Among assorted memorabilia on top of my wardrobe is a cap. I think you would call the colour forage green. The cap has a peak, and above the peak is a red, five-point, metal star. My brother brought it back from China — as worn by members of the Chinese armed forces, he said — some time in the early 1980s. We knew them as 'the Red Army', without any understanding of the politics.
I might not have known about Chinese politics, but I knew very well what I was doing when deciding to wear that hat to work. It suited me, at the time, to be seen as a 'leftie', and a green hat with a red star would leave little room for political ambiguity. So in my early days on university staff I donned the cap every morning, wound a scarf around my neck, and set off to my lecturing in a topless Mini Moke.
'Smug', I think, best describes this particular period of my political life. Smug and naïve. But alas, one is always found out by smugness. I think this is because to be smug is to have one's nose in the air. There is, with smugness, no feeling of compulsion to keep one's eye on the ball, and so tripping up — to pursue a tangle of metaphors — will almost certainly follow. Just deserts seem to work with smugness.
My tripping up occurred one cold, autumn morning. I donned the cap and scarf and set off in peak hour traffic. At about 25 minutes in, and still some distance to travel, the meandering line of commuters inevitably ground to a near stand-still, and crawled and grumbled its way through several sets of traffic lights before the final open stretch to campus. There was nothing for it but to wait. I sat and rehearsed a lecture, or watched others watching me. Maybe they were wondering about my cap ...
In the next instant I became acutely aware of three things in rapid succession. First, people in an adjacent car were pointing at me and to one another, animated in conversation behind their closed window. Second, I caught sight of some wisps of hair blowing in the wind under the peak of my cap. And third, I realised there was no wind and that I had no hair to blow in the first place.
All this