I APOLOGISE wholeheartedly to Thelma Edwards (Letters, December 12) for the fact that my using the word “elephant” in a “grumpy old man” letter (December 11) conjured up demons from her past. Thankfully she, unlike my good self, appears to have no problem with the word “hat” which I was also forced to use in said epistle. I had qualms about even writing the word following years of struggling with hats mainly because of the size of my ginormous heid.

Hats have been badly treated in Scotland for years but nobody seems to care. There was a time when every Glaswegian wore a bunnet or a bowler, admittedly some of the women refused to join in, nowadays one is more likely to see a native pretending they had actually been abroad by sporting a USA baseball cap or a floppy woolly creation seemingly ripped from the head of a Patagonian pan-pipe player. As for the ladies, they wear fascinators, bizarre iridescent semi-transparent monstrosities Sellotaped at a ridiculous angle to the side of the heid. What few genuine hats there are now in existence are taken out only in the worst of weather then chucked carelessly in the boot of the car to gradually go mouldy.

Let’s hear it for hats, three cheers ... but no throwing your hat in the air.

David J Crawford,

85 Whittingehame Court, 1300 Great Western Road, Glasgow.