Should you neglect to have the gift on your coffee table / wall / mantelpiece / person when the giver visits, you may be able to salvage your friendship by saying that the present is so precious that you keep it hidden in a safe place where you can sneak a look at it whenever life seems bleak.Do, when talking to the giver at a later date, drop the gift into conversation absent-mindedly, forgetting for a moment that it was a present from the person you're addressing, ie: "I was listening to my all-time favourite CD the other day - it's Oranges And Lemons by XTC - when I got a call from ... A simple essay of no more than 1,000 words should suffice, just to detail which aspects of the gift you like most of all. Accompanying photos of you with said item are always a welcome touch.Do have the gift displayed prominently in your house when the giver comes to visit. You might as well add, "which is just as well, because the present's crap".Do say, a few days after you've received the gift: "Actually, I shouldn't tell you this, but yours was the best present I got Everyone else gave me a pile of old dross. I mean, it's impossible to drive in London anyway, so what's the use of having a car? The frisbee you got me was much better."Don't worry too much about a thank you letter. Upon receiving a present, follow these rules and you won't go far wrong.Don't stint on your initial reaction: first impressions last. It is apposite in most cases to sob with gratitude so vigorously that a coughing fit and, ideally, hospitalisation will follow.Don't say: "Great! Just what I wanted! Have you kept the receipt, by the way?"Don't say that it's the thought that counts.

When I give someone a present, it's the product of more research and inspiration than go into the average Booker-winning novel, so I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a proportionate measure of appreciation. I have therefore devised a handy cut-out-and-throw-away Gratitude Guide. Typically, my mother's taken his side and made excuses for him - how he's had a lot on his mind what with the divorce and the breakdown, and how it takes so long to write in crayon, now that the doctor won't let him have a pen in his room blah blah blah - but, really, we can all come up with an excuse if we put our minds to it, so why not come up with a thank you letter instead? And don't give me any of that nonsense about postal strikes when you know very well that it's relatively cheap to hire a courier bike these days. Only time will tell.8 Courtney Pine plays the Forum, London NW5, on 6 Sept (for details, call 0171 344 0044). Five days. Five days since my brother's birthday and still not a word of thanks for his present. If it wasn't for drugs, Charlie Parker would have lived ..."Yet he is keen to make his music more underground, breaking down boundaries: "I wanted the album to have more jungle music, because as far as I'm concerned, that's where I want to go next. It has the duality that interests me as a jazz musician - fast and slow, soft and loud; a mix of reggae and technology." He sees ample opportunity for a new meeting of dance and jazz, but laments the stay-at-home mentality of other jazz musicians: "They can be so narrow minded - they were left standing by the house explosion and now they're missing out on drum and bass." If they're not interested, he will have to go to the rave on his own.His description of jazz has an oddly familiar ideological tang to it: "When you are playing, you have to stand on your own two feet You have to think for yourself.

That's the kind of creative energy we need in this country, or we're going to be left behind." Coming of age in the Eighties, he is inevitably connected with those yuppie times,but his values are not so easily labelled. On the one hand, he is entrepreneurial and eager to crack the American market; on the other, he insists that he wants to stay in Britain, wants to help the cause of black British musicians, wants to "bring jazz to the masses". Could he be that rare creature, a New Labour stakeholder?"I like Tony Blair," he says, and he means it "He's the man The way he got rid of those bad seeds, he's a leader. He's the one to take us into the millennium.'' At a time when you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't tend to your image, perhaps Courtney Pine will suffer a similar fate. Demonised for trying to make jazz more appealing to the pop electorate; too clean-cut for his own good One of "them". By his own admission, he is too busy composing to get out much. He lives in suburban Harrow with his psychologist wife June and their three young children: Jamaal, Isis and Janae (whom he calls Marley, "because she was born on his birthday").

Leisure time is confined to jogging and hanging out at a local internet cafe and watching television. He may be following in the musical footsteps of his heroes but he is not copying their self-destructive templates. He even sees a formative trip to Jamaica at the age of nine as empowering rather than embittering: "There I was, walking round, seeing black people running things, organising positions of power - which you just didn't see over here - and it was like, Wow. Davis went through a lot of cocaine, which affected his music. "I'm not going to try to act like an American - it would be fake We've learned from the people who came before us Coltrane's liver gave out.

It made you feel you could do something.""Ivory tower" is his ultimate term of abuse ("ask yourself - am I going to stay in my ivory tower or am I going to the rave?") And yet, as Pine well knows, practice makes perfect. For him, the exclusiveness of the jazz scene ("being a minority music, people get away with murder") was not a source of rancour, but the much-needed spur to setting up another one: the Jazz Warriors, a big band which provided a vital platform for young black talent in the mid-Eighties, and propelled him into a record contract with Island. That wasn't my scene." His parents are still distinctly unimpressed. "My dad has stopped coming to the gigs because he was falling asleep.''He has, he believes, turned disapproval on its head and shows an almost masochistic gratitude for obstacles placed in his path. I've got a big case'.'' He parted company with the reggae outfits that he joined after leaving school at 16, not just because his musical tastes lay elsewhere, but because they weren't serious enough: "They'd stop off to get some stuff and would either turn up late or miss the gig. He played along to their ska records and imagined himself as the saxophonist Sonny Rollins on the cover of Way Out West, which he had borrowed from the local library: "At school, I was just an average guy I had these big eyes None of the girls liked me I was a goal keeper But the jazz took me out of that I could say [he beams] 'I play sax. Inevitably this looks like someone chasing after street-cred - something which his artistic development, built on unflinching optimism and a punishing work ethic, would seem to rule out.Growing up in Paddington, he rebelled against his Jamaican parents, both practising Methodists, by ignoring their plans for him to become a doctor and teaching himself the tenor saxophone that they had given him, reluctantly, when he was 14.