A holiday problem to try get your head around

Unlike your waist it cannot be increased or decreased by simply accepting or refusing a fourth piece of fried chicken.

In a world of significant wonder that routinely forces us to challenge every thing we think we know, there are still a few things you can set in concrete.

The sun will always come up in the morning, teenagers will always feel misunderstood and an ungloved hand will always find the cat poo in a flower garden.

And, of course, there is the size of your head.

Unlike your waist it cannot be increased or decreased by simply accepting or refusing a fourth piece of fried chicken. What you have is what you will always have. It is a certainty that cannot be made uncertain. It is immutable.

This is something everyone should bear in mind when considering commenting on the head size of the people around them. In the circumference of our skull we are all victims of genetics and, to as much of a degree as this allows, essentially blameless.

However that doesn’t prevent me feeling like a victim and looking for someone to blame for my head, because it is a problematic piece of bone that I am not happy with at all.

For the last three weeks the seemingly simple task of finding a holiday sunhat for my head has proved utterly fruitless. It is not because I am fussy or unable to make up my mind. My lack of success is entirely on the account of the mighty girth of my skull.

While the human race is remarkably varied in size, shape and colour, most men have a head size between 56cm and 58cm and the world is designed to accommodate them.

My head size is 61cm, a mere 4cm, or 7 per cent, bigger than the average.

You might think this could be easily accommodated. But you would be wrong, and not just because your average head lacks the mental capacity to understand such complex situations.

For some reason, apart from when purchasing a trucker’s cap of the type you wear when committing a murder, a 4cm head size difference is crippling to your hat buying opportunities.

If blessed with a 61 cm head I have discovered you have three options.

You can select a 58cm hat that severely restricts the flow of blood around your scalp enough that certain unnecessary functions like sight, speech and taste shut down due to lack of fuel.

If that’s not your idea of a good time you can buy an flannel bucket hat of the sort made famous by men who wear socks with sandals to Christmas dinners and carry hankies in their sleeves.

Or, thanks to the internet, there is a third option. You can go online and search for such things ‘‘big hats for big heads’’ or, if you want to increase your chances of success, use the terms ’’hats for those with grotesquely massive skulls’’ or ‘‘hats for the socially embarrassing loser’’.

It never used to be this way for big headed people. Not so very long ago in an age that some might say was horrible unenlightened and dramatically racist, a big head was the grandest thing a man could own.

This is because it indicated a large brain and large brained people were really the only ones fit to dominate all other humans and subjugate them to their every whim, which was usually growing cotton, sugar cane or rubber trees.

The science of craniometry soon fell out of favour because, like so much of early science, it was soon found to be total poppy cock that was only ever about giving Europeans the evolutionary authority to be the jerks they were being.

It was obviously bogus from the beginning and is even more obvious now. After all, Albert Einstein, one of the 20th century’s smartest chaps, had a brain that weighed just 1.23kg. Which is to say, significantly smaller than average.

The reason I want a sunhat in a spring so wet even the puddles are complaining is because next month I am going toNoosa to eat prawns and read books. It’s fair to say I’m quite looking forward to this holiday and may have in fact mentioned it before.

In Noosa the temperature will be about 24 degrees Celsius, or about 10 degrees hotter and 100 times dryer than here.

Actually, I’m not so worried about getting a hat before I leave as I know there will be plenty there, even for heads such as mine. It’s Noosa after all, a place just one or two rungs below heaven.

This whole thing is really just to say that while I may have not have the small head of your average man and so can never enjoy the cranial fashions you all take for granted, I’m the one who’s going on a summer holiday in October. What will you be doing?