Labels

I hate labels. All of them. Worst of all are the ones they sew in the collars of shirts, fiendish for irritating the back of your neck.

I hate the stickers they put on fruits in the supermarket. I don't buy fruit but my husband does, and he doesn't mind labels. So I go through the apples and bananas he's set out in his fruit basket on the supper table, carefully peeling off the wretched stickers.

I hate the Fire Resistant labels they affix to furniture, incomprehensibly sited to dangle down from the centre front of the chair so they're clearly visible. You have to keep them, of course, because if you ever want to pass on the item of furniture at a later point, the charity shops can't take it without its fire label. So I either re-attach it where it can't be seen (underneath, where it should have been stapled on in the first place) or I squirrel it away in a drawer to retrieve later if needed.

I understand why manufacturers need to attach labels like this.

But I cut them off.

Other members of my family share my dislike. At Christmas-time, Alice and Hebe had bought some very pretty double-gauze napkins for the lunch table. But they all had the mandatory labels, so when it was time to eat lunch Hebe passed round the scissors so we could get rid of the labels first. Ha!

A book I ordered recently came in yesterday's post. 

I've had this book before, but moved it on at some point, and I wanted to have it again, so I sent for a second-hand copy that didn't cost much. When it arrived I discovered a new and loathsome label manifestation. It was an ex-library book, so to protect it they'd covered it in crackly cellophane, and added a cataloguing label. Understandable but  . . . no.

Fortunately, being librarians and respecting books, they'd stuck the cellophane to an inner paper cover, ingeniously added under the book's own dust cover. This meant I was able to wrestle off the cellophane completely with its cataloguing label, and the book was left intact.

It does have inner labels of course — but if there's one thing even worse than a label it's a disfigured surface where a label used to be; so I left well alone. 

I can live with those inner labels because I don't have to look at them; I can just shut the book.

That blanket, by the way, that still has a label (shown above) — that's an example of the fly tipping where I live. It was thrown out in the street. I left it there a few days in case someone had left it there by accident and actually wanted it; but no, it just stayed there covered in mud and sodden with rain. So I brought it home and washed it, and when my husband sits up late reading, he wraps it round his legs these cold winter nights. I think I will make a nice picnic/sunbathing rug when the summer comes, too, because it's quite thick, not flimsy at all. So it's a new acquisition which is how come it still has its label.