Spectacles and baseball caps as fashion accessories

Why wear your specs on your head?

I've been fortunate in never having to wear glasses for anything other than reading, drawing and painting. 

I do of course occasionally wear sun-glasses. But whether using reading or sun-glasses, I avoid doing what the bloke above is doing - because, unlike him, I've still enough hair left that it would probably make the specs greasy and in need of a clean.

Yet these days, for no apparent reason as far as I can see, it's become very fashionable for men and women of all ages to rest their glasses on their hair when they don't need them.

Does anyone have any idea why this is?
Is it another pointless import from the USA?
If so, what prompted our American cousins to start doing it in the first place?

What about baseball caps that point backwards?

                      

These young man are Americans, so it makes sense that they might want to wear a baseball cap.  What makes no sense to me that they're wearing them with the peak pointing backwards.

I know that baseball caps have become fashionable here in the UK (but have no idea why).

I also know that a lot of our youngsters have taken to wearing them back to front. In fact, I've a young neighbour who never comes out of the house without wearing his baseball cap the wrong way round  - regardless of whether it's hot and sunny, pouring with rain or cold and snowing.

A few years ago I blogged, to no avail, about why we Brits make so much use of baseball metaphors in presentations and business-speak (standing up to the plate, getting past first base, hitting a home run, etc.) when our national summer game is cricket, not rounders with a hard ball on a big field.

Now, the big question nagging away at me is: why so many men (of all ages) prefer US style baseball caps to traditional British headwear.

A few years ago, another neighbour of ours went skiing in the USA and told an American in a lift queue how much he liked his baseball cap and asked where he could get one that pointed backwards.  When the American aid he'd got it at the local ski shop, my neighbour went there and asked if they had any backwards-pointing caps.

The shop assistant was serious and apologetic:"Sorry sir, but I'm afraid we only stock ones that point forwards and I'm not sure where you'd get one of the type you're looking for."

Now even outstanding cricketers like Kohli sometimes wear baseball caps

India's cricket captain Virat Kohl with  baseball cap (and beard)

                                                   

Proper cricket cap worn last week by record-breaking 

 former England captain, Alistair Cook  

All of which is to ask: why all these things are happening and happening at the same time?

  

Time for the chancellor to tax beards?

FACT FOR TODAY:

According to my 2018 diary, which has one historical fact for every day of the year, today was the day in 1698 when Peter the Great of Russia imposed a tax on all men with beards (for more information on which, watch this on Youtube). The tax remained in force for a further 70years after that.

Nicholas II                                 Lenin

This was just as well, because beards had become so fashionable by the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries that Nicholas II and Lenin both had beards, as did Queen Victoria's two successors, Edward VII and George V.

Even one of my own great grandfathers had a beard and still had it when he died in 1950 at the age of 98.





But by the 1960s and 70s, beards went out of fashion - apart from exceptions like students and hippies (left).

BEARDS MAKE A BIG COMEBACK

For reasons that remain a mystery to me, the last few years have seen beards make a sudden and rapid return to the world of male fashion - regardless of age, occupation, social class. or politics.

Call me old fashioned, but I still haven't got used to watching bearded professional footballers and cricketers (of all nationalities) playing such sweaty sports.

During the recent hot summer when pollen counts were high, we were visited by a salesman in his twenties with an enormous red beard (and a shaved bald head) -who couldn't stop coughing and spluttering.

"Hay fever?" I asked, to which he replied "I've always suffered from it but it seems to get worse as I get older."

I was too polite to suggest that it had nothing to do with growing older and everything to do with the fact that his beard must have been full of pollen. If he could be bothered to shave his face as well as his head,  his hay fever wouldn't be so debilitating.

A TAX ON BEARDS TO REDUCE NHS EXPENDITURE ON HAY FEVER

Were I advising Philip Hammond on a simple way to increase tax and reduce the deficit in these economically challenging pre-brexit times, I'd suggest he takes a leaf out of Peter the Great's tax book.

He could say that treating hay fever with antihistamines, nasal sprays, etc. is a cost to the NHS that's made worse by men who don't shave.

A tax on beards wouldn't affect the P.M., or many other Tory MPs - but would penalise the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn!

TV interviews with politicians

A lesson fromMichael Crick of Channel 4 News on how to interview a politician?

 (The following has been reproduced from https://www.joe.co.uk/news/journalist-decimates-theresa-mays-record-on-south-african-apartheid-in-car-crash-interview-197165 https://www.joe.co.uk/news/journalist-decimates-theresa-mays-record-on-south-african-apartheid-in-car-crash-interview-197165 where you can watch the interview - to whom many thanks):

"What did you do to help the release of Nelson Mandela?"

Having endured a day of intense scrutiny from the media, Theresa May was last night forced to defend her record on South African apartheid ahead of a visit to Nelson Mandela's cell on Robben Island.

Michael Crick interviews Teresa May

Channel 4 news reporter Michael Crick used the opportunity of a one-on-one interview to question the prime minister about what she had done to oppose racial segregation in South Africa, which was only ended in the country in the early 90s.

During the two-minute grilling, May was repeatedly interrupted and refused to give a straight answer to the journalist's line of questioning, although she admitted that she had not personally taken part in protests against South Africa's white-only regime.

"You were active in politics in the 70s and 80s, what did you do to help release Nelson Mandela?" Crick asked.

May responded: "I think what is important is what the United Kingdon-" But Crick interrupted the prime minister, repeating: "No, what did you do? Did you go on protests? Did you get arrested outside the embassy? Did you boycott South African goods? Did you do anything?"

She replied: "I think you know full well, Michael, that I didn't go on protests. But what is important is the work that -"

"Well did you boycott South African goods?" Crick interrupted again. Only for May to continue:

"The work that the United Kingdom government did to ensure that it did give support where that support was needed."

Although not a member of parliament until 1997, Theresa May was an active Conservative politician and party member during the 1980s and served as a councillor for London Borough of Merton from 1986 to 1994.

 

Margaret Thatcher, addressing the Tory party conference 

in 1984 (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Margaret Thatcher attracted criticism during her premiership of the country in the 80s for dismissing the then incarcerated Nelson Mandela as "a terrorist". Following the end of his 18-year imprisonment, Mandela would go on to become President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.

Turning to the record of the Tory government at the time, Crick asked: "Hang on a minute at that stage Mrs Thatcher believed that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. Were you a loyal Conservative member, did you think the same thing?"

May responded: "What was important was the support that the government was giving at the time, often support behind the scenes to ensure that we saw the result that we did in relation to the ending of apartheid here in South Africa."

Theresa May later visited the deceased former South African president's cell on Robben Island. Upon leaving the island, she wrote in the visitor book: "It has been a privilege to visit in this year - the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nelson Mandela. His legacy lives on in the hopes and dreams of young people here in South Africa and around the world."

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When Michael Crick was a young reporter in the early days of Channel 4 News, he interviewed me. But not in the way he did here with Mrs May because, unlike a lot of TV interviewers (e.g. John Humphrys) he understood the difference between an interview to obtain facts from an expert and an interview to put the interviewee under pressure.

So he doesn't always interrupt the interviewee in mid-answer as a matter of course (like John Humphrys) but only does so when his question is being as blatantly avoided as is done by the  Prime Minister in this particular interview.

I have no idea why he resigned as political editor of BBC 2's Newsnight, but thought it a damaging loss to the BBC that he went back to Channel 4 News, were he started his TV career. 

Crick is one of the reasons why so many of us believe that Channel 4 News is by far the best news programme on British television.

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