The Jar of Buttons

I've always had a button fetish. Chocolate buttons of course, mmmmm. More especially though the obsession lay with the small round objects holding our trousers up, keeping our straining shirts closed and our chattering lips shut.
It all came flooding back when I saw the glass jar sat on Roz’s counter, filled with bright orange, green and pink sweeties just begging to be licked and sucked and gobbled down. But not so hasty please.
Connoisseurs of buttons will know that it's not pear drops, lemon sherbet or rhubarb and custard that will hit you. Pop a button into your mouth and your Masterchef flavour sensation will be flat, plasticky with a cold, hard edge. Not sweet, but wickedly moreish – ask any child - and all with zero calories.
Not so much the taste; it is the sound of buttons that is so evocative. Most sewing mums will have had a button jar. Ours was an old Birds Eye custard jar with a screwtop lid. I remember the chinking sound of ceramic on glass when you shook it, then the thundering rain as you poured the contents onto the carpet into bright, twinkling mounds. How many hundreds, thousands, millions? Impossible to guess, but if you did you won a goldfish.
Some buttons came in pairs, others in threes. Mostly though they were single, unique, leftovers from long ago sewing projects.
There were exciting buttons, shaped like umbrellas or toadstools. There were vivid red strawberries with raised edges you could run your fingers over. And there were cloth-covered buttons for blouses, soft and spongy and indolent.
On top of that there were big round buttons for coats, translucent, boring buttons for men’s shirts and a few clumsy wooden toggles kindly donated by Paddington Bear.
I’d play with the buttons for hours (yes, I was a special child), feeling the knobbly edges of some, the shiny metal of others. Dividing them into snow drifts, building great pyramids before knocking them down again. Scooping handfuls up like dragon treasure, like sand, like a Willy Wonka bonbon factory before letting them trickle slowly through my fingers back onto the carpet.
Sweet, innocent joy… and now, guess what? I have my own button jar! A Nutella jar, fittingly - into the pot of sweet stuff go the sweetie-like things. Not many yet, a goldfish estimator might say less than 100, but the humble beginnings of a new generation of umbrellas and toadstools.
Chinkety-chink, scoop, mmmm.