Saturday 12 November 2011

Peterborough, the other way - not cool, and yet...


 


Not the 'third way', just the way back. Brilliant sunshine much of the way, the kind of light that transforms everything it touches, serving up a world that is practically Samuel Palmer-Edenic.

I read a while, then do some codewords, sudoku and crossword for half an hour. There are six ways of travelling: social, working, playing, daydreaming, reading and looking. One moves between these depending on circustances. I do five out of the six.

Having picked up an Indy & a Times I scan the glossy mag. Aaronovitch in hospital etc and get to Hannah Betts. She writes a small envelope sized column in which she declares that couples who think they are cool are not cool. Being single is cool.

My general view on cool is that anything referred to as cool cannot be cool. In short cool is not cool. Not-cool can be cool but as soon as it becomes cool it is not cool. Cool is possibly the least cool thing on earth.

As for Peterborough it is cool in a simple temperature sense. Sunshine gone. No Palmer. Just Peterborough. Cool.

But then at Darlington before, the man in front of me in the shop queue was Steve McClaren. Who is that? asked the girl at the till after he had gone. Steve McClaren, I answered. Her eyes widened just a little. Does it ever get cooler than that?



1 comment:

HSz said...

How strange. I have also stood behind Steve McClaren in a shop queue, in a train station. Boots, it was, in King's Cross. What on earth can it all mean? Double cool points for the Szirtes family, surely.