I knew it was really over when a (now ex) boyfriend gave me a present of a denim baseball cap. Whatever sweetly romantic connotations he attached to this gift, to me it said two things very clearly: 1) after all this time, he actually thinks I'd like a denim baseball cap? And 2) for all this time, could he really have wanted me to be the kind of girl who wears a denim baseball cap? It ended shortly afterwards.
I doubt whether any other piece of headgear or indeed any other piece of clothing would have evoked the same response. When girlfriends asked me why the relationship had ended I used to recount the baseball cap incident as a kind of shorthand explanation. All without fail simply said "Ah" - the rest was self-explanatory. There is just something about the wearing of the baseball cap that goes beyond its status as a hat - it is a social signifier, a message rather than a medium, a cause without a rebel. Like dungarees, Levis, combats, and Raybans, it has travelled far from its functional origins; unlike them it has not managed to pick up one iota of cool along the way. In fact, baseball caps have managed to shed every bit of appeal they ever had on their journey from sports uniform to rugger bugger uniform, but bizarrely enough, they still manage to proliferate at a terrifying rate.
Any pub - urban, suburban or rural - will yield a rash of the things, and attached to them will be a rash of braying, pompous, self-important, badly-dressed yobs. Oh, all right, I know that's not fair, but there is just something about the darned objects that makes my hackles rise. Worried that this was a little unfair to an innocent peaked cap, I decided to poll a bunch of friends. "Terrible things", "Ugh", "Awful" was the general chorus, except for one brave soul who volunteered that, yes, he was a baseball cap wearer. "Marvellous," I cried. "You can tell me why people wear them then." With some bewilderment, he said they were useful for keeping the rain off his face, and then with a hunted look (there were rather a lot of us), he asked what exactly was wrong with them - a very good question and one not easily answered.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the actual look of them, although they have a nasty tendency of making Prince Charleses out of the most delicate-lobed. There is also the hair issue, of course - short hair erupts below a cap like a valance beneath a bed, while the baseball cap wearer with long hair has a nasty tendency to poke it through the catch at the back in an unexplainable attempt to look like a fast food waitress.
They are undeniably practical items, useful against the rain as my friend pointed out, but also against the sun's glare, which I gather was the original point of them. They are presumably a good option if you are having a bad hair day, couldn't be bothered to wash your hair or are rather lacking in the hair department altogether. Indeed, I am almost persuaded to leave the follically challenged and the very young out of my putsch on baseball caps on the grounds of health and vanity (former) and cuteness (latter), but I am not quite convinced that any other hat wouldn't look better on both. (Rappers are definitely allowed to hang on to their caps as these are not worn for aesthetic reasons but as part of their heritage and, anyway, I'm scared of them.)
So what exactly is wrong with the poor ol' baseball cap then? My mates and I were floored when we tried to explain to our cap-wearing friend exactly what was so heinously awful about them. And I actually dumped a boyfriend over a breakdown of baseball cap communication. This, it seems, is the fundamental problem with these wretched hats - the gap between what the wearer thinks of the baseball cap and what the baseball cap hater thinks of it is just too wide.
Proud owners seem to think that a baseball cap says "I'm young but confident. I don't care too much about what I wear but I've got a touch of style. I'm freewheeling, easygoing and devil-may-care. I'm bald but nobody will know under this cap. I'm not going to get wet. What baseball cap?" What they say to me, and to the legions of other baseball cap bigots is: "I have no dress sense. I like to fit in. I'm liable to like sports and talk about them at length. I'm bald. I somehow think that wearing a baseball cap like thousands of others makes me unique. I'll barge ahead of you at the bar because I know the barman. I am a girl who says `Listen guys' all the time. I have an annoying laugh."
The other thing baseball caps say, of course, is "I am a supporter of a certain baseball team/rock band/brand of fertiliser", and here the problem gets knottier still. Because, essentially, the baseball cap, complete with logo, is a way of fitting in, of displaying your tribal loyalties and telling other people that you, too, are cool enough to follow the Giants. Admittedly, this gets a little subverted when your cap logo says "Triple Gradex Kills All Liverfluke Dead", but this too is a form of boast - that you are the kind of person who gets free baseball caps.
So perhaps it's time to let my campaign against the wearing of baseball caps subside. For a start, the wearers tend to be a particularly tenacious group who seem completely unworried by my hatred. Suggest a more fashionable alternative and you tend to be told that the whole point about wearing the baseball cap is that they're not fashionable; they're a uniform, they're just something you put on your head. The very qualities that prove their worth to the wearer are those that shout "Horror" to their enemies. So go ahead, wear the darn things, but just be careful before you go giving one to a loved one. And never wear one on a first date - the object of your desire just might think you're trying to say "I'm a bald, loud, fertiliser fan."