To do this idea, you have to really like the person, enough to spend hours slaving away for their sake!

1) Buy an A5 sized cool-looking blank notebook
2) Find all of your coloured pens, magazines, photos, and start thinking...
3) Make the present!

So what is it? It's a journal of their life since you have known them. Share your memories, photos, jokes, and stupid things you've done. Start about six months before you need to give the present, and enlist the help of your friend's family, other mates and relations.

• Copy off heaps of stupid photos and write jokes all the way through the book.
• Devote pages to things like "Our Worst Mistake" "Our Stupidest Fight" and "Ex-Crushes".
• Remind them of things they would rather forget. Make it embarrassing. Make it funny.
• Chop pictures out of magazines randomly and add them in.
• List websites, phone numbers and good/bad personality traits.
• Give complements, pay them out.
• Leave pages for other people (epsecially ones that they don't know, because a bit of abstract writing helps fill in the book!) and force them (at gunpoint if need be) to write in the book.
• Add in helpful bits of advice like: When you're annoyed with somebody, walk a mile in their shoes... that way, when you blow up, you're a mile away, and you have their shoes!
• Song lyrics, poems...
• Hang around listening to conversations, and write them in, verbatim. Read over it - they sound strange but cool, especially if you've got lots of muddled conversations.
• Write lists of everything! Favourite songs, movies, members of opposite sex, people you guys like, people you hate, everyone you've ever talked to...

You'll be amazed how cool it ends up to be, and I PROMISE you that it will be a great, personalised gift! Then, most importantly, be there when they open it, and read through it together. Be armed with chocolate and tissues.

Just_Tom adds: for your pesent idea: I normally stick a really cool mix CD of our favourite songs and memorable film samples and catchphrases in the back.

So why not add a soundtrack to their life as well? Great idea.