Wearing Hats in my Dublin
For as long as I can remember I use a hat to dry my hair.
No, I don’t use a great big floppy one and use it as a towel for the drying; I just put it on and when I take it off my hair is dry.
Time was I used to have a summer hat and a winter hat. My favourite summer hat was one I bought in Kathmandu, and it displaced, literally, the previous favourite which was a Dublin hat. I wore that Nepali hat until most of it wore away.
My favourite winter hat I bought in Prague, and one night when I arrived home from a long night in Dublin’s pubs and clubs without it, I was disconsolate. For weeks I kept returning to the city centre to walk the routes of that night over and over, from Ballsbridge, where that night started, to much of Dublin 2. Eventually I stopped looking at the ground and began staring at people’s heads, convinced somebody had found it and naturally was now wearing it.
Some months later in London I was going up a long escalator in a crowded Tube station when among the crowds coming down I saw my hat. You may well believe that more than one copy of my hat was manufactured and sold, but I know that this hat on this man’s head was my hat.
In the moments in life when most you need to physically act, like shouting stop and running towards somebody you see stealing your bicycle, or running to call an ambulance when you see somebody getting knocked down, or just running out of the house when a crazy person is screaming and shouting at you yet again - I don’t. I’m one of those people who freezes. My legs won’t move and my mouth won’t open.
So in London, while I leapt from the escalator going up and scrambled over to the escalator going down, and snatched my hat back from the stranger’s head, that was all only in my head. In reality I was rooted to the spot. But when you freeze on an escalator you carry on escalating. And that was the moment I stopped looking for my favourite winter hat.
I still have my old Dublin hat. It’s a summer hat because it’s slight - light and not too warm - but being designed for watching Gaelic games it is lined with what I can only describe as that stuff they used to make nappy liners out of. The genius of this is that I have stood on Hill 16 so many times in the rain without an umbrella (put down those umbrellas!) yet left Croke Park with a dry head.
But the elastic has long gone in the back of the cap so my only surviving summer hat is in a box somewhere in an industrial estate in Dublin West.
Still, I need to dry my hair when I wash it, and it takes a lot longer in Ireland’s moist and cooler temperatures than in the extreme heat of a Kansas City summer or the fierce dryness of a KC winter. So I tolerate the overly warm winter hat these spring days.
The winter hat is one that claims to have been made in India by Tibetan artisans. It dries the hair fine but probably seems a tad overdressed in the head area compared with the t-shirted torso.
Yesterday while walking the dog down the fields, a football came a bouncing my way. In the nearby sports center some lads playing 5-a-side soccer had managed to kick it over 2 fences, one of them 12 foot high. It’s quite a long walk around for them so they’re thrilled if there is ever anyone remotely near where they have kicked the ball.
They couldn’t have known that I had definitely seen the ball and was about to retrieve it and use my Gaelic Footballing skills to hoof it from distance accurately back into their collective laps to the sounds of “Fair play t’ya”. So they shouted at me to get my attention.
-Hey! Bin Laden!
Read More Meanderings:
• An Irish Odyssey in Kansas City
• Readying for Ireland on the Streets of Kansas City
• The Seagull Has Landed
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
You could always shave your head
Great post!
That’s crazy talk Conortje. And a good idea.
Bin Laden! Ha!
But doesn’t it take ages to dry your hair in a hat? Wouldn’t a bit of a breeze dry it more quickly? It must gently steam inside of there. I bet if you could look at your scalp underneath it would look like the prune finger-skin you get from being in the bath too long.
Hi eolai
I came here through Devins blog, im very impressed ur art is wicked 
is it ok if I add you as a link to my own blog?
Sam - But it would dry all wrong whereas with the hat I give it shape, without any substance being added. I ldo like the wind method but I only use it when I am walking or cycling directly into the wind - no turns are allowed or then I am blinded bya sea of hair.
Lette - Lovely, linky link. And thank you.
I don’t have quite as much hair as you, but I’m close. Furthermore, I used to have a lot more hair than you do now, so I have some expertise in this area, and I want to say just one thing.
A hat is a bad plan if you want to dry your hair.
Air dries hair, not hats.
That’s two things, I realise, but you’ll surely forgive me.
I do of course forgive you Bockmeister. However, having over 25 years experience of lengthy hair, albeit on and off, I have some expertise in mine own hair, and a thing or two myself I’d like to say.
Not alone is a hat not a bad plan, it’s not even a plan; it’s an experience.
Generally, hats tend not to be air-tight.
Woollen hats aren’t much better at creating a vacuum than hairnets are.
Perhaps you had too much hair for the hat method.
I have a feeling that’s more than 2 things, but, well, you know.
Once again I offer: send me a measurement & I will crochet you a hat, seasonal or otherwise. Will have to search for cotton or wool yarn, acrylic is easy come by, but has not much drying power.