Putting The Hat Back On The Heads Of The British People

My unheard-of three week absence from these pages can be explained by a variety of factors, including a clandestine high-noon mission which necessitated changing into my best suit in the cramped confines of a Fiat Punto in a layby outside of a west Manchester cornflake factory.  I could tell you about that little adventure in more detail, but then I would then have to kill you.  So instead I will tell you about our trip to New York to visit Abby and John- and to make the acquaintance for the first time of their incredibly cute and beautiful new baby Oscar.

Now as you know what we specialise in round here is wringing 1000 words out of a trip to the cornershop, so- and this is another explanation for that impromptu hiatus- the task of writing about something as momentous and life-affirming as a trip to the other side of the world to see your first nephew has proved strangely daunting.  I mean, where exactly do we start here?  With that first, surreal, emergence from the subway tunnel into chilly Central Park?  Or with the sunset walk across Brooklyn Bridge?  Then again, perhaps the view of the Manhattan skyline from the overland 'Seven' train as it rattles over the bridge connecting Abby's borough of Queens to the downtown district would serve as an ideal starting point to our odyssey?  Or even better-how about the vignette on the Subway platform later that night, where a trackworker came to our aid as we struggled to understand the transport system (the New York subway, a spaghetti-like mass of multicoloured squiggly wires intersecting at seemingly random points throughout the five boroughs, has been known to reduce seasoned European Citybreakers to helpless fits of sobbing) and proceeded, with the help of a smartly-dressed middle-aged lady on her way to a uptown dinnerparty who had been listening in to our conversation, to give us a quarter-hours' worth of unsolicited airline  advice, along with a quickfire review of the best places to catch late night jazz in lower Harlem?

Oh it's all very cinematic I'm sure (and that last episode was only one of many establishing  our view of New Yorkers as the friendliest, most helpful and most approachable people on earth, whatever you may have heard to the contrary), but then that's the trouble- you've seen it all before.... in the early films of Woody Allen.  So instead I'm going to attempt to convey to you the excitement of New York- and how it contrasts with our Manchester existence- by telling you about the hat.

The hat is on the table right by me.  It's a black pinstripe trilby, finished with a jaunty brim- just like the one Humphrey Bogart wore in every film he ever made.  As soon as I saw it laid out on the table outside of a shabby East Village boutique I knew it had my name written on it, and no amount of wry sideways glances from Charlotte (who was hardly in a position to demur, since her head was adorned with a spectacularly oversized pair of sparkly sunglasses just bought from the very same emporium) was about to persuade me otherwise.  $12 later I was striding across Union Square feeling every inch the 1930s mobster- and it was all the assembled company could do to dissuade me from rigging a couple of union ballots right there and then, before, as a Saturday night encore, mowing down the eldest Pascuale boy in cold blood with a view to setting up a watertight five-borough racket halting all movement of tinned herring across state borders.

Such haughty delusions kept me awake all the way home, and the Hollywoodesque headwear was still firmly in place on Monday morning as we stepped off the plane, still buzzing with the effects of a gin-and-tonic breakfast, into the unseasonably bright Manchester sunshine.  However, just as the airport train wheezed out of Gatley station the complimentary Martinis started to wear off, and that Anything-Goes-Holiday-Bubble burst, as audibly to me as the post-flight popping inside my eardrum, just as we glided over the rooftops of the Burnage council estate. 

By the time we stepped off the connecting service at Levenshulme I was feeling suddenly jet-lagged, and quite acutely aware that the sporting of a jauntily-brimmed trilby in inner-city Manchester in broad weekday daylight- depression era gangland associations notwithstanding- is the sort of behaviour liable to get your fucking head kicked in.  Weighed down by this realisation as much as by the rucksack on my back filled with holiday presents for young Frankie (who was at that moment racing across the M62 with his Merseyside granny to meet us), I scurried head-down past the Polish grocers and kebab shops lining our stretch of the A6, and, once safely indoors, hung the hat on a peg in the downstairs landing.  It has stayed there ever since.

But you know what?  I'm starting to think it doesn't have to be that way.  If the people of this neighbourhood are too damn suburban to cope with the sight of a man pushing a baby's pushchair into Greggs the Bakers dressed from the neck upwards like an extra from Casablanca, then that's their problem.  Come to think of it, hasn't it been posited by learned academics that the postwar dimunition in urban civility and social cohesion can be traced indelibly to the decline of hat-wearing among the common folk of these islands?  Damn it, I'm not standing for it any longer- what I'm embarking on as from tomorrow morning is nothing less than a one-man crusade to Put The Hats Back On The Heads Of The British People. 

Right then.  I'm off to walk around the house for a bit in my hat, just to get a feel for the thing again, you understand.  Your promises of solidarity, donations to the fighting fund, and- most valuably of all- suggestions of places in this city where the overt and pointed donning of retro dandy headwear might place me in immediate peril at the hands of sneering shopboys (the ensuing brawls later to be reported in graphic detail on these pages for your amusement)- into the comment box please.  The good fight starts here, my friends.  Hang on to your hats, now.

Comments

[Chris]

I like it! And I'm off out to get myself a top hat straight away. Or I would, but for the fact that I'm probably more at the flat cap end of the class spectrum, so whatever headgear I choose I'd spend more time doffing it and tugging the forelock than actually wearing the darn thing.

Joking apart though, the British people have started wearing hats again in recent years, inspired by that very same US of A what you have just visited. Think about it - seen any baseball caps lately? Maybe you're right: a return to trilbies would improve Britain. At least you can't wear 'em back to front!

[joella]

I wear hats! I had a trilby of my very own circa 1986 (inspired by Madonna, I think) but it was always a bit small. However I have been known to go out and about in various bobble hats, a cowboy hat, and a floppy straw hat. People laugh, but let them. You're making the world a happier place. And I've never had my head kicked in yet, maybe it's like hitting someone with glasses?

[Nexus John]

Brilliant. I've thought of a slogan for the campaign already.
'If you wan't to get ahead get a hat!'

[jonathan]

Ah Nexus John but you see that's where we went wrong in the first place- by trying to get ahead of each other by lavish displays of plumage. Come the revolution all citizens will be viewed equally, whether attired in flat caps or in those fantastic knickerbockergloryesque creations you used to see the Queen Mother in at Ascot... and as a result forelock tugging, doffing, and other servile behaviour will be consignned to the hatbox of history and our man Chris up there will be able to hold his head high in public once again, Gawd bless him...

And Joella- hat's off to you (and, indeed, hats on) for leading the way with your undersized pop-diva inspired headwear of yesteryear... I think I may have seen that floppy straw hat thanks to that clever feature you have where every time you visit your site a new picture of you appears top right... I have often wished I could work out how to do something similar on Crinklybee, if only to give everyone something to look at during any more unforeseen three-week dissappearing acts on my part...

[looby]

The hat sounds great, but I think we need a picture.

[jonathan]

No sooner said Looby, no sooner said...

[looby]

Great! It really suits you. You look like a record producer with part-time interests in horse racing.

[EE!OurJohn]

As a man with a rapidly disappearing hairline I would strongly suggest you hang up that hat for now. You've still got a good mop on you (well suited to your love of Jangly 80's indie-pop music). Don't hide it away, let it live and fly while you still can.

PS- tell us more about your clandesite trip to the local cornflake factory.

[beth]

Is that baby Oscar being introduced to Elvis Costello in the bottom photo??

[StylePolice]

You look like a dick.

[abby]

Following up on that charming comment from StylePolice, I just wanted to give you the quote that might have been swirling in the back of your head somewhere when you bought your magnificent trilby. It's from Bob Reid, a Railway man from back in the day, and his hopes for resurrecting the railways and getting rid of silly old cars:

"My mind goes to another picture, a mural that adorns the wall of the foyer of the Shell cinema at Waterloo. This mural is all about Londoners and the war. Buses, planes, and people scurrying everywhere. What strikes you when you look carefully is that all of the many people that make up the mural are wearing hats. Draw that mural today and you would be lucky to find ten hats. Fashions change and times change. In symbolic terms, the problem of the railways is to put the hats back on their public. Not to take them back in time but to rekindle the idea that rail travel is the natural and most congenial choice for many of their journeys."