Actually, you can’t leave your hat on

My long-held ambition is to be at least eccentric in my old age. I’m allergic to cats, so that rules that out but I was thinking interesting clothing and multicoloured hair and spouting mutterings of the “oh she’s incorrigible” variety. I hear old age isn’t great, so the plan is to grant myself a Feck Yiz All licence by way of compensation. I also have a schedule of vices, with a direct correlation between age and severity of vice, so at 75 I’m going to be drunk by 10am, 78 I’m going to smoke 50 a day, doing crack at 80, that kind of thing.

My children assure me I’m doing a good job on the eccentricity and I am aware that there has been some kind of corrosion in previously firm filters that might have stopped me saying some things, so that I occasionally have to Chandlerishly wonder: “Did I say that out loud?” But sometimes there are setbacks.

I was in Texas recently and, naturally, bought myself a cowboy hat. It’s open carry of handguns in Texas and the Walmart huntin’n’fishin’ department is full and fascinating, so a hat was really a very sedate local-themed purchase. It keeps the sun off your eyes, and possibly reality because I duly sported it every subsequent day, regardless of my other attire. I thought it was a marvellous investment, indeed a homeless man in Memphis said I looked like I should be in Hollywood. Then asked me for $20.

Despite absolutely zero affinity with cows or horses, though I do like boys, I developed such an affinity with my hat that I no longer felt dressed without it and believed I was making excellent eccentricity progress. Until I got home and saw the look on my daughter’s face. It suggested I had crossed the line from ‘endearingly eccentric’ to ‘total spanner’. I clearly have progress to make before I can run the gauntlet of teenage disdain.