It’s that time again when I play the eternal battle that faces most people each year. You want to support the cause but in doing so leads you to two weeks of a continuous fight with your clothing, a pin, your conscience and your over garments.
Yes; I’m talking about the humble poppy.
Now, I support the reasons behind wearing a poppy and am happy to wear mine with pride. I don’t write into ‘Points of View’ to deride news readers and every presenter from Countryfile to Balamory (is that still on?) wearing them on TV from mid-July, or however early it is they wear them these days; I don’t particularly support the wars we might be involved in but want to support our soldiers both past and present; and I don’t mind wearing the red one over a “white” poppy. But what I don’t enjoy is the total faff that wearing a poppy brings.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to make out that wearing a poppy is a real trial, as if doing so is really difficult like nuclear fusion, building a space rocket or trying to work out just how Nicki Minaj comes up with the lyrics to her song. It’s just an annual annoyance that really gets my goat.
Let’s start by trying to find a poppy. Now, where I work at the University of Bradford, you can rely on them having them at main reception, where I picked up my first (notice the word first, and remember it). But elsewhere it’s tricky to find them. As I wandered through town there was no one selling them in the street, weird considering you usually have to bat away charity sellers down the main street like the pilot in film ‘Airplane!’, and there were none on sale in Morrisons, which is weird considering you can already buy Christmas crackers and puddings seven weeks ahead of time but nothing for, like, eight days away. It’s almost like you have to hunt them down to find them, and surely it shouldn’t be like that?
Secondly, once you’ve found a poppy and purchased one, the struggle then begins to keep it on your clothes. For reasons unknown to me, each year they insist on selling the poppy in two-parts, like a really boring Kinder toy: the poppy, and a pin. Now, when you buy an AIDS or cancer ribbon, or get a badge free in your favourite magazine, they’ve invented the technology of the safety pin that is, you know, attached to the thing. You open the pin, slip it through your clothes and, voila, it’s attached to your outfit and only a very heavy wind, a Tom and Jerry-style magnet, or Chuck Norris is going to remove it. But, for some reason the Royal Legion think that a pin is ample to allow you to keep hold of your poppy for a week.
And herein lies the flaw. From my experience it’s fine if you always wear nice linen shirts which the pin stays in pretty happily. But if you wear a t-shirt or, heaven forbid, something woollen or bobbly, you might as well just buy your poppy and chuck it immediately on the floor as if you don’t really like it.
Even a small blob of your favourite brand of blu-tac style adhesive on the end fails to provide a permanent solution as that soon shuffles its way off the end of the pin and falls to the floor, only to be followed by the poppy in some sort of weird clothing suicide pact.
You can spend five minutes carefully pushing the pin through your top, ensuring you don’t snag too much fabric so there’s plenty of pin-end left to compensate for the movement of your clothing, and still within half a day the pin will have wriggled free, allowing your poppy to make its escape on the floor somewhere, meaning you have to spend the whole day re-tracing your steps to find it like some sort of sub-par orienteering day trip; add the pin to your collection of them; or buy a new one.
Not that I’m against paying another pound for a new poppy – it goes to a good cause after all – but I’d rather spend extra and buy one where the poppy actually comes with a safety pin attached.
Now for the past couple of years I have been in the possession of an enamel poppy badge which does come with an attached pin but even this has its flaws. Firstly, it’s smaller than the usual poppy so it doesn’t really show the support as much; secondly, as I have done, you put it somewhere safe and lose it between each Remembrance Sunday, especially when you’ve moved twice in twelve months as I have. And, if you want to buy a new one, good luck. They’re rarer than the ordinary poppies.
So, that leaves you with Hobson’s choice of sticking with the traditional poppy, the one that moves around more than the head of the caravan club as you, as etiquette and social standing dictates, change your clothes on a daily basis. One day it might be fine; the next, as you choose to wear a more flexible t-shirt, the poppy makes a bid for freedom.
One solution would be to stay in the same clothes for a fortnight, but that brings with it its own pitfalls. Like a lack of friends and people avoiding you. And stickiness.
If you are lucky enough to keep hold of your poppy then having one leads to an unfortunate tic. You know, as you sit at your desk, or in meetings, constantly fiddling with it to a) ensure it’s still there and not blowing away down the corridor; b) there’s enough pin-end left that it’s not going to wriggle to freedom; and c) it’s not curling up to form the poppy equivalent of those wrapped wafers you get in posh coffee shops. If people didn’t think you were eccentric before they will after you constantly look like you’re inspecting your left nipple all the time.
Somewhere I believe there is, next to the fridge mountain and wine lake, a pile of poppies a mile high, somewhere outside Glamorgan, where all the free poppies have blown off people’s tops, ready to be gathered up, dusted down and re-sold. I swear I saw it on Google Earth.
And, of course, in between losing your poppy and finding somewhere that actually sells them, you are poppy-less and thus feel like, even though this probably isn’t the case, everyone is looking at you disparagingly for not wearing a poppy.
For next year I’m going to get a t-shirt printed that has a large picture of a poppy on the front that says ‘I bought a poppy but the stupid pin is as much use as Gordon Ramsey at a Weight Watchers meeting for the easily offended’ and just donate a fiver to the cause instead.
In conclusion I agree with the cause behind poppies and I think people should wear them but I think they need to sort it out. A minimum of £2 in these times of inflation is not much to ask in exchange for a poppy that comes with its own attached safety pin, and having them available at more places. You can get cash back at Morrisons, why not poppy back (and sexy back if they have time, but that’s for another discussion…)?
I’m not against giving them more than a quid; after all I must buy about five poppies per season, when a season is only two weeks. It’s like Man United replacing their striker every match throughout their season because they fall off the terraces and disappear, only left with a small metallic souvenir. You wouldn’t expect to purchase half a dozen pumpkins in the run up to Hallowe’en or replace your Christmas tree every week as it doesn’t stay up. So why should we put up with it in the run up to Remembrance Sunday.
[You can, of course, keep replacing eggs at Easter. Yum.]
I can walk into any pub round here and purchase from a vending machine tampons, condoms, inflatable sheep and god knows what else that you can get for £2.00. Why not poppies? Or at least gaffer tape to affix it to your chest like some sort of bomb.
I want to wear a poppy with pride but at the moment the poppy appeal is not that appealing. I can’t support it well if every time I change my top, move or sneeze I have to re-align it, ensure it’s still on and fiddle with it like I’ve got OCD and demand it be perpendicular to my beard.
Sort it out somebody. Else I’ll be buying one of those sticky ones you get for cars and attaching it to my chest, looking like some floral version of Iron Man.
Or maybe just an idiot.
Phil bought his first poppy on October 27th and it stayed with him for four days. He’s currently on the hunt to purchase his second. So don’t judge him for not wearing one, OK!
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