Richard Hearn tips his hat to Youngest™

I’ve never trusted people who wear hats indoors. This might be random or a generational thing – I don’t like whistlers either; it works both ways – but there’s something about a hat indoors that seems, how can I put it, affected. Remember Badly Drawn Boy? Jamiroquai? (Insert your own more recent third example here – I’m a bit out of touch). Whether you like their music or not, there’s always something you couldn’t quite trust about someone who never took off their hat.

“At one point he swapped his wolly hat for a cowboy hat”

I’m going to have to revise my opinion. Youngest™ just over two, insists on wearing his hat indoors. He’s always been a fan of being outside, and will fetch his shoes to let you know, so I think the hat started as an extension of that. You like a football team, you wear a scarf when you watch this football team, you start to enjoy wearing the scarf at other times.
This all started in the October heat wave.

Then it turned colder, so maybe he’s a prophet, but in the sweltering heat he was insisting on a woolly hat indoors. We had to conjure a rule for bath time, that the hat had to go on a special bear. I imagine there’s probably a special bear in the Badly Drawn Boy household too. Not too sure about Jamiroquai‘s.

Youngest™ does look very cute in the hat. I’m not arguing with that, but as he has not yet fully learnt the skill of putting on his own hat, this can cause a lot of anguish. All hell breaks loose if during the course of the day it gets nudged off. If he becomes hatless in the back of the car,
you’ll get wailing until you stop.

While we’re discussing the car, this hat-trick is matched with another: he likes to wind down his electric window. After starting the engine, in my rear view mirror I see a movement of the hat, hear the sound of the button press and feel the cold air on my neck. Logically, I suppose, these two traits go together. He wears a hat because he’s cold, he’s cold because he likes to wind down the window. In this instance, two wrongs have made a right.

At one point, he swapped his woolly hat for a cowboy hat. The problem
with this is the brim. It can easily get dislodged when he falls asleep during CBeebies. (I believe this is how Wyatt Earp met his end.)

When it is off, his urgency to get the hat back on reminds me of a diver’s relationship with their oxygen mask. He acts like it’s life or death. It does get us to obey his obsessive rule, I suppose. And for that, I take my hat off to him.