Your starter for 10 – much too easy – is to complete the sentence quoted in this week’s title.

If you responded, immediately, “Get a hat!”, then you may want to try the bonus question: Where does the phrase come from?

I wasn’t aware (until I googled my way into this week’s post-writing) that it comes, in fact, from an advertising campaign, launched by the British-based Hatters’ Development Council in 1948. The previous year, British men had bought 5,000,000 hats. This represents about one man in four buying a new hat. While you might regard this as pretty impressive market penetration, it represented a serious decline, particularly among the under-25’s. The Council attributed this decline to the “wave of informality” since 1918. In a concerted effort to reverse this disturbing trend, the Council budgeted £50,000 over the next two years (the equivalent of over £1,000,000 a year today) to an advertising campaign built around the catchy slogan “If you want to get ahead, get a hat1”

In the short run, the campaign met with some success. However, in the last 50 years, as men’s hairstyling (and, indeed, starting in the late 50s, men’s hair) has become a major growth industry, hats have steadily gone out of fashion.

Of course, it was not unfailingly so. My late father boasted a fine selection of headgear. On workdays, especially in the winter, he wore a Dunn & Co cloth cap for driving to and from the East End to collect fresh food supplies for his shop. (I see that Dunn & Co flatcaps are available as vintage clothing items on eBay for under £20 these days.) If he was going out in the evening, he might wear one of his trilbies. On shabbat, like almost all of his contemporaries in Beehive Lane Synagogue, he wore a bowler hat. (The only exceptions were the shammes, who I almost feel I need to call a beadle, and the Honorary Officers, who all wore top hats.) As an aid to those who are unfamiliar with any of these terms, I offer this classic comedy sketch from The Frost Report.

Having viewed that, I realise this makes my father classless (or, rather, classful). Incidentally, I remember very clearly when, together with my classmates, I was completing my UCCA university application forms: the father of one of my classmates owned a shop in the same street as my father. Under ‘Father’s Occupation’ on the form, where I wrote ‘Shopkeeper’, he wrote ‘Managing Director’. Although he suggested I do the same, and, he believed, thereby enhance my chances of being offered a university place, I felt very strongly that this would be a betrayal of my father, and a belittling of what I saw as his very worthwhile occupation. Dad’s shop was a real institution in the Jewish community, and he was loved (genuinely, that is not too strong a word) by his customers.

What has brought on these musings is the turn of the seasons here. In summer, I am careful about always wearing a hat as protection against the sun. I currently have two relatively inexpensive ‘straw’ hats – one very battered and only used when gardening, the other swiftly reaching the point where I will no longer be able to wear it even for going to the local shops, at which point I will have two gardening hats, which seems a little excessive, even to me.

In addition, I have a peaked cap with a neck flap, which offers very good protection, and which I wear for my summer morning constitutional, and a fairly wide-brimmed sun hat for other informal outdoor occasions. On shabbat in summer, I wear my panama hat, which I spent a long time looking for when I was travelling for work, and eventually found in Puerto Rico. It is a genuine panama, which means, as all you trivia quizsters know, that it was made in Ecuador.

The panama is the traditional Ecuadorean ‘toca’ straw hat made from toquilla – a small, palm-like plant that is native to South America. When the Panama canal opened, there was suddenly a demand from Europeans and North Americans passing through for a lightweight sunhat. The toca fit the bill, and since then has been known as a panama. What I particularly like about it is that I can roll it up and slip it into an empty round whisky cardboard canister. Thus protected, it could travel to Singapore or Puerto Rico, in both of which it was essential wear. Unrolled and left overnight in the hotel bathroom, where it was revived by the shower steam, the hat was restored to good as new.

After decades of resistance, I eventually succumbed and bought a baseball cap. This piece of headgear’s only redeeming feature, in my eyes, is that it can be slipped into a back pocket (where, I would argue, it looks considerably more elegant than on someone’s head). I usually wear this only when going to the supermarket, since, with any other hat, I have to remember to pick it up from the trolley when we get back to the car.

This last week, winter arrived in Maale Adumim. (It then left again, but I believe it will be back at some point.) This means a whole other set of headgear. For my morning walk in winter cold (when I can steel myself for it) I sport a woollen bobble cap. For everyday wear I have a classic flat cap, which will, for me, forever be associated with Dad. I also have a suede-like water-repellent, lightweight beige cap, which is slightly more up-market.

In an Atlanta discount clothing store, when I realised that my Shabbat hosts lived a 15-minute walk from the shul, and that the weather forecast for the coming weekend was for rain, I bought a trilby, which feels very 50s when I wear it with my now-45-year-old M&S trenchcoat. For the once-a-year deepest winter sleet Friday night walk back from shul, I have a leather, wide-brimmed Indiana Jones hat, bought on a whim at Heathrow Airport many years ago. While the wide brim ensures that no rain falls on me, and precious little on my coat, the hat has a tendency to retain the water, so that, on particularly wet evenings, by the time I arrive home from shul I can barely hold my head up.

In Kathmandu, I bought a highly decorated peacock blue Tibetan brimless cap, which I have occasionally worn on Purim and at no other time. I was also given, many years ago, a fur-lined pilot’s helmet in which I feel that I could fly a twin-engined plane to Shangri-La. Agsain, this doesn’t get much use, but it’s comforting to know that it is in my wardrobe ready to be called upon if needed.

Which, I am astonished to discover, means that I possess twelve items of headgear, not counting kippot. While I can make a case for needing hats – in the almost total absence of hair – I don’t really feel like someone who has twelve hats. Acquiring them has not been a conscious act, but rather something that happened of its own volition.

Over the years, of course, I have mislaid, or laid to rest, several other items. The only one whose loss I genuinely feel is what I would describe as a brown, corduroy, Tom Paxton cap. On relection, perhaps the period in my life when I could comfortably wear that is now behind me, and it may be just as well that I mislaid it at some point.

Meanwhile, up in Zichron, the move to winter hats has also happened. Now here’s a young man who really looks as though he’s going to get ahead.