Mistaken Millinery

On the edge of the parish is a brand-new estate. There will eventually be more than sixty properties but they're not finished yet. However enough are complete and occupied to make us consider how we might make contact with the new residents, and Christmas being upon us we thought we might go carol-singing there. That's nice and gentle and Anglican. So I went around delivering leaflets so people were warned this would be happening (and arrange to be out if they chose). 

I found the last occupied dwelling, with the incomplete houses and empty plots beyond it. A couple of chaps were manoeuvring around a tipper, and one gaily hailed me in an Eastern European accent.

'I thought you Indiana Jones!'

I boggled a bit. 'You have hat!' he went on, grinning. 

My black wool-felt fedora is nothing like Mr Jones's leather bush hat, and the closest I have to it is my waterproof. I wouldn't have thought my black wool overcoat would be very practical garb in his line of work, either. Mind you, in my teens I toyed with the idea of being an archaeologist, always more a matter of standing in mud up to your knees in return for a few mouse bones and less of Nazis in search of mystical powers. However I decided I preferred my history indoors and became a museum curator instead. That doesn't require any special form of headgear although my colleague Mathieu the education officer sometimes wore his tricorn.