The Dido DVD

I once bought the Dido: Live at Brixton Academy DVD as a gift for someone I had met through Ekşi Sözlük. I paid good money for it too. At the time, buying a DVD still felt like buying something real. You did not send a link and say, “Watch this when you have time.” You went somewhere, found the edition you wanted, paid for it, carried it home, and imagined the other person opening it.

And this was not a random DVD for me. I loved that concert. I had watched it many times from beginning to end. I knew the songs, the atmosphere, the stage, the quiet confidence of the performance. So giving that DVD to someone felt more personal than simply buying a gift. At least in my head it did.

We agreed to meet one day. I went to her workplace and waited outside. Her work took longer than expected, then longer, then much longer. I kept waiting, and by the time she finally came out, it was around eleven at night.

She got into the car, and because it was so late, I said something very simple: “If you want, I can drive you home.” I thought I was being considerate. Apparently, she did not hear it that way. She became angry and said there was a company shuttle and she would go with that.

The atmosphere changed immediately. There are moments when you can almost hear a conversation closing like a door, and this was one of them. Then I did something that still makes me laugh at myself: I gave her the DVD anyway.

I had waited for hours, the meeting had gone badly, she was angry, and it was obvious that whatever idea I had built around that evening was already dead. Still, there I was, handing over Dido: Live at Brixton Academy like a man determined to complete a failed mission. The gift had been purchased, therefore the gift had to be delivered. Excellent logic.

We hardly spoke after that. We never met again, and the DVD was gone.

For years, whenever I thought about that evening, one part of my mind returned to the same completely unimportant question: why did I give her the DVD? I could have taken it home. I actually liked it. I could have watched it again. Instead, I handed one of my favourite concerts to someone who was effectively disappearing from my life at that exact moment.

There is probably a lesson here about expectations. Sometimes we do not give gifts only to another person. We also give them to the story we hope will happen. We imagine the reaction, the conversation, and the object becoming connected to something meaningful. Then reality refuses the script.

The strange thing is that the DVD probably meant far more to me than it ever meant to her. Maybe she watched it. Maybe she never opened it. Maybe it sat on a shelf for years or disappeared during a move. I have no idea.

That is what makes the story funny now. I spent good money on a concert I loved, waited outside a workplace until eleven at night, managed to annoy the person I was waiting for, gave away the DVD anyway, and then never saw her again. A remarkably inefficient evening.

If I could return to that moment, I would probably change only one thing. I would still say, “It is late, I can drive you home if you want.” If that made her angry, fine.

But the DVD?

The DVD would be coming home with me.