I’m a woman at home with her nerdiness. I outed myself in that regard years ago. But there is a side to me that wishes at times for her own montage, her own dance track, her own theme music.

I wish I was cool.

I want to be free of the ability I have to catch my sleeve in a door as I walk in, thereby throwing juice back in my face. I want to have a devil may care attitude and a ‘be free to be who you are’ belief.

Being cool crucially isn’t about being excellent or  the best at something. Carl Sagan was wonderfully smart, but he himself wasn’t cool. No, he wasn’t, sorry.

Same goes for Grace Kelly. She’s too poised to be cool. She is perfect, but too aware of it to move to an instinctive beat that would make her cool.

Whereas young Jim here is so cool he makes others cool by association. The Doors made music with a goddamn organ, think anyone cares about that? Hell no, sister.

Cool is that attitude that, coupled with physical beauty means a person has allure beyond charisma. It means a person simultaneously attracts and distances themselves,  as us mere mortals would never be good enough to get close to them. James Spader was astonishingly, blood freezingly cool in the 1990s. Add twenty years, a destroyed marriage and him quitting smoking, and he ain’t cool now.

While these two are so cool, its a miracle they don’t repel each other.

Yes I am conscious that I am the Queen of fuddy duddy and that my idea of coordinated cool is matching woolens at Marks and Sparks. You are reading the words of a baby-food covered woman who is typing with one hand because her baby is in her arm, gently snoring. But every so often, a wistful air comes over me and I sigh, and I think… “I wish I was cool…”