{"id":5050,"date":"2009-07-09T16:43:56","date_gmt":"2009-07-09T20:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=5050"},"modified":"2009-07-09T16:43:56","modified_gmt":"2009-07-09T20:43:56","slug":"the-ill-behaved-hat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/the-ill-behaved-hat\/","title":{"rendered":"The Ill-Behaved Hat"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I don’t often like to quote at length from another work. This is almost too good, though — too apt for Running After My Hat<\/em>. It’s from “The Tramp’s Tale,” one of Czech author Karel Capek<\/a>‘s Nine Tales for Children<\/em>. The man who’s telling this story has interrupted a court proceeding (which is where “the judge” comes from) in such a way that he is about to exonerate a condemned man.<\/p>\n

“My hat,” said the man.\u00a0 “Oh, what a lot of trouble it’s been!\u00a0 It’s already a year now since I was walking along the street and the wind wind suddenly took my hat.\u00a0 I gave somebody my suitcase, I didn’t even know who it was, and off I went running after my hat.\u00a0 But my hat was very badly behaved and it rolled along over the bridge to Sychrov and from Sychrov to Z\u00e1les\u00ed and then to Rtyni and through Kostelec to Zbecn\u00edk and all through Hronov to N\u00e1chod and from there on as far as\u00a0 the border with Prussia.\u00a0 I went on after it; I nearly had it there but I was stopped by the border guard who wanted to know what I was running after and I told him I was running after my hat.\u00a0 Before I had finished explaining this to him the hat was away again with the dust.\u00a0 So I found somewhere to sleep and set off after my hat again in Prussia in the morning through Lev\u00edn and Chudoba, oh the water was very bad there… ”<\/p>\n

“Wait,” said the judge.\u00a0 “This is a court of law, not a geography lecture.”<\/p>\n

“I’ll cut the story short, then,” said the unkown man.\u00a0 “In Chudoba I learned that my hat had been there and drunk a glass of water, bought itself a walking stick and then got on a train and went to Sv\u00eddnice.\u00a0 I, of course, went after it.\u00a0 In Sv\u00eddnice my naughty hat spent the night in a hotel without even paying the bill and then went off somewhere without saying where.\u00a0 After asking lots of people, I learned that it had been seen in Cracow, and was even making plans to marry a widow.\u00a0 So I went off to Cracow after it.”<\/p>\n

“And why did you chase after your hat in this way?” the judge asked.<\/p>\n

“Well,” said the man, “that hat was still new, and not only that, but I’d put my return railway ticket from Svatonovice to Starko\u0161 under its band.\u00a0 It was because of that return ticket, sir.”<\/p>\n

“Ah,” said the judge, “now I understand.”<\/p>\n

“I didn’t want to have to buy my ticket all over again,” said the man.\u00a0 “Now, where was I? Ah yes, I was on my way to Cracow.\u00a0 So I arrived in Cracow, but by then my naughty hat had travelled on to Warsaw, first class and pretending to be a diplomat.”<\/p>\n

“That was dishonest,” exclaimed the judge.<\/p>\n

“That’s why I told the police about it,” said the man, “and they sent a telegram from Cracow to Warsaw saying it should be arrested.\u00a0 But by then my hat had got itself a fur coat as it was nearly winter, grown a beard, and travelled on to Moscow.”<\/p>\n

“And what did it do in Moscow?” the judge asked.<\/p>\n

“Well, what would a hat do in Moscow,” said the man.\u00a0 “It got involved in politics, the blighter, and became a journalist.\u00a0 Then it got it into its head that it would take over the government, but then the Russians arrested it and condemned it to death by firing squad; but as soon as they got it against the wall where it was to be shot there was a gust of wind and the vagabond began to roll along the street, slipped through between the soldiers’ legs and rolled off all the way through Russia as far as Novocherkask.\u00a0 There it\u00a0 put on the lambskin cap and became an ataman of the cossacks on the Don.\u00a0 I was still chasing after it and finally caught up with it; and then, the blighter, he whistled to his cossack friends and told them to shoot me.”<\/p>\n

“And what happened then?” the judge asked, anxious to hear more.<\/p>\n

“What happened then,” the stranger said, “is that I told them that we’re not afraid of cossacks: ‘We cut them into slices and we eat them with our soup!’ And that frightened the cossacks so much that they let me go.\u00a0 Meanwhile though, my good-for-nothing hat had jumped onto a horse and galloped off to the east.\u00a0 And, of course, I went after it.\u00a0 At Oranienburg it got onto a train and went on to Omsk and right the way across Siberia, but in Irkutsk I lost its trail; it seems it somehow came into some money while it was there, but then it was attacked by some robbers who took it all from him again and it was lucky to escape with its life.\u00a0 In Blagovyeshchensko I came across my hat in the street, but it was clever enough to escape from me again and rolled off all the way through Manchuria as far as the Sea of China.\u00a0 On the coast, there, I caught up with it because it was afraid of water.”<\/p>\n

“So you finally caught your hat there?” the judge asked.<\/p>\n

“If only!” the stranger replied.\u00a0 “I ran after it all along the coast, but just as I was about to catch it the wind changed and my hat went bowling off towards the west again.\u00a0 I went after it and chased it all the way through China and Turkestan, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a sedan chair, sometimes on horseback and sometimes on a camel until, in the city of Tashkent, he got on a train and went back Oranienburg.\u00a0 From there it went to Kharkov and Odessa, then to Hungary, then, back in Czechoslovakia, it rolled along into Olomouc, then Cesk\u00e1 Trebov\u00e1, then T\u00fdni\u0161te then finally back here to Prague.\u00a0 And here I finally caught it, just five minutes ago in the square as it was about to go into a resaurant for some dumplings and sauce.\u00a0 So, here it is.”<\/p>\n

And he showed them all the hat; it was beaten and tatty, but there was nothing else about it to suggest it was such a complete rascal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oh, I love the idea of a rascally hat!<\/p>\n

(Read the whole thing here<\/a>, for now — in all its diacritically correct glory.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t often like to quote at length from another work. This is almost too good, though — too apt for Running After My Hat. It’s from “The Tramp’s Tale,” one of Czech author Karel Capek‘s Nine Tales for Children. The man who’s telling this story has interrupted a court proceeding (which is where “the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,5,50,36,105],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-03_runningaftermyhat","7":"category-06_writing","8":"category-language-writing_cat","9":"category-reading","10":"category-short-fiction","11":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1js","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5050"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5057,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5050\/revisions\/5057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}