What a Good Hat

Seven of us were walking home from Jackson’s pub after a wild ladies night out in Carmarthen when we ran into another group of drunken students and started taking pictures with each other.  One girl in particular was quite taken with my beautiful green wool fedora, so I put it on her and took a picture of her wearing it.  She promptly turned and took off running down the street with my hat.  Now, I am a good-natured Canadian lady and I can take a joke, but NOBODY steals my hat and gets away with it.  Ever.  I chased this girl down the street.  She tried to run away, but I can run fast at short distances and she was significantly drunker than I was, so I soon caught up.  I snatched the hat away from her and started running back, but she grabbed me by the lei I was wearing, pulling it tight across my trachea so I couldn’t breathe.  Luckily, I was able to slip the lei over my head and make good my escape, and my six friends and I made our merry way back to Trinity College.  

    This is a rather extreme example of a phenomenon that I have noticed a lot during my brief time here in Wales: strangers are very vocal about their appreciation of my hat.  Every time I go out in public here, a stranger will take the time out of their busy day to come up to me and tell me how much they like my hat.  This has happened on occasion in Canada, but not to the same extent, and most are people who I already know, or who have just been introduced to me.  It is possible that fedoras are just more ‘in’ in the UK than they are in Canada, or that they are more of a novelty here, but I think that the difference runs deeper than that.      It seems to me that people on this side of the Atlantic have a different approach to talking to strangers than we do in North America.  When I’m in a shop in Canada, for example, the interaction with the teller is very quick.  People are often polite, but never overly friendly or interested.  Here, I’m noticing that shopkeepers will often make small talk with customers and take a genuine interest in them.  When I was sitting in the sitting room in the Old College at night, the porter who came to kick me out at closing time was very talkative and jolly, whereas North American security guards I have met in similar situations have been quite brusque.  It seems as though the Welsh have a more relaxed attitude toward interaction with strangers that I find both surprising and refreshing.      I remember being in kindergarten learning that the one thing one must never do is talk to a stranger.  Strangers, we were taught, are almost always pederasts and murderers, and as soon as someone we don’t know talks to us we must immediately run, screaming for the police, the fire department and Mommy.  Naturally, it is important to teach children caution, but at the same time, apparently a lot of this childhood prejudice against strangers has translated into a natural aloofness when interacting with strangers as adults.  In North America, it’s hard to make friends when we’re in a crowd of people we don’t know.