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.
Left: A sensible man wearing a sensible hat, fashioned from his handkerchief. And right: Two idiots. Credit: Reuters 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 .
