BY ROGER WATSON

If you spend a lot of money on a hat, you expect it to be a good one. I just have, it is and it came from Borges & Scott. But more about the hat later.

I have worn a variety of hats over the years. Starting at school there was the navy blue school cap with the school badge above the peak which was donned along with a school trench coat before setting off for school. Then I was in the Cub Scouts where we had a similar cap which was green with yellow trim and a badge to denote your troop. I was very glad to graduate to the Boy Scouts and I am old enough to have worn—with considerable pride—the original Baden-Powell scout hat, which is described as a ‘broad- brimmed felt hat, with a high crown, pinched symmetrically at the four corners’ and which came replete with the narrow leather hat belt. This had to be steamed and shaped before coming to Scout meetings. I was disappointed when the Boy Scout uniform was modernised; the distinctive Baden-Powell hat was out and in came the green beret accompanied by a brown beret for the Venture Scouts.

My next major encounter with hats was as an officer in the Territorial Army. We wore a beret most of the time, the more well-worn the better, and an officer’s cap with my number  2 uniform. I always felt remarkably stupid, not to mention prominent, in this cap which at any moment seemed ready to fall off. It served little practical purpose.

I find baseball caps, apart from keeping the sun out of your eyes, to be fairly useless and, the older I get, increasingly ridiculous. The sun is much better kept out of your eyes, and off your ears, wearing a Panama hat and that is how I try to cut a dash on a sunny day. My wife tolerates it, my children merely smile and try to keep as much distance between them and the man with the hat as possible. I could never get along with the soft woollen hats much beloved of outdoor types (made my head itch) so, for hill walking and camping I wore a deerstalker or a cap with flaps, mainly because the flaps could be tied under the chin which kept my ears warm and prevented them (the hats!) from blowing off in a gale.

But then we come to the tweed cap, in my mind the queen of all hats. I have long had a herringbone flat cap, obtained many years ago in a fishing and shooting shop in Edinburgh, F & D Simpson on West Preston Street, Edinburgh. It is a delightfully antediluvian establishment; it has no website. This cap has served me well at home and abroad in fair weather and foul. I forget the price, but it was well worth whatever I paid for it. However, all good things come to an end and I noticed that my old cap was suffering from the signs of fair wear and, especially, tear. At some point soon the peak is going to become detached from the rest so I decided that retirement was the only option. It now rests on a hook in the cloakroom and there it will probably remain until my wife decides otherwise.

My advanced years which mean I always feel cold, the microscopic amount of hair left on the top of my head and the fact that I now almost feel naked without one means that the old cap had to be replaced. Which brings me to my latest cranial adornment, a Borges & Scott eight piece Harris tweed Dingwall cap. Not cheap but this truly was money well spent. Available in three colours—woodland, partridge brown and herringbone—with three choices of lining I went for the herringbone with a burgundy lining. It arrived superbly packed in a very nice box. I always worry that hats are going to be too tight on my rather large bonce, but this one slid on and I felt like it had been made especially for me. It fits perfectly, has already remained in place in several Shakespearean gusts and it keeps my brain as warm as toast. What’s more, I think I look quite stylish. My wife agrees, but this has yet to be confirmed by any of my children.

Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.