14 November); Wolverhampton Art Gallery (20 November-9 January 1994), and Leicester Museum (15 January- 27 February).

THE World Arts Market is a mail-order music and video company which offers armchair shopping and a 10 per cent discount on recommended retail prices. It supplies a free, quarterly mail-order catalogue with more than 10,000 titles, and will attempt to trace and source any other. (It promises not to be superior if you ring up and hum a tune you heard in a TV advert.) Music is available on cassette or CD, and you can order by post, telephone or fax. For a catalogue, phone 071-794 8005.

My nomination for 'Diary of the Year' goes to the Fortean Times 1993 Diary. You have almost certainly chosen your own diary of the year - but what does it tell you about today that you could not find out from the top of this page? The Fortean Diary reveals that 9 January was the day set by King Charles II in 1683 for the Ceremony of Touching for the King's Evil. The diary is guaranteed to keep you amused with such weird facts and extraordinary events for every day, alongside the space to record the details of your own ordinary existence.

The entry for 21 May caught my eye: 'In 1921 a frog fall during a thunderstorm in Gibraltar covered the north of the colony with thousands of little amphibians. Frogs are the most common animal to fall from the sky mysteriously; such falls have been recorded regularly since Pliny and the Annamese historical almanacs. Athenaeus's Deipnosophists (4th century AD), records a frog fall in Greece so serious that the roads were blocked, people were unable to open their front doors and the town stank for weeks. There are records of hundreds of frog falls in the last 200 years.'

The diary is available from bookshops or by mail order (p & p free) at pounds 9.99. It is in 'week-to-view' format, slightly larger than A5. From Fortean Times Diary, 20 Paul Street, Frome, Somerset BA11 1DX. Credit-card orders on 0373 451777.

THE Bed Side Bed is the perfect compromise for parents who cannot bear to have a wall between them and their infants but who do not want the little demons in bed with them. An adaptation of the traditional cot, it fits against any adult bed (from 12in to 30in in height), allowing your baby to sleep next to you but in in its own bed. Made from beech, the bed is fitted with lockable castors and takes a standard cot mattress. It looks similar to a traditional cot but has only three high sides, the open side being pushed and secured against the parents' bed.

A conversion kit is available to turn the bed into a full, four-wall cot, and the sides can be removed altogether later on to help the child get used to sleeping in a normal bed. Enquiries to The Bed Side Bed Company, 081-989 8683. Price pounds 250, with conversion kit pounds 295 (kit pounds 75 if bought separately).

CORRECTION

IN OUR report last week about the British Heart Foundation's offer to take unwanted Christmas presents off your hands in exchange for a discount voucher that can be used in its 138 shops, we gave the wrong telephone number for the foundation. The correct one is: 081-390 8011.

(Photograph omitted)