Ayoung physician, a recent and welcome accession to our health care unit, told me in connection with a minor complaint that the basic problem might be T.M.B. That’s too many birthdays. I reflected that he may have had the benefit of too few. Such personal comments, though perhaps apposite, are invidious.

Be that as it may. When yet another birthday comes soon I would like to receive some good old-fashioned cloth handkerchiefs. Persons of a certain age will remember them. One doesn’t often see them nowadays. As youngsters we used to tie their corners in knots to create combined sun shields and sweat bands. Older folk found handkerchiefs useful for waving goodbye to people leaving in train coaches or on board ship.

They did occasionally involve putting cold germs into one’s pocket, something that advertisers used to point out could be avoided by the use of disposable tissues. Cloth ‘hankies’ were also, to be sure, a bit of a nuisance when it came to laundering them. More discriminating persons insisted that they be ironed and folded, as tea towels and bed sheets should be.

As un-rumpled as possible, handkerchiefs were an important part of a gentleman’s haberdashery. The ones with coloured stripes around their borders usually offered the choice of blue, scarlet or brown to match other articles of clothing but most were plain white, often with unobtrusive in-woven designs. Solid colours were not in the best of taste.

We shall omit here discussion of the silk or pure linen variety or of that superior kind that had rolled edges and, often, bore one’s initial(s). The former type was favoured for the breast pocket of a lounge suit or a dinner jacket. To fold it in such a way as to display three peaks rather than only one distinguished those in the upper sartorial bracket from the ordinary run of men. Not to sport such an adornment at all could, as Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell might have said, be considered carelessness.

My desired birthday handkerchiefs will not be because “it’s my party and I can cry if I want to”. One is above shedding easy tears even for that TMB condition. They will be needed because the people who manufacture paper tissues have stopped making the 28 x 28 cm (11 x 11 inch) product. They first marketed them as ‘man-size’ but, as though the term ‘man’ufacture were not bad enough, a stop was put to that by the feminist lobby. If, as some feminist terrorists said, they could put a man on the moon, why not put everything man-size there as well?

One met fewer ladies as the sexual revolution took hold among women. Apparently, not even a more open- minded modern Mme Defarge was willing to purchase a man-size handkerchief. So the ‘kleenex’ people decided to call them ‘extra large’. Even that did not bring back the market. Now, everything that does not appeal primarily to the female or maternal side of humanity has been discontinued.

I first noticed the sexist discrimination that will eventually drive all men back to real handkerchiefs when my usual grocery and drug marts stopped carrying extra large disposable tissues. “They didn’t sell”, said a stock man. I didn’t believe him, convinced at first that more space was needed for ultra-soft and ‘designer’ (birds and flowers imprinted) smaller sized facial tissues and for those bulky Huggy and Pamper packages that a man seldom buys. So I took my business elsewhere and for several months continued to find the desired extra large product. You can always count on Loblaw’s, I thought. Wrong.

The supply there soon disappeared, too. I found that the fault lies at the Dallas, U.S.A., executive level of Kimberly-Clark Corp., the multinational manufacturer of paper products that clear cuts northern forests in order to obtain the wood fibre from which cellulose handkerchiefs are made. Could it be under pressure from Greenpeace, the ecological watchdog, that K-C is reducing the size of Kleenex and Scotties to the vanishing point? Soon they may be of little use except as cocktail napkins or as accessory to the few remaining restaurant finger bowls.

Lewis Carroll’s Walrus, weeping, once said, “I deeply sympathise, holding his pocket handkerchief before his streaming eyes”. And did Othello the Moor not rage against Desdemona over a handkerchief she had been warned not to give lose or give away? When he thinks she has done so he is prepared to “chop her into messes”. Even with just those two cases under consideration, who can doubt the importance of the part the real handkerchief once played in our culture?

Perhaps with some prejudice, Greenpeace says that while Kimberly-Clark, which operates worldwide, is astute at ‘greenwashing’ its image, it is a threat to the world’s boreal forests. K-C claims that a high percentage of its wood fibre comes from sawmill waste, agricultural residues and recycled wood products. Greenpeace insists that provides less than 20% of what goes into even the smallest facial tissues.

The rest comes from clear cut logging in Ontario, Alberta and other virgin forests where 200 year old trees are felled and birds and terrestrial animals are driven from their habitats. Although forest fires have a similar effect, fire kills fungi and harmful insects, releases nutrients from the burnt debris and prevents soil erosion. Clear cutting depletes an area of natural nutrients and prepares the way for further industrial activity and moisture loss.

All the above is reason for reconsidering the cloth handkerchief - pure linen, all cotton or whatever. Though anticipating some birthday gifts, I recently chanced upon men’s cloth handkerchiefs in the accessories section of a discount mart and bought a few. Packages of three 39.5 x 39.5 cm (15.5 x 15.5 inch) cotton handkerchiefs were on offer for $4. Similar but individually wrapped and attractively boxed three-packs, I also found, are available in more up-market shops at $9.

Having spent over $100 annually on throw-away tissues, I am now (barring donations) planning to budget about $15 for a further, one-time purchase of handkerchiefs that may well outlast that T.M.B. problem.