IF IT'S GOOD enough for Elizabeth the Queen of England, it should be good enough for Elizabeth my wife, but somehow I don't believe a fish singing "Don't Worry, Be Happy" is going to do the trick. Nor do I hold out much hope for the plastic sushi or the course in tank driving.

Ever since Christmas shopping season started, which was about three hours after Santa Claus replaced the Easter Bunny in department store windows, I've racked my brain, several dozen snooker balls and a couple of tons of hay trying to come up with gift ideas. Something special has been the theme.

But originality has now given way to desperation, which in turn will yield to total panic once the Thanksgiving dinner bell goes, a tocsin warning me there is just about one month left to come up with something suitable or be prepared for seven weeks of vegetable stew at suppertime.

Wives are notoriously difficult to shop for, and mine is that, with knobs on. Elizabeth is quick to advise that her preferences run to clothes and accessories, but she is even quicker to opine that as far as fashion and style are concerned, my taste buds lay somewhere between the heel bone and the big toe of my left foot.

This rather harsh criticism appears to stem from my preference for an aquamarine T-shirt emblazoned "All Stressed Out and No One to Choke," a cricket hat that she insists would look better on a dead cricket, and my stated opinion that jeans should be worn only by people on Death Row.

Anyway, with clothes and stuff out, my Christmas gift shopping annually takes on the aspect of a quest for the Holy Grail. More often it ends up with a used cat food can, metaphorically speaking.

For one Yuletide a few seasons back, I bought her a cappuccino coffee-making machine. It turned out you needed an advance degree in hydraulics to operate it, and Elizabeth, bright though she is with most things, still has not mastered the video recorder after 11 years.

Stored alongside the cappuccino machine in the remote rear of one closet is a metronome, another Christmas gift. She found it an annoyance when she was playing, so she sold the piano. The world globe followed into the closet's depths when, a few months later, the Soviet Union dissolved.

(On the other hand, pride of place still goes to a wristwatch I got for free when I spent 60 bucks on a bottle of eau de cologne at a pharmacy. She loved the watch, hated the cologne.)

This year, I've decided that since my imagination owes more to Stephen King than to Yves St. Laurent, I'd look to others for ideas. For taste, it should be hard to beat Queen Elizabeth II - then I found that one of her favorite gifts was something called "Big Mouth Billy Bass, the Singing Sensation."

Billy is a rubber fish that looks like a mounted large-mouth bass It hangs on the wall, and when it detects an admirer it immediately flaps its tail and sings a bit of reggae called "Don't Worry, Be Happy," or "Take Me to the River," by someone named Al Green.

It is hard to believe that either of these ditties is something the Queen hums under her breath as she goes about her daily chores knighting new knights and issuing royal decrees banning the sale of hot dogs in the shadow of Buckingham Palace.

Nevertheless, Big Mouth Billy Bass hangs there amid the historic portraits and elegant furnishings at Balmoral Castle, where the Queen gathers with family and friends around the piano, to sing along with the stuffed fish. And you begin to understand why her eldest son, Prince Charles, talks to oak trees.

(It seems that not only the Queen, but the prime minister, Tony Blair, has Billy Bass hanging proudly alongside the family knick-knacks. Sometimes, I'm convinced that if he had two less IQ points, Tony Blair would be an oak tree. This country is not overly endowed in sanity these days.)

"Billy Bass is our biggest seller ever," insists Malcolm Ford of Funtime Gifts. "It will top a million by the end of the year."

Maybe so, but one of those million won't be in the Webb household. It dare not. I have a suspicion that if I gave my Elizabeth a Big Mouth Billy Bass for Christmas, it would indeed be stuffed, and I don't mean down my throat.

Still in keeping with the "originality" theme, I've found other possibilities. There is the plastic wind-up sushi that whizzes across the table, the cigarette lighter that cusses you in Japanese if you open it to fire up a cigarette, or perhaps a nodding Buddha for the rear window shelf in the car.

"There's a huge demand for this sort of thing," Tony Morgan, a department store home fashions coordinator. "I think everybody is so stressed out that it's nice to have a laugh about something like this."

I have a hunch that "stressed out" would take on a whole new meaning if I were to wrap up a self-propelled sushi in foil and tinsel and hand it to my wife as a Christmas present. Lesser violence was settled in the signing of documents aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Harbor back in '45.

But this is doing nothing to solve my dilemma, and meanwhile I've taken to listening to the words of a former Harvard mathematician-turned-composer named Tom Lehrer to try to dispel my growing Yuletide cynicism:

"On Christmas Day you can't get sore, your fellow man you must adore, there's time to rob him all the more, the other three hundred and sixty-four. . . "

Wonder how a pint of lager table lamp might fly? Aside from at my head, that is. Or maybe a 75-buck gift voucher for a one-day course in how to drive a Challenger tank . . .?

Please, kindly press that button for me. The one labeled: "PANIC!"

Thought for the Week: God grant me the senility to forget the people who I didn't like anyway.

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