The Hot v Cool thing

It’s 34 degrees here tonight, and so I’m hot. On the whole, I’d rather be cool.

But on the other hand – and we may wind up being mob-handed during this piece – I’d like to have a hot six-pack like I did aged eighteen….as opposed to the two-pack plus wine-bag I have today. And although being cool is about not bothering if you’re cool or not, after 65 it gets harder and harder to be effortlessly  cool. Beyond 33 degrees centigrade, it’s impossible to be cool in any sense apart from sitting in the fridge all day.

I may be missing something here, but it seems to me that (in contemporary parlance) being hot is a purely physical thing, whereas being cool is about an abstract aura one gives off in some way or another. Now it could well be that the ideal is to be physically hot and stylistically cool. But then, we can’t all be Brad Pitt or Mariella Frostrup. However, if the two of them became an item, it’s highly likely they’d be blowing hot and cool 24/7. Whatever room they shared would have a permanent rain cloud near the ceiling. By morning, they’d have pneumonia.

One sometimes has to come clean and ask something without inhibition, so here’s mine for tonight: as I am clearly twenty years past hot, is it possible I could become so cool, women would think me hot? It’s an unfair and tricksy question, so allow me to give you some guidance on how to guide me re this one.

However hard you might try,  it is well-nigh impossible to see Jeremy Clarkson as hot. So although quite a few blokes think he’s cool, finding women who think he’s hot would involve looking for a needle in a hay planet.

Similarly, although the little lamented Louise Mensch (MP, rtd) is without question hotter than a Saharan tin roof, she is about as cool as ten-pin bowling.

Perhaps the answer lies in these theses: if Clarkson lost weight and stopped playing daft pre-planned pranks, it is quite possible some raunchy sports-car girlies would find him hot and cool. And if Louise Mensch could think about things beyond Louise Mensch, stop wrestling the camera towards Louise Mensch, and tweet a little less about Louise Mensch, one or two blokes might see something cool in her beyond the obvious desire to give her a good etc etc.

Or maybe it’s this simple: people interested first and foremost in other people are cool, and their genuine desire to see something cool in other people they encounter renders them hot.

I shall now throw this open to the floor for questions.