When I was a boy, my mother stuck a note to the pin board in my room listing all the things I had to pack for school. I was like the gormless kid in the Larson cartoon: “First pants THEN your shoes.”
Now I’m all grown up, the checklist still exists, but only in my head: phone, headphones, laptop, keys. One item alone has carried over from the childhood list – handkerchief.
Every day, even now, my phone goes in one pocket, the hanky into the other. Without it, I feel undressed.
Some people insist that everyone is better off using tissues that can be disposed of, instead of a piece of fabric to transport our discharge with us. But since I was a child, my snot rags have had busy lives.
I wasn’t, thank God, one of those kids with two green strings permanently linking nostrils and mouth. My phlegm was internal. Furled. Packed high in the sinuses and in need of regular expulsion to avoid choking.
My best efforts at clearing it out could be volcanic – a housemate once quizzed me, genuinely concerned that some brain matter might be emerging along with the rheum.
That kind of force will shred a mere tissue or blow straight through it into the hand, which is not pleasant, and unlikely to get you laid.
A hanky, on the other hand, can be quite sexy.
You’re sceptical, but on my first date with the woman who was to become my wife, we went ice skating. The cold made her nose run, and I was able to produce, chivalrously, from my pocket, a fabric square to save the day.
It was unused and still neatly folded – though as she remarked later, it did smell a little pungent, no doubt after spending too long between washes in the jeans pocket and next to a sweaty thigh.
She used it though, and was grateful. I’d like to say it was love at first wipe, but I don’t attribute our happy, 29-year marriage solely to the provision of a humble rag. It was just a small, ready service that pointed, perhaps, to the notion that I’d be handy to have around.
And so it proved. Through two pregnancies, and then two beautiful (drooling, vomiting, bawling, leaking, nose-blowing) children, dad’s hanky did regular work.
To this day, my 20-something offspring (who unaccountably have never themselves developed the hanky habit) will ask to “borrow” mine to capture their catarrh.
My daughter recalls treating a hanky like a tissue – folding it in two and expelling mucus into its middle, then wordlessly handing it back to me to carry. I did, of course, but this is not the way a hanky is properly used.
A hanky contains multitudes. Or it can. An adept user with a thick cold can bestow six or eight emissions before it goes into the laundry at the end of the day – one in each corner, leaving several mostly dry patches in the middle.
It can do much more besides.
It can wipe sweat or provide shade for a bald pate. It’s a bandage for cat scratches and a sop for blood. It doubles as a serviette; a potholder; a duster, a mop. It catches a sneeze, or wipes up the residue when you miss. It gives protection from smells (by holding up to the nose) or (with water added) from dust. I’ve been teargassed twice in the line of journalistic duty – a hanky was on hand to filter the chemicals and wipe my stinging eyes.
And when teary teenagers suffer a break-up, or my wife starts gently sniffling beside me at the cinema, my trusty hanky is on hand to ease their distress.
Useful they might be, but regrettably, they are not fashionable. The days of Dickens – when hankies were so valuable they were prized by Fagin’s pickpockets – are long gone. My fruitful hanky experience notwithstanding, no modern playwright would, as Shakespeare did in Othello, use one as a romantic plot device.
No, these days, in most people’s minds, a hanky lies somewhere between puzzling and embarrassing – they’re for dags, throwbacks, Morris dancers and confused old blokes only.
After a lifetime of hanky use, I confess, I have felt this sting. When I empty my pockets for airline security I palm mine into my bag before hitting the full-body scan so no-one sees it.
As I write these lines, though, I feel like a coward. If I, a lifelong devotee, cannot glory in the handkerchief – if even I am unwilling to defend it from disdain, then who will?
From now on, I’m out and proud. I’m a hanky-carrier. Come at me.
Michael Bachelard is a senior writer and former deputy editor and investigations editor of The Age.
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Michael Bachelard is a senior writer and former deputy editor and investigations editor of The Age. He has worked in Canberra, Melbourne and Jakarta, has written two books and won multiple awards for journalism, including the Gold Walkley.Connect via X or email.
