What the world needs now is a mad hatter—not the Lewis Carroll tea party attendee with a broken watch and an insoluble riddle, but a maniacal putter-on of hats, a superhuman being whose mission it is to make everybody wear a hat, just like everybody used to do, before the modern obsession with being casual put an end to this wholesome practice. In the happy past, we didn’t have to look at the hairlines of strangers, and, since our eyes were pleasantly shaded by hat brims, we didn’t have to wear the sunglasses that now make us seem to each other hatefully dead-eyed and cruel. Who knows how much of the social conflict that our society has endured since the 1960s is just a side-effect of soulless stares and disagreeable haircuts?
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