Monday, July 2nd, 2012. Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that tile?
“If you want to
get ahead, get a hat.” That’s what they used to say when I was a child, back in
the days when men of my grandfather’s generation still wore them. It was
actually an advertising slogan of the 1940s of Dunn & Co, the hatmakers. It
was a clever little play on words that obviously struck a chord with the
public. You still occasionally hear it today.
I
attended a funeral yesterday and, as I regularly do, wore my black suit, black
raincoat and black homburg. There are not too many homburgs about today. One or
two comments were made to me, all complimentary. (What the comments made to
others or under people’s breath were like, I have no way of knowing.) And little
inclination to care. I like wearing hats. I wore the homburg to a funeral last
year too. A former pupil approached me, obviously under the assumption that our
previous acquaintanceship gave him the right to try and be smart. He said, “I
didn’t know this was a Jewish funeral.” I told him any more cracks like that
and I would circumcise him. With a pencil sharpener.
I
just like wearing hats. I am aware that it is a, what shall we say, a stylistic
tic? Men do not wear hats any more. By and large. There are one or two like me
in the streets of West Lothian, but only one or two. And they are all my
vintage or even older. A Twitter mate sent me an article postulating just why
men stopped wearing hats in the 50s, at least in America. Some thought that it
started with JFK, the first president not to wear a top hat throughout his
inauguration. But this article suggests it started to happen earlier, in the
50’s. Eisenhower had highways and interstates built, thereby vastly increasing
the number of cars in circulation. There is far less hatroom in a car, as
opposed to standing or sitting in a train. Men in cars felt uncomfortable
wearing a hat, so they took them off. And never put them back on again. It’s a
fascinating theory.
Whatever
the reason for it, men so seldom wear hats nowadays that people who do, like
me, are a regular target for witless commentary. And I just love the witless. A
guy said to me once, “Whae hat ye?” (in
other words, translated from the Doric, ‘Who hit you?’ with a pun on ‘hat’.) I said,
“Sorry; I don’t speak Imbecile.” The most common piece of asinine badinage,
“Are you wearing that for a bet?” I invariably
answer with: “Yes. I bet my wife that at least one arsehole today would try to
fob that tired old jibe off as wit. You’re the fifth.”
Curiously,
though, and paradoxically, (two adverbs for the price of one), I have often
been asked if the speakers could try my hat on. “Give us a shot, Dennis; see
what I look like.” There is obviously a hankering there to be individual enough
to wear a hat. So why not buy yourself one and wear the damn thing? There are
still shops enough that sell them. No, you can’t try my hat on. Would you ask
to try a pair of my shoes on, if you thought they were snazzy enough? Of course
not. So why should a hat be any different?
I’ve
always liked wearing hats. When I was a child, I used to try on my
grandfather’s hats. Two fedoras, one brown, one dark grey, hung on pegs in the
lobby. I’d try one on and pretend I was him. They were too big for me of course, fell down
over my brow and rested on my ears. Never bothered me. I did it all through
childhood. He didn’t seem to mind. Then , one day not long before he died, when
I was a student, I tried them on again and they were too small. I had outgrown
them. I could have wept at the irony of it.
I
bought a huge picture hat, when I was a student , from the millinery department
of J&R Allen on the Bridges, tore the flowers from it and sported it as I
sauntered around Edinburgh, thinking I was no end of a dog in my peach-coloured
titfer, my bus-driver’s black jacket with green piping, my cerise cords and
baseball boots. I passed two fat women on George IV Bridge, a lumpy proletarian
cruet set. One stopped dead in her tracks and said loudly to her companion,
“The things ye see when you’ve no got a gun!”
Oh,
how I seethed. Come the revolution, Tubs, and there’ll be none of this, plebs
haranguing the beautiful people!
I
wore hats on and off throughout my 20s to 40s – if not quite the traffic
stopper that the peach one was. Trilbies, pork pies, tweedy numbers from the
Edinburgh Woollen Mill. I rarely, if ever, wore one without engendering at
least one of the beefwitted remarks outlined above. But, once into my 50s, the tedious
comments dried up and eventually stopped. Obviously, hats are accepted for
older men, if not actually widely worn. Fine. Whatever. I wear them all the
time now. I like wearing hats. I have, in the last five or six years, only ever
had one doltish thing said to me. A poultice of a man, himself sporting a
baseball cap (ugh!) said to me, “Do you only wear hats because you’re bald?” To
which I replied, “Do you only ask questions like that because you’re simple?”
Yes, I’m bald. No, that’s not why I wear hats. I wear hats because I like them,
and would, even if I’d a head of hair as thick, and even a head as thick, as
Tim Henman’s. I have no problem with my baldness and never try to hide it. As
one of the sages in the pub said, “You never see a baldie man it doesnae suit.”
But
I have standards withal. I would never wear a baseball cap, although a sizeable
chunk of the over-50s demographic favour them. And I would happily torture
anyone wearing a pixie. Anyone who is not
a 12 year old girl, that is. You know, those fucking Peruvian ski
beanies or whatever they’re supposed to be. What a blight upon hat-wearing
those are! Every time I see a male over 15 wearing one, I want to hold him down
and nail it to his skull. “It’s a fucking PIXIE!” I want to scream in his ear.
“Get yer mammy to cross your scarf over your chest and pin it at the back, too.
And knit you some pawkies while you’re at it!”
I take my headgear seriously.
Pork Pie Hat Visionary
No comments:
Post a Comment