Have a hat!

I read this morning about the death of Isabella Blow, the queen of the strange hat. On her last visit to India, she showed off some extremely exotic confections, one with a couple of birds perched on it, in rather dire straits. But she wore even the most bizarre of headgear with panache, walking tall and proud into all sorts of occasions without a twitch at the reception she – or her hats – got. She was ‘Aunty’ to ace designers like Philip Treacy and Alexander McQueen and, right through a serious illness, maintained her sense of style and humour. And her hats, of course.

I love hats. I look at them in stores, online, on other people’s heads, and sigh longingly. Many years ago, when I was younger, slimmer and far less sensible, I even bought hats. There was at one time a nicely stacked pile of the wonderful accessories on top of my wardrobe, and every time I got a free moment I would try them on, one after the other, posing in front of the mirror with my hair up…or down….or somewhere in between, sort of like a combination of Veronica Lake and Diana Ross on a bad hair day. And I would hold the aforementioned hat in what I fondly imagined to be sexy poses, tilted over one eye, over the front of my face, against my hip…rarely anything even remotely salacious or adult.

The only problem with hats is, will be and always was that I hate wearing them, except for these temporary stints admiring myself when no one else can see. I never liked anything on my head, be it the hood of a raincoat or the fold of a dupatta or a…sigh….hat. perhaps it is a latent case of claustrophobia, maybe it is the Asterixian feeling that the sky will fall on my head, or it could be that I just prefer my uppermost keratin follicles to get the same dosage of Vitamin D as the rest of my head, I don’t know. But ever since the time I was in kindergarten, my various care-givers – Mother, Father, ayah or Granny – would have a time and a half trying to keep me dry during the monsoon, or cool during the heat of high summer.

That never stopped me buying hats, however. When I was about ten, a summer in the South of France gave me a big orange straw hat, one that I may have worn for five minutes every time my mother would see my unprotected head and yell at me. When I was rather older, I bought a black and white cartwheel that shaded my head and neck and, indeed, most of the rest of me, if I ever wore it, that is. And when I was in my early 20s, an oversized yellow straw and satin hat made me feel wonderfully mysterious and Mata Hari-like, especially on the one occasion that I actually put it on my head, my long hair curling wildly from underneath and my grasshopper sunglasses doing a Paris Hilton with my face.

But gradually, better sense has prevailed and I have slowly stopped buying hats. I look at them. I cover them. I even lech for them. But I do not sidle furtively into the hat department of a large store and try on a few, with an aim to buying at least one before whoever I am with catches me and takes it away. I no longer walk single-mindedly into tourist shops and test-wear the hats stacked in one corner where I hopefully imagine no one can see me and stop me. The stack on the top of my wardrobe is down to none and I have been happily hat free for years now.

But whenever my friend Nina tells me that my life sounds like she needs to buy a hat (no translations offered for that, sorry!), I sigh, again longingly, thinking of the days when I could and would go out and do that myself.