"Times they are a-changing"

The times do change. There's nothing we can do. It eventually happens. The vexing thing is when they do finally change we usually aren't paying attention and miss it. It only finally hits us on a rainy Sunday afternoon when we have nothing better to think about then the past.

Recently, after a rather mediocre night out in town, myself and a friend- who i shall call Chris, because that's his name, were talking about the usual stuff guys tend to talk about. The gorgeous blond in that pub, the cheek of those bouncers, the price of a chicken kebab and the disappearance of the tradition to never be seen without a hat.

It is the last of these points that I will expand upon, as it was this point that Chris and myself began to discuss. Think back 200 years, I know you won't be able to think back that far, because you weren't alive back then (sadly we can't all be Highlander-there can only be one!). However we see movies which portray events from those times and even get to glimpse at a photograph taken back then.

What you begin to notice, is that every single man in these movies or photographs, always wear a hat. They get out of bed, they put on their hat, and they don't take it off until they go to bed that following night- or if they are dead and it just fell off when their cold, dead corpse hit the ground. What I want to know is- why don't we all go around wearing hats all the time now?

Now I know men still wore hats before the First World War, because you see pictures of them all happy and peaceful, with their flat-caps and pipes, with absolutely no premonition of the horrors they are about to face. When the horrors finally did spring upon them the men still wore hats, but this time out of necessity- if they didn't have their helmet they would surely lose their head!

After the war (or 'ze var', as the losers call it) the men went back home and back to wearing their trusty hats, only now half of them were mad from shell shock and the other half had lost an arm, leg or visibility in their left eye. It would be a number of years until the next big thing to rock England, and yet again it was those pesky Germans back for round 2, only this time we called it World War 2.

Helmets again were a must-have accessory in the trenches, they doubled up as a soup bowl when you weren't dodging machine gun fire or looking for the toes which just fell off your left foot. However it would seem that it was upon their return home that the men of England decided not to don their hats.

Maybe it was because of ze var, maybe it was because they were tired of having hat-hair, maybe it was because they simply couldn't find the right one to suit their face because Topman wouldn't be invented for another 50 years. I'll simply do what I always do in these situations and... just blame the Germans!

Over and out.

P.S This blog is dedicated to the rather cool Grandfather of Miss Chantelle Marie Watson. He's seen Jimi Hendrix before he was famous for smegs sake!