If you want to get ahead, get a hat. That was the marketing slogan of the British Hat Council in the 1930s. A time when no stylish man or woman would venture out in public without a hat.

With the gradual decline of hat wearing, the slogan re-appeared in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s, by which time the wearing of any form of headgear was almost old hat. Probably because hair was becoming the focal fashion point, and most hats, even flat caps on men, but not women, looked ridiculous atop a mass of long, unkempt hair. However, the wearing of woolly hats with untidy locks did gain currency through the examples of Benny (Paul Henry) of Crossroads and Compo (Bill Owen) in Last Of The Summer Wine.

Hats had a way of classifying their wearers: bowlers and homburgs were for city businessmen, upper-class toffs, diplomats, professionals, bailiffs and comedians; the middle-class trilby was worn - in various forms - by actors, newspapermen, detectives, gangsters and race goers, and the working-class flat cap was also favoured by gentlemen farmers, golfers and juvenile actors, like Jackie Coogan and Mickey Rooney.

After seeing The Maltese Falcon I bought a second-hand snap-brim trilby, not because I wanted to look "middle-class", or tough like Bogie - although I was told at the time: "If you can't fight, wear a big hat" - but to look a couple of years older, to get into cinemas to see A and H films.

My wardrobe contains a large collection of hats for all occasions; everything from a Russian-style fur forage cap to a Tahitian banana leaf pith helmet, but they are rarely aired these days. More often than not I sport the headwear of the retired gentleman - a classless corduroy cap, but hope to see the day when the bowler, the homburg and the trilby, like the mini-skirt, become fashionable again.

Those who share my nostalgia for hats might be interested to know that it will be 150 years tomorrow since John Bowler invented the bowler hat. "So, what!" do I hear some say? OK, well try to imagine Charlie Chaplin without one.

According to a debt management firm "one in three adults are up to their ears in debt." Is it any wonder when we are constantly bombarded with offers of "cheap" loans through the mail, and on television? I received two yesterday: one addressed to 'Mr Malone' from American Express, the other from MBNA Express Loan, both were left unopened and "filed" in my paper salvage sack, which gets heavier every time I carry it to the Foxwood wastepaper bank.

A credit manager friend once told me: "money is the most expensive commodity you can buy." An odd remark from a moneylender, but he should know.

The many offers of low interest-rate loans devilishly tempts me to accept the lot, draw the maximum credit available, and swan off to the Seychelles. That should stop any further offers.

Ecology, being one of my concerns, prompts me to mention that today is the 784th anniversary of the death of St Francis of Assisi, the Patron Saint of Ecologists.

And tomorrow is St Francis of Assisi's Day, so I warn my evening paperboy not to throw his chocolate biscuit wrapper on my grass verge. For if he does there will be no more bonus biscuits for him, and his name will be crossed off my Christmas box list. Well, we have to make a start somewhere.

Research by psychologists in the US suggests that people with big heads are likely to have higher IQs than those with smaller heads, and that those with pointy-heads may be the least intellectually endowed. It would, therefore, seem inappropriate to describe the not so bright as "fatheads"; used in this context, "pinhead" would be more fitting.