name tapes

Presumably these sew-in name tapes for school uniform date from 1961, when I first went to school and needed such things, to avoid confusion when it came to navy gym slips or apple-green aertex game shirts or - yes - voluminous navy underpants.  Very probably they were ordered through Kinch & Lack, who had a monopoly on things related to school uniforms in South London - at the very least - at the time.  But why would my mother have kept them in her sewing kit?  She can hardly have thought that I was going to sew them into anything that I've possessed in the last fifty years or so.  Of course, I'd love to think that they had some kind of sentimental value for her - but that seems unlikely, since she wasn't that kind of an emotional-object hoarder, so far as I can tell.  More likely she thought that if they fell into other hands, identity fraud could be an issue (yes, I know: that sounds ridiculous, but believe me, not implausible as a mode of anxious logic).  Or maybe she thought They Might Be Useful Some Day (and certainly wouldn't be useful to anyone else - except, I guess, the woman who irritatingly has the email address kate.flint@gmail.com and is actually called Kate Sparrowhawk and lives in Kent.  Identity, in other words, hardly is uniquely in synch with a name ...).  I was, though, surprisingly jolted by this encounter - an encounter of a sub-Lacanian nature, I guess - with my past self.