badges, badges, we don't need no stinking badges!

(which I always think of in terms of Julian Cope's Julian H Cope so I tend to follow it with "Sissified, you're civilised, I wanna be a savage!")

I spent my writing breaks last night going through various boxes until I found some good enamel badges for my blazer. Currently, it's a lone Thompson twin but I also have a little Dougal (I'm sensing a French cartoons interest I never realised I had), a soviet communist star, a hare, a Yoko Ono Imagine Peace and a very snazzy one in silver and red. Today, i have the Thom(p)son twin.

This is rather entertaining as, back when I was at a school with blazers as uniform, I wore my stinking badges under the collar and they included a Thompson Twins one. You wore your badges under the collar, then walked about with the collar turned up to reveal them. If a prefect or teacher who was a sod about dress code came by, you just had to drop the collar to look all innocent. I had a Madness M, and the 2-tone logo - this is why as soon as I pulled on a blazer style jacket, I had an urge to add badges and go mod-like. Zoe Williams (a woman incapable of writing an article without bracketed comments) wrote about the curious lure of replicating school uniforms in the Grauniad the other week. I love her idea that the subconscious return to white shirts, black blazers etc is "the search for a set of formal parameters within which rebellion can be undertaken in a circumscribed and comprehensible manner".