if the hat fits

I spent much of the 1970s trying not to buy a lava lamp – coloured chaos in a bottle. A prisoner of my insecure good taste, I feared the snobbish derision of friends if one were suddenly to appear in my sitting room. The lamps became fixtures in English pubs, and I consoled myself by perching on a bar stool and furtively communing with those iridescent, endlessly mutating lemon-yellow, green and puce globules as they rolled tumescently behind glass. ‘Obscene’ was the usual adjective, but I found them beautiful; an addiction I kept under my hat.
Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau

Written in the old familiar spirit of timid and beleaguered independence.