Old Hat

And so I sit here trying to think interesting thoughts, but the synapses refuse to spark. My hungry eyes comb the room for potential blog topics... there! Just outside of my peripheral vision.. a stray sock! I'll blog about socks! No.. that's rubbish.. the sort of thing a bad observational comic might wax trivial about on one of those 'An Audience With..' shows.. "Socks.. right.. we all wear them.. except when we're wearing sandals..right? Now...how come.. right.. we never have enough? They're always disappearing, like maybe they have a secret club, or are being taken by sock pixies or something? Am I right?" I'm not a fat and redundant Northern stand-up, I'm a skinny and insubstantial wannabe starving artist in Brighton.. I need to blog about something either hip.. or achingly pretentious..

Like, could I pull off wearing a beret?

I was given a beret as a gift by a former friend and house mate, it's genuinely French (both the hat and the person in question) and utterly beautiful, but tragically I've been too cowed by the opinions of others to wear it outside the house. But sod the opinions of others, sod them to bits, I could wear it ironically; the beret is such a potent signifier of artistic preciousness it would look like satire (or Sartre).

Berets are a throwback to an outmoded form of hipness, a bygone age of beatnik chic; dickheads still wear stupid hats, only now flat-caps and trilbys are the haute couture (incidentally, I recently met a drainpiped airhead in a Laines vintage shop who insisted on pronouncing that phrase as "horticulture"- I shit you not), but trilbys lack the irony of the beret, as well as the class.

Imagine how wacky I'd look in a beret! I'm keerrrazy I am!

Yup.. should have written about the socks...

Next time:

Bob blogs on the subject of his faded grey boxers.. how many holes is too many?

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