I HAVE an infuriating habit. I know it can wind some people up, I know it’s foolish, but I haven’t found a rehab unit that handles this sort of problem.

The dictionary defines the condition as procrastination. Other people sometimes use more fundamentally Anglo-Saxon phrases. I’m not an impulsive person by nature, but even so I often think long and hard before making a move – especially when it comes to buying things.

Such indecisiveness has cost me dear in the past, but it hasn’t changed my ways. For instance I recently missed a golden opportunity to buy a bowler hat for £5. Truly.

It was in the window of a charity shop in Amersham and when I finally decided that it seemed a good buy and went back not more than ten minutes later the hat had gone. Now, it appears, this may have been a bigger mistake than normal.

You see there’s a revolution going on in France among the young people. We know the French like revolutions and are clearly long overdue for one, but now it’s kicking off. They are railing against the threatened Americanisation of their country and guess what’s the target for their ire? The baseball cap.

Young French people are seeing it as a symbol of a lifestyle they don’t want to embrace and are responding with typical Gallic flair. Fashion manufacturers are reporting a doubling in sales of the beret.

Patricia Jourdain, who runs a designer boutique in Paris, said: “The beret is as far removed from the baseball cap and other manifestations of US culture as you can get.

“Following the collapse of the Anglo-Saxon economy young people are harking back to their roots, showing they’re proud to be French.”

She added that rather than being just worn by country people or intellectuals, the beret is now an extremely chic item.

One manufacturer, Blanq-Olibert, said that after facing closure a few years ago it was now producing 300,000 a year and apparently the beret can be slanted to the left or right as a sign of your political affiliations.

While it was worn by such vaunted Frenchmen as Jean Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso it was embraced by ridicule in this country thanks to Michael Crawford’s character Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em.

So perhaps we should start our own revolution against the creeping Americanisation of our culture. Let’s kick the baseball hat into touch and bring back our national tifter – the bowler hat.

It was devised in 1849 by London hatmakers Thomas and William following an order placed by the firm of hatters Lock & Co.

They had been commissioned by a customer to design a close-fitting low-crowned hat to protect gamekeepers’ heads from low hanging branches while out on horseback.

The bowler may not have the chic flair of a beret – but at least it’s not a baseball cap. Of course if I’d been quicker off the mark in Amersham I could have become a style guru.