Want an interesting fact to impress your friends and work colleagues with this week? Something you can subtly work into conversation which will make you sound like one of those intellectual types?

I heard the other day that we spend over £85m in this country buying flowers for our mums on Mother’s Day.

Let me just repeat that. EIGHTY.. FIVE MILLION pounds…On a gift that is lucky to last a fortnight.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy receiving flowers, and even though I’m the only person in my family blessed with a brown thumb, I even appreciate their beauty. But I do wonder if there’s another way we can show our mums we care that doesn’t cost EIGHTY FIVE MILLION pounds?

So, faced with finding ideas either on the Internet or by talking to real live human beings (I hear it’s a dying art), I’ve just done a quick phone survey of my friends who all agree that they would love to go that extra mile to show their mum how much they care, but time constraints and a complete lack of creativity means they will probably just resort to buying flowers this year.

Although surprisingly, well actually make that shockingly, one of my male friends impressed me by telling me about the year he engineered dropping by his mum’s for a surprise Mother’s Day dinner. Not all that impressive? To clarify, he was living in Seattle at the time and she was in Australia.

Without mum’s knowledge, his sister picked him up at the airport, they both walked in the front door and he had actually managed to sit down on the sofa and ask his mum to turn up the volume on the TV before the realisation hit and the screaming began.

It reminded me that in my younger, and clearly more creative days, about nine months after moving to this side of the world, my fiancé and I decided to surprise my mum by not telling her we were coming home for my cousin’s 21st.

I can still picture her face and hear her telling the person she was on the phone to that she ‘had to go because my daughter who should be in England has just walked in’.

On a less grand scale, my ‘offensively good at cooking’ friend once snuck into her mum’s home while she was at work, and prepared a three-course meal for the whole family, for her to arrive home to.

Another mate and her husband stripped and repainted her mother-in-law’s bathroom as a surprise one weekend. (Unfortunately they used the wrong kind of paint and had to re-do it several weeks later, but, as they say, it’s the thought that counts).

I’ve heard tales of surprise repairs to broken fences, washing of cars, putting handles back on cupboards, re-carpeting of rooms, secret cleaning, and my favourites; stealth washing and ironing.

I guess at the end of the day it doesn’t matter how much, or how little you spend on Mother’s Day, because it really IS the thought that counts. Although weighing it up?

Cost of buying flowers on Mother’s Day, £85m. Cost of finding out someone cares enough to put a secret surprise into action, priceless.