Fun with hats!

For the first time in my life, I'm having an absolute blast wearing hats. They can look so positively glamorous!
But it wasn't always so. I'd always rather liked hats but my hair, which when I had it was impossibly curly, tended to make hats bounce right off. Plus, if there's one thing which I loathe with a passion, it's hat hair. Here's why.
In England, where I grew up, school children all wear uniforms, which is great because you can roll out of bed and put on your uniform, and off you go to school. No need to spend hours on the phone with your best friend figuring out what to wear the next day, or trying on outfits late into the night, which is how my three daughters spent most of their high school evenings.
Back in those days, an essential part of the school uniform was The Hat. We had a winter hat, which was a sort of navy blue felt thing with a hatband in our school colors, and we had a summer hat, which was a straw boater that looked like this and was unbelievably heavy.
My school had all sorts of impossible rules and regulations, including the color of your underwear and the thickness of your stockings, which we all bent whenever we could, but the rule governing the wearing of The Hat was the one we feared most.There was no such thing as a school bus in those days -- when the bell rang, we left school and walked: some took the city buses, others, like me, walked over a mile to the train station. I don't think anyone's mother drove to school to pick up her daughter. The minute you left the school grounds, you'd better have that hat on your head or you were dead meat.
We girls weren't the only ones walking -- the teachers were also heading home as well as the prefects, girls who were seniors and whose job it was to police the younger girls. So the roads were positively crawling with spies, and being spotted, and reported, for the serious breach of No Hat in Public, led to instant detention at school the next day.
One of the other hard-and-fast rules was absolutely no eating in public. "Very unlady-like," according to our headmistress. But we were starving teenagers and the London streets are thick with sweet shops, so we used to duck in for a packet of potato chips and a 1/4 lb of chocolate malteasers, stuff them into our blazer pocket and hope no-one had spotted us.
A group of us was in the sweet shop next to the train station one day, stocking up on munchies for the train ride, and I'd taken off my boater, sitting it on top of my book bag while I decided what to have. Suddenly there was a tremendous crash. Horrors!! A bottle of lemonade was stuck head first through the middle of my boater. We all froze. How the heck was I ever going to explain this?
Luckily my dad had the sort of glue you need to repair a boater with a hole through its top and I think I ended up concocting some complicated story that involved one or both of my brothers, so on that occasion I escaped punishment!Sorry, this has rambled on from the hat hair issue, but the point is that for all those school years I was positively tortured by those blasted hats, especially the boater which left me with a most extraordinary hair-do -- flat on the top and square on the sides. Really, really unflattering.
But now, my friends, I have turned into a total hat maven. I'm enjoying it while I can -- and that may not be for very long -- because I've suddenly got a layer of baby fluff growing back on my head! WooHoo!!