Dan Morris: Canyons and the crowns of cowboys

While on duty I remain, and always shall remain, the sharp-suited swashbuckler you have all come to know and love. But in my private life, I love nothing more than to accessorise my dome with a topper or two.

For many blokes, hats are a wonderful way to style up your swede when you used to love pratting about with your hair. And prat about with my hair, I did…

As a younger chap I used to frivolously experiment with my locks. During my surfer phase my hair was bleached blond and down to my shoulders. In my goth years it was cropped jagged and dyed blacker than the night. There have been mohawks, faux-hawks, and everything in between, including a time when the variety of colours adorning my bonce once forced a zoo keeper to question whether or not I was an escaped parrot.

These days, however, I’m just getting a little too old for that sort of thing, and so the party time when it comes to abusing my scalp has ended. Still, boys just wanna have fun, and over the last few years I’ve embraced headgear to the fullest.

The adornment of choice has for some time been a flat cap. Even before Cillian Murphy et al made them very cool again I’d always been a fan of this signature topper of the 19th century working class, and happily, since Peaky Blinders rocked the telly box, they’ve been very easy to come by.

I own several, but am proud to state that my favourite was purchased at one of our region’s most exemplary attractions, the Black Country Living Museum.

Like with hair cuts though, hats can get somewhat samey, and you occasionally feel the need to change things up. As a recent convert to the spectacular Paramount neo-western show, Yellowstone, there was really only one way my hat fetish was going to develop this year.

I’ve owned a particularly beautiful cowboy hat for years. It was a gift, in fact, from a Native American I met many moons ago in Arizona. While on my travels across the pond, he was a guide charged with escorting me and various other doe-eyed hippies to the Grand Canyon.

A handsome chap who had styled himself true to every pop culture image of his proud people, his jeans were fastened with a snakeskin belt, his feet were shod in stunningly ornate leather boots, and his impressively thick and braided hair was crowned with a magnificent Stetson.

He was probably the most helpful and knowledgeable tour guide I’ve ever encountered, and - it has to be said - was particularly patient with my very embarrassing fear of heights.

We’d driven to Arizona from Nevada (I was staying in Vegas at the time), and while the outward journey was problem free, disaster struck on the return trip when the bus radio ceased to function.

Our guide/driver was a very calm and level man, yet clearly music was important to his ability to relax while behind the wheel.

Frustrated at the silence from the speakers while most of the passengers slept and snored, he asked me if he might be able to borrow my MP3 player for the remaining miles back to ‘Sin City’.

I was more than happy to oblige, thoroughly transfixed on the beautiful desert wilderness visible through the window, and with no interest in my terrible taste in tunes interrupting its serenity. He plugged in my headphones, seemingly happy with the available cocktail of Kiss, Madonna and Toto (I take it back - my taste in tunes is awesome), and gently nodded his way all the way home to Caesar’s.

I was one of his last drops, and as I disembarked he returned my iPod with a thanks, and then proceeded to plonk his shining Stetson on my bonce. “Thanks man, that’s yours now.” I was pretty stunned. This seemed a very unfair trade, and I half expected him to want to keep the iPod. But, as a matter of honour, the squaring of debts was very important to this chap, and he insisted that in repayment of the small favour I’d done him, the hat was mine to keep.

Proudly, I rolled into Caesar’s Palace, new crown in place, and all of a sudden registered the number of other cowboy hats gracing the domes of the casino crowd. As you might expect, there were a lot of them, and I hadn’t noticed this at all until I was rocking one of my own. As if a spell had been cast, the attitude of bartenders and croupiers changed completely now that I was sporting a resolutely American look, and my new bit of headgear served as a passport to enough bourbon to sink a ship.

You don’t see many Stetsons in rural England, and so when I returned home my cowboy hat was hung up – for nearly 20 years, in fact.

Yet now, with Taylor Sheridan’s top telly work having inspired a fresh love for the wild, wild west, and country music seeing a surge of popularity in Blighty, it has felt like time for the cobwebs to be dusted off. So saddle up, partners – my Fred Dibnah days are done, and it’s time to embrace a Willie Nelson phase.

After all, who wants to be Cillian Murphy when you could be Clint Eastwood?

I’ll check in with you in a few months… It may well be fez time by then. But for now, yee-haw!