Adventures with my Hat

Pretty hat or mark of Cain?

As dedicated readers know, I bought a splendid hat for Polish Pretend Son's June wedding. But as dedicated readers also know, I try to justify what I spent by wearing it to church on sunny Sundays.

This endeavour is fraught with danger because women in Scotland wear fancy hats only to weddings and the races lest we be accused of class treason. If you're invited to the Queen's garden party at Holyrood Palace, better go by taxicab, that's what I say.

Anyway, today is a delightfully sunny Sunday, and so I wore my splendid hat to church. My husband thought it would be nice to take the bus all the way to Roseburn Terrace and then walk to Mass via the path along the Water of Leith. I agreed to this plan and felt only the faintest of alarms when I saw Glasgow Celtic fans in the west Edinburgh streets. Prawdę mowiąc, I initially felt more amusement than alarm. for the first Celtic fan I saw in the famous green-and-white-hoops shirt had an enormously round belly, which the hoops only accentuated. 

"You should all be at Mass," I crooned facetiously--though very, very quietly, as one does not want to hack off Glaswegian football fans, even if they are fellow Catholics and should, in fact, be at Mass instead of loitering around Roseburn Terrace on Sunday morning. They wouldn't punch me, but they might thump B.A., and he is still recovering from surgery. 

There was a throng of large men wearing green-and-white hooped shirts at the top of the stairs down to the Water of Leith, and a comparable crowd of policemen wearing yellow anti-stab vests remonstrating with them for public drinking. The Celtic fans were listening to this in a high good humour, so I wasn't terribly alarmed as Benedict Ambrose and I squeezed past them. 

At the bottom of the stairs was an even larger throng of male Celtic fans, and I can only imagine all the Edinburgh daughters under 30 were locked up this morning, for suddenly I was attracting more male attention than I have since my double-sided body tape stopped working at Polish Pretend Daughter's party five years ago. 

Goodness gracious. What a banter-rumpus. Wolf-whistles.  Compliments. Hopes that I would enjoy the wedding they assumed I was going to. A few bars of "I'm sexy and I know it" sung in tune. Had I been 27, I would have been furious. But I'm not 27, am I? 

"Thank you-ou-ou-ou," trilled your grizzled correspondent and felt enormously glad to be alive.  However, when he too emerged from the scrum, Benedict Ambrose looked quite cross.

"They were taking the p***," he said uncharitably. 

I pondered this sobering possibility but decided I didn't care. It was very funny, and it sounded good-humoured, and had I been on my own, I would have been tempted to inform them that I was on my way to Mass and that they should be, too. 

After Mass and lunch at the art gallery, we walked back to Roseburn Terrace by way of the Water of Leith. There was a different group of big men--not wearing Hoops but still sounding Glasgow--standing at the bottom of the stairs with several plastic Scot-Mid shopping bags.

"Oh, bother," I said, or some ruder version of that. Two hours is sufficient to turn happy drinking men into surly drinking men and a piece of feminine frippery into some ghastly class war symbol. So now I was alarmed, and behold:

"Here comes the Queen," said one of these new Glaswegians, which is when I stopped listening.

The Queen is 92; we were not amused. 

"Where ARE the police?" I thought crossly and then, oh joy, there they were, three strapping Edinburgh cops, the sight of their yellow anti-stab vests as comforting as that of my parents' reading lamp still alight in their front window. 

"Here comes the Queen's constabulary," said Benedict Ambrose drily, and then we bought a free-range chicken at Tesco and went home.