behatted

What must the neighbours have thought when about 26 'behatted' ladies (and Clive, without hat) descended on Sue W's in June!

Robert Dudley's Tissotesque From Sheerness to Valentia, the earliest work in the exhibition, represents a pivotal moment in sea travel; painted in 1868 it shows elegant ladies and behatted gentlemen on the deck of the Great Eastern, amid the maritime clutter, a reminder that she was a working ship, whose prime task was the laying of transatlantic cables.

This twee presentation is destined for Instagram, the idea of perfume as a behatted little friend with a jaunty name that might wink at you from your vanity while you sleep.

Yet his observations of such curious specimens as the 'Behatted Bibliophilic Female' are interrupted when a mysterious fog rolls in to cover the island.

A rather verdigris grisaille work, Erwartung depicts a group of some twenty-plus behatted observers (cloches on the ladies) all seen from the rear, except for one fellow--also hat-wearing--who turns to face the viewer.

(Having the behatted man sit on the floor, with a pocket full of juicy treats, would nudge that encounter in the right direction.)

The behatted figure on the acoustic finished his set by returning the Moby sampled Trouble So Hard to its roots.

It's hard to imagine the days when horse-drawn buses would make their way up and down Broad Street with the passengers upstairs suitably behatted as fashion and etiquette required in those days, and elegantly dressed ladies sauntered along the pavement as seen in the picture postcard of Edwardian Broad Street posted to Moseley in April 1910, the penultimate month of King Edward V11's reign.

Indeed, the cover evokes this sense of lost innocence, with its image of behatted children with their trousers or skirts rolled up to paddle, but also gazing out to sea, as if into their unknowable future.

For each behatted smoothie sold, Age Cymru's Spread the Warmth campaign will get a donation to help vulnerable older people this winter.

From passing trams and omnibuses, vintage cars and horse-drawn carts to the behatted men and umbrella'd ladies crisscrossing Brummagem's bustling streets, these beautifully-preserved images are a fleeting glimpse of an age when the city really was the workshop of the world.