SOMETHING for nothing? Sometimes even that can be rotten value for money. Especially when your fingers are jammed together with sticky plastic. Every week, magazines are trying to give us something. In any newsagent's display there are rows and rows of magazines with a give-away clagged onto the front. Sometimes, the gift and magazine are sealed inside a polythene bag - don't let your dentist see you trying to tear your way in with your teeth. This stops you having a little glance through before you decide to buy.

We might get them for nothing but all those freebies probably cost the magazines a fair amount of money. Three leading men's magazines - FHM, Loaded and Maxim - will apparently spend £5m on give-aways this year. Which is an awful lot of plastic.

A free CD, chamois leather or lipstick won't change our lives and we could probably afford to buy one if we really wanted one. But because we all like something for nothing, that lipstick or notebook could be just enough to persuade us to buy one magazine instead of another. Though there might be a limit to how many compilation CDs one music collection needs. (There was once a long correspondence in the pages of the Times or Telegraph about what uses could be found for all the free CDs you get in magazines and newspapers these days. Among the suggestions was to string them up to use as Christmas decorations and then after Twelfth Night, stick them in the garden as bird scarers.)

Gifts range from the nice but pointless - would you really wear a woolly hat with the initials of Performance Bike on the front? - through nail varnishes, lip gloss and eye makeup - and what chance the one on the cover being the perfect shade and texture? - to the frankly tacky. A nylon bag is a nylon bag, even when it's reversible.

Plus, there are any amount of CDs and recipe booklets.

There were some we quite liked - the notebook from Homes and Gardens was OK, and we'll certainly plant the tulip bulbs from Garden Answers. We've given the woolly hat to the editor because he shares initials with Performance Bike. Vrrroom vrrroom.

We liked the piano classics CD from Classic FM and we're sure the pot of coloured glue will come in really useful one day. But the gift we most appreciated was the stationery set from Cartoon Network because it arrived just when we needed a ruler.

Oh yes, and the Cheerios bar that was stuck to the Beyblades magazine. Sweet, sickly, but we'd missed out on breakfast so ate it just the same.

After all, it hadn't cost us anything...

SOME OF THIS MONTH'S FREEBIES

ART ATTACK, £1.75 - Pot of coloured glue.

B, £2.50 - Three lip glosses.

BEYBLADE, £1.99 - Trading cards and Nestle Cheerios cereal and milk bar.

BOB THE BUILDER, £1.75 - Crazy golf set. Clearly for very small golfers as the club is about seven inches long...

CARTOON NETWORK, £1.75 - Cow and Chicken stationery set - pen, ruler, tiny roll of sticky tape and a sort of paper clip. Genuinely, just what we needed.

CLASSIC FM, £3.99 - Two CDs - Piano Classics and one for a competition.

COSMO GIRL, £1.55 - Four in one nail kit. Three pots of nail polish - "your free birthday gift with love from Cosmo Girl".

ELLE, £3 - Designer bag by Antoni and Alison. Reversible. "The hot new season shopper." Mmmm.

FOUR FOUR TWO, £3.50 - "Definitive Guide to World's 20 Greatest Football Holidays".

GARDEN ANSWERS, £2.70 - Pack of ten tulip bulbs.

HOMES AND GARDENS, £3 - Designer notebook. "Exclusive decorator's notebook on gorgeous award-winning fabric design."

MIZZ, £1.60 - Powerpuff Girls stickers.

NOW, £1.10 - Party Now CD, with tracks by The O Jays, The Jacksons, Cyndi Lauper and Snap "Get into the groove with your great free party CD. The party starts here..."

PERFORMANCE BIKES, £3.40 - Woolly hat. "Stick your head in one of these." Actually, quite a nice hat.

PLAYSTATION, £5.49 - Disk with demos of 14 games.

PRIMA, £2.10 - Nylon bag. "Useful, classic, long lasting."

PRIMA BABY, £1.99 - Free vest with "Superbaby" on it and booklet about the time from two to four years.

SUGAR, £2.10 - Two free gifts - Sugar Love Quiz Book: "Suss his secret signals..." "Hook him by his hair..." plus a Lip Gloss Kit: "Get a perfect pout with four sassy shades and lip brush."

TOP OF THE POPS, £1.95 - Guessing game - a sort of smaller and tackier version of Guess Who? using pop stars as pieces.

TOP SANTE, £2.10 - "Ultimate feelgood CD" including, of course, Gloria Gaynor's I will survive. But will you survive the fat burner workout also offered to go with it?

TOTALFILM, £3.10 - Lifelines - movie quotes to live your life by: "If I ever start referring to these as the best years of my life, remind me to kill myself", "It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces", "Get out of my way son. You're using my oxygen." Oh yes, we liked this one.

VOGUE, £3 - The Ultimate Shoe Guide - lots of pictures of exquisite shoes that we can't afford and couldn't walk in if we could.

WOMAN AND HOME, £2.80 - Food magazine "345 recipe ideas - heavenly desserts, veggie suppers, New Sunday lunch..."

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