At various times I have been employed as a school teacher, a public servant, an insurance consultant, a toga-wearing barman in a theatre restaurant, a stay-at-home dad and an Australian Rules footballer with Collingwood and Oakleigh. The record books have me down for 51 senior games and 95 goals for Oakleigh in the VFA from 1983 to 1994, so some of the opinions here about footballers, supporters and people making mistakes under pressure are not entirely theoretical.
I have contributed articles to The Punch and was an expert columnist for The Roar, where I have published 189 pieces, passed 348,000 reads and somehow acquired Roar Guru status. What Are The Chances Of That? is where I write about sport, film, books, mortality, memory and the ordinary details that become less ordinary the longer you look at them.
But it is really all about that hat worn by Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 masterpiece Le Samourai. It used to sit in this blog's header until I removed it out of fear of a copyright breach. A beautiful hat on the head of a killer. Its colour is the grey-blue that infuses Melville's greatest films.
Apparently I am not the only one who has worried over its thick band, colour and peculiar crown. I too searched for the hat through the narrow laneways of Melbourne and eventually bought my killer's fedora. At home I realised I had made a dreadful mistake: black, wrong crown, brim too wide. In the mirror was not Jef Costello, the cool French assassin, but Rabbi Pinkelbaum.
Now I am not sure the brilliant hat ever existed. Perhaps an ordinary hat was transformed by Delon's features and Melville's genius. That is often where these essays begin: with sport, dread, beauty, vanity, fear and the possibility that the explanation is both ridiculous and true.