defeat
Requiem for a good hat
This is your correspondent, in a paddock somewhere,* no doubt up to nefarious nefariety, perhaps organising a foco insurgency or maybe a revolutionary reconnaissance, but certainly up to no good. Note the presence of a suspicious superfluence above the eyebrows: yes indeed, a beret.
It’s my unpleasant duty to you all, my comrades, to report to you the loss in action of the hat you see there on my head. It fell in active duty—keeping me warm on a bus ride home from my disagreeable duty to capitalism that the ruling classes term “work”—and in the act of gathering my possessions, when I left the vehicle, the beret without me was carried heroically into martyrdom past my stop and onwards to paradise/terminus.
Technically speaking, I made a disembarking maneoevre without fully engaging my headgear. As I write, I’m mourning the loss of a good friend, a warming companion of the upper scone, a good solid felt friend, and let’s be honest, an identifying feature for an unremarkable man.
Goodbye, hat.
The authorities have yet to determine the whereabouts of my beret in the optimistically named Lost And Found Department.
*South Australia, 2007. I had the map and the binoculars, I knew exactly where I was.