Concatenating Strings in Django Templates

Huh? Django templates seriously can't handle string concatenation in any manner that could possibly be considered sane?

All I want to do is give some HTML elements IDs of the form doodad_1, doodad_2, etc. I want to do this so that these elements are easier to find with Javascript/jQuery. I also want to generate some of these elements (e.g. select elements) with sub-templates. I can't do both of these things at the same time without resorting to something ugly. Am I missing something here?

I managed to work around this, but it's cramping my style and I don't see any particularly good reason for it.