If you can't get ahead, get a hat

THERE are signs that whatever is happening to the weather is beginning to influence how we dress in this country. These days, in the summer, such heat as occurs tends to be of a more oppressive variety than used to be the case and people go around half-naked. The thoroughfares twinkle with knees and midriffs.

There is, however, a curious seasonal hang-over which results in the warm woolly hats of winter staying put when summer comes, while the occasional bare knee and midriff can be seen throughout the winter. This is all very confusing to those trained to remain decently and stiflingly clad at all times, fossils for whom the loosening of a tie is regarded as wild
abandon .

Even they, however, are feeling the pressures of change and this winter, I, a fossil of many years standing, have been obliged to resort to a hat, which, while not exactly woolly, is not exactly a hat, either, but one of those floppy numbers which come down over the ears and would cover the eyes too if left to their own devices. This particular specimen has the effect of making its wearer resemble a dumpling made ready for steaming and when I go out in it I feel like one of those faceless men who used to congregate on balconies in Moscow's Red Square and watch the rockets go by.

This headgear has been forced upon me by the inability of any of my other hats to stay on in a howling gale. This might seem a feeble sort of excuse, but it's true nonetheless, and anyone who had ever seen me lollop over a golf course in hot pursuit of my normal snap-brim job would go along with my decision. The old hat to which I refer, clings to the head pretty well for the most part, but when things get really rough, it flies off when you least expect it and, worse, somehow manages to get up on its brim and bowl along at an extraordinary lick. To stop it, it is often necessary to maim it with a tackle from behind, as it were, slamming a foot down on the crown whenever conditions and the speed of the hat permit.

Some wilder winters have brought a rise in the number of such pursuits and I was driven to the reluctant conclusion that while the hat was showing no signs of slowing down, I certainly was and something had to be done. Accordingly, I turned to the floppy item which is now drafted into service when the wind howls and though it falls well short of the mark in terms of style, it doesn't blow off and I take the view that if looking gormless is the price I have to pay to keep my lid in place, then so be it.

Also, there is the undeniable fact that the old hat is beginning to look a bit worn and there is about it a certain sad weariness. It is a hat which has seen service and, in its latter years, much brutality. Much of the jaunty charm which first attracted me to it is gone and that is hardly surprising considering the severe kickings to which it was subjected as the chases became longer and I became more irascible.

This, of course, is part of the attraction of golf in this part of the world, as opposed to the bland, unvarying sunshine of Dubai where I've never seen a hat blown away in all the times I've been there. Quite probably, if a hat were to blow away in Dubai, no-one would bother to chase it because of the heat. Hats didn't really figure in the Desert Classic which concluded at the Emirates Golf Club at the weekend, though, as Tiger Woods put his ball into the water at the last hole of his third round, he looked ready to eat his.

If there's one thing I have in common with Tiger, it's that I too put my ball in the same stretch of water at the same hole. There were differences, of course. Little devils lurk in the detail. Tiger was going for the green with his second shot from a roughish lie. I was playing my third shot from just short of the water and from a fairway with an Axminster pile. Reasoning that all the trouble was at the front (my mind is laser-like at such moments), I played a 6-iron to make sure of getting over and was yards short. If Tiger had played a 6-iron from there, he'd have finished up in down-town Dubai.

Actually, I thought I'd played the shot pretty well, but then I thought much the same about my fifth shot. When the splash came on that one, I couldn't believe it. I didn't feel there was much wrong with my seventh either, but then I think by then I was getting a little psyched out by the whole thing. The concentration wasn't what it should have been, I was running out of golf balls and I had reached that depressing stage at which you ask yourself why you play the stupid game. I've asked myself that question many times and haven't had an answer yet.