Way way back when … when babies and toddlers wore cloth nappies (diapers to you in the north western hemisphere) safety pins were common.

The strong, well-made ones with the slide down safety caps ruled. Women regularly wore them pinned to their aprons while they bathed their babies.

Sometimes there was a cry through the house, where are the safety pins? For years and years, millions of nappies were safely safety-pinned around all the babies who wore nappies.

Yes, of course there were accidents, babies getting pricked. But not as often as disposable nappy manufacturers shouted about. There was a technique that you were taught in prenatal classes. You only stabbed your own fingers a few times until you learned.

Now we don’t have those particular accidents. But can you imagine the billions by now of disposable but not degradable diapers in landfills and oceans everywhere? And so there’ve been other, also frightening accidents.

Whales and other marine animals choking on soiled nappies thrown overboard a boat. Soiled nappies choking the gutters and causing floods.

Soiled nappies flushed down toilets, nappies dumped by the side of roads and wildlife trying to eat them. At least when my mother, who out of sheer frustration had to dump a full nappy in a train station’s rubbish bin, that nappy was made of biodegradable cotton.

I remember her mourning the necessity and the loss, sixty-eight years ago. The railway station in Genoa, Italy. The family, including the now four month old twins, were on their way back to Netherland after a year in Indonesia.

That up there is my collection of old safety pins. At least three are forty years old from the time when it was my turn to pin nappies on a baby. These pins still going strong. I wouldn’t like to be without them.

This little repair, for instance, does anybody ever replace tired elastic in jeans, pyjamas, etc? And how, if not with the help of safety pins?