Last weekend I experienced one of those awful moments of
panic, when you can almost feel your bowels turn themselves inside out. It
happened on the Paris Metro.
My wife and I had travelled up on the 9 o’clock train
from Brive en provenance de Toulouse. Leaving nothing to chance, we got
to the station at least half an hour before the train was due – only to find
that the train was 40 minutes late. This is fairly exceptional here. Brits
accustomed to the vagaries of British Rail and its privatised successors wax
lyrical about the punctuality of French trains, forgetting that they run only
about a third of the number that they do back in the U.K. Given the enormous
subsidies that SNCF receives, one has to say that if they can’t run a few trains
on time, what hope is there for the country? (Not much – particularly in the
face of the cowardly criminals who stole the copper cable that delayed the
train.)
We’d come up for a long weekend to stay with The Daughter
in her new digs, give her whatever practical support we were able to, visit the
big Edward Hopper retrospective at the Grand Palais, and meet up with friends
from Sheffield to celebrate a 60th birthday in a swanky restaurant
on the rive gauche.
So I was feeling pretty buoyant and walking along the
platform with a spring in my step until… that heart-stopping moment when you
realise that you’ve left something important behind and it’s too late to do
anything about it. Not my credit card or my life’s savings or a manuscript of
unrepeatable brilliance, but my hat. I left it in the luggage rack when I
retrieved my coat and our bags.
Oh that’s a relief, you might say, but it was a
particularly nice hat. I’ve always had a soft spot for hats and have often
sported a titfer during my life, even though I admit that there have been times
when I’ve probably looked a dick as a result. But, almost out of a sense of
duty, I’ve felt the need to make a stand for the common hat. If I don’t do it,
then who will? Really, I should have been born in a time when hats were de
rigeur. Ideally, I would have been a Bopper, jamming with the other cats
after hours at Minton’s Playhouse. Every one of us in a fine felt hat and
double-breasted suit.
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| Long, tall Dexter |
I’d had this particular hat for over 20 years. I bought
it in the sportswear department of the Co-operative Stores in London Road,
Brighton. It was a tan-coloured cotton golf hat – the type that Sam Snead might
have worn in the days before Arnie Palmer went bare-headed – but I could wear
it as the kind of pork-pie hat that Dexter Gordon sports on the cover of Dexter
Blows Hot And Cool. Fashions have changed in golf, so I knew that I would
never see its like again. Alas, poor hat, I knew thee well.
Tilley’s landlady persuaded me to go straight back to the
Gare d’Austerlitz and fill out a déposition. Lost property is not what
it used to be. These days the service has been outsourced to a company that
charges you €9 minimum to re-unite owner and missing object. The woman at the Acceuil
looked in the next room, where anything found on a train sits until the end of
the day before being taken off to the out-sourcers, but no… My hat was probably
travelling back to Toulouse at that very moment. I filled in the form in the
hope that it might be found by a responsible member of the community, who
didn’t want to wear someone else’s dirty hat in a misguided attempt to look
like Dexter Gordon blowing hot and cool.
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| 'The Thin Man' |
Strange how it goes, though. The next day was Saturday
and there was a big bi-monthly vide grenier in the nearby Boulevard
Richard Lenoir, where the Canal Saint-Martin flows underneath the wide central
reservation. It was my kind of attic sale: dozens of stallholders charging
sensible prices in an effort to sell rather than continue to hoard their
bric-a-brac. I found a DVD boxed set of rugby world cup highlights for a buck,
a semi-rare LP for three, a little je ne sais quoi for our neighbours to
thank them for feeding our cats and… a hat! A light-grey felt hat sufficiently
malleable to shape into a pork-pie like the ones that Wardell Gray used to wear
(before he was found dead, dumped in the desert near Las Vegas). I offered the
woman a crisp ten-euro note instead of the €12 on the ticket. She agreed, but
pointed out that it was a Lanvin. It might have been a Johnny Stompanato for
all I know about hat manufacturers, so I smiled and gave her my best Gallic
shrug.
When I returned to our daughter’s new quarters, an
elegant fin de siècle third-floor apartment miniaturised by her landlady’s
clutter, Tilley was so excited by the fact that I’d come back with a Lanvin hat
that you would have thought I’d won the Lottery. She pogoed on the parquet and
clapped her hands like a performing sea lion. Clearly, the boy had done good.
The landlady was so impressed that she went out to the Boulevard Richard Lenoir
and, a woman after my own heart, came back later with more clutter for the
apartment.
And so my new hat was to serve me well over the course of
our long weekend. On Sunday morning, Debs and I queued in the persistent
drizzle for two and a half hours for the Edward Hopper exhibition. My hat kept
my head dry. Tilley and her landlady came to join us just before we reached the
head of the queue. The exhibition was worth the wait and the price of
admission. And I was elated to find the famous self-portrait, in which Hopper
depicted himself wearing a particularly fine brown trilby.
That evening, I wore my hat to the swanky restaurant on
the left bank. Only, I surrendered it at the door, so our friends from
Sheffield who were already à table couldn’t admire it. Which meant that
I wasn’t able to announce, It’s a Lanvin, you know. Never mind, we had a
nice meal and a lovely time in the company of eight friends from our old
stamping ground. Debs wanted to walk across the river afterwards and catch a
bus back to République, but we didn’t know where it left from, so we all ended
up walking to the same Metro station, where we sat on opposite platforms,
waiting to travel in opposite directions. She and I did a little dance for the
others, because we’re not afraid of making a spectacle of ourselves, and I doffed
my hat to acknowledge the applause.
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