If you wanna get ahead..

..get a hat! Or so the old slogan goes. Frankly, I have yet to find a hat that doesn't make me look like a demented bag-lady or a female Michael Crawford, so I tend to avoid them like the plague, even when, as today, there appears to be a wind blowing round Nowhere-on-Thames which has come directly from Siberia without passing go or collecting £200. I look marginally less like an escapee from a home for the bewildered with my hair being whipped into coconut matting around my head, so I set off for an afternoon stroll into the local metropolis, accompanied by TH, with my head exposed to the elements.

Once we'd arrived in the local metropolis itself, there were, as usual, hordes of tourists taking photos of just about everything and milling about the castle and the shops doing the normal tourist things. Given the prevailing weather conditions, I began to notice the extraordinary range of headgear they were sporting.

Now, I guess that, unless you come from somewhere colder than the UK, you're probably not going to think about packing lots of headgear for a few days' break, so if you decide to buy something once you're here, you may not have the luxury of a wide choice. Even so...

The first person to walk past us was a man, sporting a Sherlock-Holmes-style deerstalker. It sounded as though he was Italian. If, indeed, he WAS Italian, he clearly didn't get the memo about being stylish and casually elegant at all times, for he had actually managed to find a deerstalker lined with grey faux-fur fabric, and had decided to wear it with the ear-flaps down over his ears and tied under his chin. The overall effect was sort of Sherlock-Holmes-with-learning-difficulties.

Putting the "tit" in "titfer"?

                                                   
Then there seemed to have been a massive outbreak of those Peruvian bonnets which look OK-ish on trustafarians with dreadlocks, handknitted jumpers and Doc Martens, but which make Japanese tourists of a certain age look like they're wearing a tea-cosy for a bet. And I'm not convinced that any man over 30 can really pull off a hat with multicoloured faux-plaits. There's something of the transvestite about it.

Would you?

And then there are the Princess-Leia headphone-ear-muff-headbands which make the wearer look like they've got some terrible ear infection, but even worse, make them almost completely deaf. I worry that, when sported by a tourist who tends to forget which side of the road we drive on, this could become a lethal combo.

No, really.....why?????

All I can assume is that these people will get home with their inappropriate headgear and consign it to a dark corner of their wardrobe, never to be seen or worn again. I mean....when Brits used to go on holiday to Spain and come back with those sombreros the size of a manned spacecraft...they KNEW how stupid they looked wearing them, didn't they?