To hanky or not to hanky? There is no question

The humble handkerchief is grievously underrated. Its uses are bound only by the imagination of its owner. I say owner, but I might just as easily say “wearer” or “user”, or even “conjurer”, because an industrious person can do almost anything with a handkerchief and a positive attitude.

There are the obvious uses: wiping your hands or face, blowing your nose, conjuring a rabbit from a hat, as skilled magicians do, often with a rhetorical flourish of their handkerchief. “Thank you for mentioning hats,” you’ve already said to yourself, aloud in your wood-panelled reading room, because you know that a handkerchief can be fashioned into a headpiece to keep sweat from your eyes in hot weather. More portable than its big sister the tea towel, a handkerchief is also a handy appurtenance for cleaning up spillages.

It can be purely decorative when used as a pocket square, or super useful when strategically deployed. Tom Sawyer tied his handkerchief to a stick and used it as a bag. I don’t remember what happened in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, nor do I care, but Tom did a lot of stuff up and down the banks of the Mississippi River with nothing but a vibrant spirit and his trusty handkerchief bag.

Shakespeare used a handkerchief as a plot device in one of his films. Again, I’m not across the details, but I think Desdemona left her handkerchief in a Venetian nightclub, triggering her ruin. The handkerchief was a present from her beloved Othello. That’s another thing you can do with a handkerchief: give one to your partner as a gift.

Proving its effectiveness as an object of both high and low culture, the handkerchief is an important item in folk dancing, especially in the Balkans and the Middle East. Apparently the English use handkerchiefs for Morris dancing, which sounds fun, although when I lived in England they were used to make Molotov cocktails for rioting. Helpfully, a handkerchief can also be applied as a tourniquet to stop bleeding.

Handkerchiefs are everywhere in sports. Golfers use handkerchiefs to clean their clubs. Cyclists use them to polish their bicycles. NFL quarterbacks even stuff a handkerchief down the back of their pants and use it to wipe their hands between plays. Speaking of sports, the Herald’s occasional sports editor, Ben Coady, refuses to carry a handkerchief, preferring to use tissues to wipe away his tears when the Buffalo Bills lose yet another game to the Kansas City Handkerchiefs.

That’s the thing about handkerchiefs. People have tried to replace them with other items: tissues, towels, your wife’s Kenzo T-shirt when she’s not home. But none of these items are as good as the original handkerchief. A handkerchief is not a single-use item. Every handkerchief has a unique history. Plus they don’t destroy the environment by creating waste.