Hats Off To The Brits
This London Comment was written by Up To The Minute contributor Ed Boyle.
One of America's greatest exports is fast becoming one of England's greatest public enemies: The baseball cap.
To you, perhaps, it represents a sporting obsession and a desire to stop the hot sun frying your nose. But increasingly in our country, the baseball cap is a symbol of street crime, worn by people who don't care for authority and wouldn't be averse to stealing your wallet without so much as a "have-a-nice-day" as they elbow you off the sidewalk.
In fact,there is virtually no good reason for wearing a baseball cap over here. e don't get serious sunshine and we don't understand baseball. There are only two very lame excuses for sticking one on your head. You are either a middle-aged overweight wimp who would like to be thought of as tough, or else you are a piece of despicable lowlife for whom the only purpose of wearing a baseball cap is to avoid being recognised by those ever-present security cameras we have in all our shopping malls.
Most major shopping malls in England now take a very dim view of baseball cap wearers for precisely that reason. Some have banned them altogether. Beefy guards rip the things off your skull at the entrance. But far from deterring the cap wearers, this seems to have encouraged them. It's a bit like prohibition - ban the booze and everyone wants to be Al Capone. Clamp down on caps and every lawless lout wants one.
The best sociologists and criminologists in the land are now pondering how to deal with this cap-crazy phenomenon. However the solution may already have been found by a little grey haired old lady. Mrs. Marie Savage lives in the quaint English seaside resort of Margate, which unfortunately has more than its fair share of youthful tearaways who wear baseball caps as a badge of their own revolting behaviour. Mrs. Savage was getting sick of them. So she formed a club. And the grandmothers of Margate got together and went shopping, deliberately, for baseball caps. Today you can see them out and about on their zimmer frames looking quite ridiculous. But it's working.
The Senior Citizens of Margate have dealt a death blow to America's favourite headgear. Because if granny wears one, it can't be cool for anyone else, can it?!
By Ed Boyle