The best comedy it has been said many times comes from acute discomfort, nay suffering!

The Hat Shop of the title (see below)  represents the world I have always seemed to be alienated from. The world of roles – any one of the hats mentioned in the poem.   I have never been able to find one that fits and I have certainly tried any number of them.

In this perhaps I have something in common with the acting fraternity.  An actor by some combination of talent and curse enters personalities created by others to present them to an audience.  This of course can be quite magical and the state can be almost a shamanic one.  I guess why the calling and the experience are so often intense.

I  used to think it was my fault, as director, when actors got into a cold sweat, stormed out of rehearsal or hit the gin either side of rehearsal.  It’s common enough, the physical pain, the sudden sweeping away of the vestiges of personality through weakened, under pressure  defences.  Only as I did more performing myself did I come to see that it goes with the job!

But when deprived of that magical triangular experience;  writer – actor – live audience  for any period of time and most will become increasingly restless, maladjusted and discontented.  I share that.

I signed up for a full-time Drama School in my mid-twenties sensing the possibility of some sort of a path that way.  After three years  I came to the conclusion, because of my inveterate shyness and the fact that I was hopeless at learning lines,  that I was better off trying my hand at theatre director.   I loved writers in any case and soon discovered that there was nothing better than to be in rehearsal with a first rate script and a willing, able company. There’s a similar sense of challenge, hazard and excitement in that!

The theatre work was often very successful but not being the career builder, another hat I could never don, I was soon pitting my bare-headedness at other windmills.  Perhaps now poet is the only ‘non-conformist’ niche that grants me a certain intermittent succour….

HAT SHOP

‘I do not wear hats and yet

I am never out of the Hat Shop.

I have worn the hats of clerks and travelling salesmen

but only in my dreams.

I have discarded the headwear of mechanics

for the headwear of academics but only in my fantasies.

‘Hatless, I have sought the rear door of the shop

but I have never been able to locate it.

I am pursued night and day by a hubbub of hats;

Deerstalkers, toppers and woolly hats with bobbles

Lay in ambush for me behind every piece

Of inanimate furniture.

Jockey-caps, stetsons and trilbys

Wait to pounce from cardboard boxes

That smell of straw.

‘Undercover hat-agents, disguised as clients

Constantly creep up on me from behind.

When suddenly I turn on them, invariably I glimpse

The flash of gold braid or a dyed feather

Being whipped out of sight.

They murmur apologies for startling me

And proceed to talk about the weather.

‘I am determined to brave the wind and rain bareheaded;

an uncovered pate in even the worst of storms.

‘I won’t be pinned down.

I shall resist bonneting.

‘In my worst nightmares I have seen myself

In furry hats with ear-holes and tails;

Hats that perform lobotomies without an anaesthetic;

Hats that attempt to put me to sleep

As they pour church organ music into my ears.

‘I know no way to avoid the crazed vigilance of Hatters

Except to attempt to be the epitome of vigilance myself.

‘Since yesterday I have been racked with dread.

Lying on the counter is a box with my name upon it.

I know there is something awful inside it.

That something is out to get me!

My temples are throbbing.

‘I must give it the widest of possible wide berths.

Yet my worst fear – which I must soon confirm -

Is that this box in front of me

Contains no hat at all.’