If You Want to Get Ahead

It’s taken ages to get my new hat from Mad Hatters in Brighton, where I purchased my last couple. Previously I went to a Leading High Street Retailer but over the years they began to prove erratic and I do like a snap brim, which Mad Hatters seemed able to supply reliably. The hat I’ve had since before the pandemic has become increasingly battered and a replacement was desirable, but between July and November I just got regular apologetic emails saying the requested headgear hadn’t arrived. Finally the suppliers came up with the goods. In the end I also got a panama (those never last more than a couple of seasons before the straw begins to fray).

I was never a hat-wearer before theological college, when a group of Staggers students quite self-consciously adopted black fedoras which gave them something of the air of Foxy-Faced Charles and Chubby Joe from The Box of Delights. I wasn’t part of that cadre but found a similar hat at Tumi in Little Clarendon Street and thought it was quite smart. Panamas I started on because I decided it was inappropriate to carry on wearing a black fedora in the summer. I now have a carefully-devised schedule to work out what time of the year I should wear which hat!

This dress element has become almost second nature to me, but it remains relatively unusual in society at large, and in fact my impression is that there are in fact slightly fewer hat-wearers even than there were a few years ago. I blame George Galloway, although Vince Cable’s fedora could almost have come from Mad Hatter’s too. Anyway, this means I stick out a bit in Swanvale Halt and I feel a little uncomfortable with the fact that the hats have become publicly associated with me; I have a feeling clergy ought not to be so individual.

The clerical uniform is intended to act in the other direction, eroding the distinctiveness and inviduality its wearers exhibit, but some clergy spurn it. It is a rare day when, for instance, you can catch Dr Bones’s father wearing clericals in his Cambridgeshire village: there is little point there, because everybody knows him anyway. Others think the uniform is off-putting, and perhaps they are right. I can only hope that my demeanour offsets it, and probably those who would be put off would still be put off by a pastel pullover and tan chinos. Were I to try to go down that route, I know I would not only be put off but feel my soul withering inside.