Strictly Buttons 20.11.11

I've been told that watching Strictly Come Dancing a particularly vacant expression comes over my face. It's pleasure, sheer silly pleasure, and I suppose pleasure looks foolish to those who don't share your taste. However, although I'm aware this may be a more personal preference, there seems to me to be something missing in Strictly. There is a wilful lack of buttons and buttoning. A reliance on Lycra means that while costumes can be daringly, impressively figure hugging, if thin straps snap, zips fail or Velcro fastenings become clogged, then clothes can come awry mid shimmy, mid thrust, and expose all and sundry. If only a button or two had been attached, then there would have been something to hold things in, up or down. Scroll through the images of glittering female dancers' dresses and show me one single button. Not one, dear reader.

                                                                                                                 (splendid Chelsee)

Worse still - worse than the recent retail tendency to leave out the vestigial buttons at the top of women's shirts, no doubt to save the cost of two plastic fish eyes and their buttonholes - the men on Strictly, in Latin numbers in particular, are left largely unbuttoned. More often than not there are no buttons of which it might be said had come undone. Sometimes they are entirely shirtless, thus denying all potential buttoning. Craig Revel Horwood, a pundit whom I hold in high esteem with regard to matters of the hoof, has been known to suggest that this lack of strictly buttoned covering is appealing. I believe most strongly that more is generally more attractive in the clothing stakes, even if the body in question is superb. Let our imaginations unbutton what is just so slightly hidden from view. Let satin and net strain over their sequined buttons by all means, let buttonholes gape, but let some of them - for the love of all that buttons have given to our society since the thirteenth century, the invention of the buttonhole, the discoveries of the Enlightenment and the techniques born of the Industrial Revolution - at least let some of them stay done up. 

 

 Poppy Appeal 11.11.11 

      It's the season for wearing poppies. Practically everyone in public life has

been wearing one for the past two weeks or so, in Parliament, on TV, in the

published haunts of celebrity culture. Recent reaction to Facebook images of teenagers

setting light to a poppy in Coleraine, Northern Ireland, betrays our default position and

now they are thought necessary on the football field. They are long respected, practically

unassailable symbols that have come to make some wearers themselves feel worthy of

respect. Poppies are worn on the lapel, and are more of a challenge for women's wear.

Sometimes a splash of red just won't work with orange and tan silk jersey, or teetering on

a décolleté - with those awkward stalks and inadequate pins that will not hold it fast - they

can seem out of place. There was a hoo-ha about them being worn too early on the BBC,

and when the writer Will Self chose to refuse one. This season the poppy was sported

from late October once more. There are designer versions, in gold and silver plate and

enamelware, and Simon Cowell, the TV personality, was spotted with a crocheted

number, studded with Swarovski crystals. I have an old affection for the poppy

buttonhole, and yet to wear one can seem complicated.

         As a child I recall old soldiers purveying them on street corners, alarmingly sans eyes or limbs, flesh burnt away. I'd steel myself to catch the attention of one ancient man in worn civvy suit and no medals, with a trouser leg neatly pinned, trying not to stare at a gap where once his nose had been. My grandmother would place the poppy by a photograph of a brother who'd been killed at the Somme. She had another for a son, who'd crashed on his first mission in a Wellington in 1940. Such things were not discussed but somehow I recognized that this reticence was grief. Many families have such stifled memories and the poppy with its inbuilt bravura, and its association with the two-minute silence, has seemed a fitting gesture.

The first poppies were worn in Britain in 1921, following the example of Moina Michael, who had produced the first poppy emblems the previous year in America, to raise funds for wounded and needy ex-servicemen. Initially there was some resistance. The returning troops had won a war, and some might well have thought to see their victory celebrated. The poppy had been inspired by John McCrae's poem In Flanders' Field and quickly became imbued with the idea of sorrow. In regretting those who had died it easily became a symbol of hoped for peace. Indeed members of the government had fears it might come to represent a criticism of military force.

Poppies are things of beauty, crenulated tissue-thin scarlet petals hiding that sooty black and indigo central crown. A fleeting flower and yet the seedpod can be long lasting, elegantly constructed, found in Grinling Gibbons' voluptuous woodcarvings at Hampton Court and delicate filigree Art Nouveau silver vinaigrettes, in Elizabethan embroideries and contemporary sculpture.

Hybrid forms of the poppy can be gorgeously overblown. The heroin poppy evokes alternative realities, addiction and for the romantic poets at least, a sleepy, dangerous glamour. The wild poppy is unassuming and fragile. For most brought up on the war poets at school, the buttonhole reminds us of the horrors of trench warfare, the poppies said to thrive in the mud when nothing else was left to grow. The British Legion Poppy consists of two simple red card pressed petals, paper leaf, plastic stem and black button. They have been assembled since the 30s in a factory in Richmond-on-Thames, by ex-soldiers or their disabled dependents; in Scotland there has been a factory in Edinburgh since 1926. Somehow they still manage to evoke the field poppy and its evidence of life and colour on those dismal killing fields. For most the poppy appeal is an opportunity to support disabled service people and to honour the war dead, quietly. Simon Cowell's poppy and other show biz support must surely have boosted sales for the charity, yet there remains a tension between this simple unifying gesture of regret and the brash world of celebrity.