Most of the time when I say I am a writer, it feels a bit like I am wearing someone else’s hat.

It’s a nice hat. I look at myself in the mirror and marvel at it.

When you write, you wear a lot of hats. Some of mine have included:
soil expert,
onion exporter,
gin poet,
Stick Man.

I have just learned that when you do advertising, you also have to wear a lot of hats. The first one is always blue. The others are in no particular order:
Red,
White,
Green,
Yellow,
Black.

Then you can wear the blue hat again, if you want to.

You can only wear each hat for so long, or you will get a headache. Maybe some hats don’t fit as well as others.

Yesterday, we all had to say which hats we most liked and disliked wearing. 

If you like wearing a red hat, you like to follow your gut. I secretly call this the Bradley Walsh hat because he always says ‘go with your gut’ on The Chase. Probably putting it in a SCAB means this isn’t secret anymore. 

Yellow is for optimists. Edward de Bono was a creative thinker at most times but not when it came to assigning colours to his six hats. 

The black hat is for critics. I am good at this hat. It is an easy hat to be good at wearing if you are ordinarily slightly pessimistic. 

Those who wear white hats enjoy facts and figures, which perhaps makes it the boring hat. Then again, wearing a white hat is a relatively bold choice when you take away Edward de Bono. So maybe the white hat is a bit more interesting than people think. 

The blue hat is for planning, and it is technically supposed to go first or last, but we are all supposed to be creative thinkers at the SCA, and anyway I am building up to the green hat which you probably suspected. So here it is penultimate. 

I find it hardest to wear a green hat, which is the creative hat. Please don’t tell Marc. 

Yesterday, I just said I didn’t like to wear the blue hat, but that isn’t true because I’m into strategy and I always want to know what the plan is. It’s just really hard to stand up when everyone else is sitting down. And it’s not really the done thing to say you’re not a green hat fan when the whole purpose of your being at school is to one day earn money because you’re the best at wearing a green hat.

When you are used to success coming from box ticking and rubric-meeting, though, the green hat feels uncomfortable somehow. Often, I ask Marc questions at school that might have a logical answer such as ‘what are the limits of a vegan ready meal?’ and I get something creative back like ‘only your imagination’.  This gives me no help, but it does demonstrate that Marc has no trouble at all with the green hat. 

The best hat-wearers of all time are country musicians. I have seen Dwight Yoakam wear a white hat that was by no means boring, and I am sure he would have no trouble pulling off a green one. Norman Carl Odam, who is otherwise known as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, who is otherwise known as the inspiration for Ziggy Stardust, also frequently wore hats (if you want tips on how to create a great segue like that one, just let me know). 

The Legendary Stardust Cowboy probably invented the green hat. Certainly, he’d never seen a black hat in his life: ‘Paralyzed’ is probably the worst song ever written. Even David Bowie had to clarify that he was a fan because he only actually liked ‘the idea’ of the music. But The Ledge kept on ticking, dreaming of space from Lubbock, Texas. 

What I take from this is that you can get any hat to fit if you wish. And maybe sometimes it isn’t even about the hat. Once upon a time I googled ‘average forehead size for women in cm’. Mine is one half of a centimeter too short. 50 millimeters. 

A very small half-centipede. 

This could have affected my hat-wearing in some respects. So, I’m not giving up on the green hat just yet. 

If you’ve got one in the back in a smaller size, could you let me know?  

@hopewritehead