Mid-30s? So, finally getting over the sixties My Generation mantra of never trusting anyone over 30. Maybe also reaching the point when ‘cool’ (as in the youth&beauty version) was no longer seen as essential?

1987 – in AW terms, that’s last week. We are spinning out AW straplines at the moment – can we not mutiny and demand a monthly poll for the next one?

A few others from the 80s/90s who seemed cool, then didn’t: Andrew Eldritch John Taylor & Nick Rhodes Alex James It’s probably a youth/cheekbones thing.

I regarded Hey Jude as my song, as it was Number 1 when I was born, and was written for my namesake – for a while I asked people to call me Jude, as I thought it was cooler than my actual name. Jude the Obscure, […]

I would have thought being thin and tall were prerequisites for being cool – unless you were/are exceptionally and unusually tall. I suppose Stephen Merchant is quite cool – until he opens his mouth.

That Young Cool Dude approach to attracting attention from girls is one I recognize as a tactic I in my socialphobic youth would hide behind (for years and years). I do pity the boy I was back then – better to […]

‘Hip’ originally meant something close to what ‘woke’ means (to those who generated it, not to those who denigrate it). Aware.

I think this distinction helps get to the heart of what cool is and is not. Fashion probably isn’t cool – because it gives the sense of a mad rush after an elusive property that an object gives to its wearer. […]

Permanently so – like the best of Python, with this list of writers ( Morris, Iannucci, Steven Wells, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, David Quantick), it is effortlessly, imperiously superior in its intelligence, […]

That whole early 90s officially ‘cool’ bands were when I really fell out of love with the NME – by then I had absorbed a lot of other influences from uni friends – and was no longer reliant on one source of […]

Flares were what got me laughed at in school in the early ’80s – that and those pork pie brown shoes and shirts/cardigans with metal rings over the nipples – why ever were they considered stylish? For a while, […]

Is that last one cockney rhyming slang?

What was cool for you then and now, Mike? There’s no shame in admitting these things. I used to think ‘Double Deckers’ – which I never saw, only the adverts for were so cool. Also the Bionic Man and Status Quo. […]

It is, of course, blissfully wonderful with the melancholic wistful undertones characteristic of true beauty – reflecting the unhappy circumstances of its writing and his sad early demise. Unfortunately, it […]

Maggie is cool.

It should be offered like Saga membership to all over-50s – “You’ve worked hard all your life – you deserve a seat in a virtual pub to text bs, exchange Wordle scores, and post old YT clips until the old grey […]

The Aliens unfilmed script I most enjoyed reading was the one on a wooden planet populated by monks.