Once More With Footnotes

all seen the miracle. B right new future, etc., etc.
     
                  And, of course, he'll need some good advice from someone just like me.
     
                  And he throws back his hood, and ... she lets her blonde hair fall out, and the crowd goes ice-quiet.
     
                  We're not talking damsels here. She's smiling li ke a tiger, and looks as though she could do considerable damage with that sword.
     
                  I think the word I'm looking for is imperious.
     
                  She's daring them to protest, and they can't.
     
                  They've seen the miracle.
     
                  And she doesn't look like the kind of person wh o needs advice. She looks far too intelligent for my liking. She still looks like I first saw her at Ector's, with that bright stare that sees right into a man's soul. God help the little kings who don't come to heel right now.
     
                  I glance at Nimue. She's s miling an innocent little smile to herself.
     
                  I can't remember. She'd said "child," I can remember that, but did she ever actually say "son"?
     
                  I thought I was controlling the myth, but maybe I was just one of the players.
     
                  I bend down to Nimue's ear.
     
                  " Just out of interest," I say, "what is her name? Didn't catch it the first time."
     
                  "Ursula," she says, still smiling.
     
                  Ah. From the Latin for bear. I might have guessed.
     
                  Oh, well. Nothing for it. I suppose I'd better see if I can find enough decent sea soned timber for a Round Table, although for the life of me I can't guess who's going to sit around it. Not just a lot of thick-headed knights in tin trousers, that's for sure.
     
                  If I hadn't meddled she'd never have had a chance, and what chance does she h ave anyway? What chance?
     
                  I've looked into her eyes as she stared into mine. I can see the future.
     
                  I wonder how long it's going to be before we discover America?
     

I like hats, particularly the black wide-brimmed Louisianas which most people think are c alled fedoras. Coming as I do from a family where the males go bald around 25, I prefer to have more than a thickness of bone between my brain and God.
     
    The article says it all, and got commissioned merely because of a remark I made to a journalist at a pa rty. You'd think there was something funny about hats.
     
     
     
     
     
A W ord A bout H ats
     
                  I was obviously very upset when my hat was kidnapped. You hear such stories. Was it going to be chained to a radiator? Would I get a photo of it holding a newspaper? Or — terr ible thought — would it side with its captors and refuse to leave them? I think that's called the Stockholm Syndrome, although the Swedes aren't hugely famous for hats.
     
                  So I just paid up with a cheque for £ 75 to the student Rag Day charity, which was the o bject of the whole exercise. The dreadful drama was over in ten minutes, and I didn't even get an opportunity to speak to the hat on the telephone.
     
                  I got the big black hat back and was, once again, myself.
     
                  I like hats. They give me something to do with my head.
     
                  In my family the men go bald in their twenties, to get it over with. It stops it coming as a nasty shock later in life. But it means that there's nothing there to absorb all those bumps and scratches that the hairy people never even notice. The modern remedy is a baseball cap. A baseball cap? I'd sooner eat worms.
     
                  I spotted the first big black hat in a shop called Billie Jean in Walcot Street, Bath, back in the late '80s. There it was, on a shelf. It was everything I wanted in a hat although, up until that point, I hadn't realised that I did, in fact, want a hat.
     
                  It was black, of course, and wide-brimmed, and quite tough, and flexible enough to hold a decent curve once I'd done a bit of work with a steaming kettle.
     
                  Sometimes you see somethi ng and you just have to go for it.