Rare goods

I like comfortable things. I never buy clothes that feel scratchy or stiff – no jeans, no crackly polyester fabrics. I cut off labels from t-shirts. And I use cotton hankies instead of paper tissues. They are softer and more pleasant for everyday use, and so much gentler than paper on tender skin when I have a cold.

In the Soviet Union cloth hankies were the standard solution – there was nothing else. The habit also seems fairly common in England: it wasn’t too hard to find hankies when I needed new ones. But in Sweden, apparently, people don’t use them.

NK, the upmarket department store in central Stockholm, used to be the place to go for ladies’ hankies. One went to NK’s ladies’ accessories department and asked for them: the demand was so low that they weren’t even on display. Now even NK has stopped selling them. When I asked why, I was told that for years NK kept stocking hankies as a service to people who had come to rely on them – it wasn’t really worth it economically.

So now I am buying cloth hankies online. It’s ridiculous… It’s the cheapest, simplest accessory you could possibly imagine – a simple square of thin cotton cloth – and they are being shipped to me from England. Eric is going to England soon and I have asked him to buy me some more, since almost all hankies I found on eBay were embroidered and I’d rather have plain ones.

By the way, I still have and use several of my Soviet hankies. No holes, all seams are intact, and the fabric is softer than ever. How’s that for quality?