RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29907, 22 August 1962, Page 20

RANDOM REMINDER

LOOSE NECKED SWEATERS

After a long spell of wet weather, home laundry problems sometimes become a problem—and this is not a preliminary to an advertisement for those who manufacture clothes driers. In many homes, a week of rain, or lack of sunshine can seriously diminish the supply of clothing available at short notice. So it was that, recently, we were reduced to wearing a shirt we had not worn or even seen, for two or three years. It was one of those with separate collars. Inevitably, there was no stud. Not at first. In the days of the stiff boiled shirt, instead of those

easy, glazed-looking things which make a formal occasion so much more comfortable these days, there was every prospect of finding a stud when needed, by getting on hands and knees and squinting through the little space left between the floor and the bottom of the dressing table. That was not the only hopeful area, of course, for those shirts used to have a distressing habit of popping out the studs at regular intervals, particularly the lowest one, the one which, by leaving the launching pad. encouraged the end of the shirt to climb up out of the trousers and billow down the front.

Today, studs must bo classed as heirlooms. It is hard to find a shop which sells them, difficult to find a man from whom one can borrow a pair. It was Wodehouse's Ukridge, wasn't it. who used ginger beer bottle wire to keep his glasses in place? He never had a wire up his collar and his shirt in such a fashion. He would not have found it comfortable, and even Ukridge might have been embarrassed to have to go out dressed in sucii a way and to feel, just as he was being greeted by his hostess, the first faint tremors of the wire knot at his Adam’s apple beginning to uncoil.