Borrowed Cool and the Things We Carry

In years past, I have signalled the build-up to Christmas in these pages with something of a message, either of hope or peace, or both. This time around, I thought I would do something different (and not simply by failing to post a column before the big day).

Rather, it occurred to me that we don’t need always to hear lectures on peace and goodwill (even if I do enjoy them myself from time to time) but with so much strife and suffering in the world, we need not to look for external reminders on how to treat our fellow humans but instead acknowledge that we know very well how we should act, collectively and individually, but that suspicion, fear or even simple unfamiliarity leads us to treat other people as if they are inferior, with all the consequences that engenders, for them and for society.

Reading that back, I realise I have managed to squeeze in a (belated) Christmas message without having intended it. I guess I just can’t help myself. But it is heartfelt.

What I really wanted to talk about, however, is something I have been carrying around, in a literal sense, with me for several decades, and feel finally ready to share with the world.

I was young, you were not. Or rather, I was young, and probably so were you, likely just a few years older than me. But there was such a wide gulf in maturity and experience between us that you were practically the wise old sage to my naïve, gauche disciple. Of course, you grew up in London, and that smart-talking estuary accent and studiedly relaxed swagger made anyone from the sticks seem like a country bumpkin, most of all to themselves.

It wasn’t the first time I had experienced and winced at such an embarrassing chasm in worldliness, but it was different when I went to university and met all those privately educated young bucks who looked down at me and my lowly state education. You were kinder than them, more accepting, and you saw my rough schooling as a virtue, indeed as something we had in common, even if my enthusiasm and utter lack of coolness (and my learned posh accent) counted against me.

We were two of a group of five working at the men’s Jaeger store in Knightsbridge just across the road from Harrods, in its dying days before the branch was closed for good. That’s how I met you: introduced one early morning before the shop opened as a fill-in for a post that we all knew would never be filled. Where are we now, our merry band of four young men skilled in drinking and cheek, and the venerable older lady who sold suits with us for a bit of pin money and to stave off the boredom of her staid life with her distant husband? She tempered our outrages and our flights of fancy, and acted as a reminder of where the line was drawn. We entertained her and kept her connected with the world as it was becoming. This was the late 90s: lads mags, Oasis, lager louts, fit birds, and nights out on the lash.

You, my idol, weren’t from that Cool-Britannia-gone-sour crowd, though. You were more mod revivalist: all sharp lines and smart one-liners. I could practically hear Up the Junction by Squeeze every time I saw you. But you were so much more than that. During breaks and our extended lunch hours, when we must have lost an incalculable number of sales to idle chatter and sexist banter, we took turns to play music on the portable cassette stereo in the staff room. You had the broadest taste in music I had ever come across, which was saying something given the wide-ranging record collection put together by my parents over the years.

I thought you were so cool, and I looked up to you. I asked you incessantly about the songs you played, until you lost patience one day and gave me a mixtape of the songs you played the most. Although it wasn’t complete, but rather one side and a quarter, it nevertheless took the listener on an eclectic journey through funk, soul and jazz from the 1960s to what was then the present day.

I would play the tape (finished off on side 2 with a poor attempt on my part to match the brilliance of your choices) to people and they would say how amazing it was, and that I was cool for knowing all that stuff. I would try to explain that the cool came secondhand but they didn’t want to know, and I would feel guilty that I hadn’t got across my admiration for you, and properly given credit for the tape’s origins.

Yet you were always so modest when I talked to you about that cool playlist. I always thought it was because I was so gauche and loud, and you were so laidback and contained, but it occurred to me while listening again to the mixtape today that maybe you were quiet when I heaped praise on it and, by extension, you because, in fact, it wasn’t your music; that you had been given that cool by someone else, and you had passed it on and didn’t want to admit it, or to burst my bubble.

Perhaps ‘cool’ is something that is never created but always handed down, from person to person, from generation to generation, and we simply swap in and out what constitutes cool in any given moment; but it nevertheless remains borrowed in some way, to be handed on. Maybe we have to let ‘cool’ in, absorb it and become it, before we can give it to someone else. Perhaps that is what ‘cool’ is.

Could it be that, for now, I am now your cool? Perhaps I am being your cool, which was originally someone else’s: a mantle, a cloak to be worn, with us its assigned guardian until it is given to the next wearer.

I like that thought, but now I realise I have to find someone to whom to pass on your cool. Anyone out there?