I blame Elvis

I am still suffering inner angst about hats.

When I hit about 50 I decided that I was old enough to get away with wearing hats. Traditional hats look too studied and self conscious on young men and teenagers. Beanies and the like is all they can wear and not look too silly.

I have a very full head of dense hair, so the wearing of hats is almost unnecessary for me. I have a wonderful Panama for the Summer but cannot bring myself to wear it, as I do not need to protect a bald head from the sun.

I notice hats on men a lot right now, and in general I hate them all - or more accurately I hate what they do to the wearer. Wide brimmed hats are almost exclusively worn by men of a certain age. Some get away with it but most don't.

The most extreme cases of inappropriate headgear are sometimes accompanied by an even more inappropriate overcoat. Nobody should ever put on a DRIZABONE cowled raincoat unless seated upon a horse and, even then, only in Australia.

I think my hat-obsession harks back to the days when almost every man in the street wore a hat and nobody thought anything of it. Pubs had hat-stands and coat-hooks in the days before young men went out in the Winter dressed in T-shirts and jeans.

Just as I was being born, young men rebelled against the short back and sides of National Service and began emulating Elvis Presley with hair-cuts which were so gloriously outlandish that they did not want to hide them under a hat.

Then, as now, only men of a certain age continued to wear wide-brimmed hats until they died out sometime in the 1960s and 70s.

My Winter town-wear - starting from the feet up - consists of Crockett and Jones boots, traditional trousers, the best tweed overcoat ever made and... a slightly wrong hat.